Why Obama's ground game is better.

[RandySF]

The challenge for a campaign, of course, is to sort voters into those two categories without the benefit of such visible markers. In an ideal world, a campaign would interview every voter to discern his or her likelihood of casting a ballot and the candidate he or she supports. But no campaign has the money or manpower to track down and survey even a sizeable fraction of the voting public, either through volunteers or paid operations. So campaigns use data about the electorate to increase the quality of their guesses about which voters are likely to have green noses and which ones purple ears. For decades, political targeters had to use geographic or demographic heuristics (classifying precincts based their past vote performance or Census tracts based on their complexion) to sort voters into those categories en masse. With the individual-level voter data and statistical analysis available to today’s campaigns, they can now sort voters one by one.

Over a two-week stretch starting at the end of July, the Obama campaign’s analytics department contacted 54,739 voters from paid call centers and asked them how they planned to vote. Obama’s databases already knew a lot about the approximately 180 million registered voters in the United States (and even a bit about those who weren’t registered, in a way that could help guide the campaign’s efforts to enroll them). The goal was to collect intelligence about potential voters’ 2012 intentions and distill that down to a series of individual-level predictions. The most important of these scores, on a range from 0 to 100, assessed an individual’s likelihood of supporting Barack Obama and of casting a ballot altogether.

Modeling turnout was thought to be easier than modeling support, since how citizens vote is a private concern but whether or not they do is a matter of public records. In reviewing the attributes of 2008 voters, Obama’s analysts confirmed that the most useful predictor of turnout was past vote history. For years, campaigns would sort voters by these criteria—assuming that someone who had participated in two of the past four elections was more likely to turn out than someone who had turned out for only one—and the Obama campaign used this as the basis for a basic typology. Those who had voted in the 2010 elections were classified as “midterm voters”; those who had voted in 2008 but not in 2010 were called “sporadic voters.”

But splitting the electorate into only three or four categories didn’t leave much opportunity to assign priority to individual voters, or room to draw granular distinctions among them. More perilously for Obama, a pure reliance on vote history didn’t help to predict the behavior young voters, because the campaign simply did not have enough of a track record to assess. The president will rely for his re-election on young people, who overwhelmingly supported him in 2008 but tend to be fickle voters. Which kids had a thin voting history because they only recently became eligible to cast a ballot and which ones because they weren’t the type of people who could be counted on to vote?


http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/2012/11/obama_s_get_out_the_vote_effort_why_it_s_better_than_romney_s.single.html

[frazzled]

1. Wrong

Obama's ground game is better because it created a grassroots organization of volunteers starting in 2007 that has remained active and dedicated these past five years.

Any of you who has shown up at an OFA office or on a planned canvassing trip knows that the organizational system is pretty darned tight, and that people are volunteering in droves. I've had to wait in freaking line just to sign in to phone bank: that's how many volunteers are showing up. They've run out of phones and even lists: I had to run a third (count that, THIRD) pass on one call sheet to Iowa—three passes on one day— because they had so many people already making calls.

People here in Illinois are traveling 3 and 4 hours to the neighboring states of Iowa and Wisconsin to knock on doors since July.

That's why the ground game is good.