Romney's Lament: He Blinded Me With Science

Fittingly, the party that embraces Creationism and rejects global warming, got a cold shoulder from the evolving science of data mining.  In this weeks issue of Time, Michael Scherer has an excellent article on the "cave", the windowless room in the Chicago Headquarters where techies crunched data.

The scientific method is to constantly test, and refine assumptions.  Through testing, followed by data analysis, the Obama campaign knew who to ask for online contributions, and what message to use in solicitations.  One example given by Scherer is that the dinner with George Clooney raffle, showed that women ages 40-49 in close geographic proximity (Southern California) to the dinner were most receptive to lottery solicitations.  So an east coast based celebrity, with appeal to that demographic, Sarah Jessica Parker, was chosen for the next dinner raffle.

Algorithms were developed and tested for voters most likely to support Obama.  This was used in registration drives.  Ad buys, to turn out and persuade voters, were done in house.  This allowed precise placement of ads, utilizing polling data, to reach a targeted demographic with a tailored message.  Social media was maximized.  Someone who had downloaded the Obama app who had friends in swing states was sent a message to forward to five of those friends.

Romney ran a faith based campaign.  Unlike science, which revises assumptions to correspond with data, faith is an immovable object.  Facts must be revised to fit the assumptions.  The guiding assumptions were (1) that Republican enthusiasm would result in a large turnout, (2) disillusionment would drive down Democratic turnout compared to 2008, particularly among minorities and the young.  Therefore, if Romney could win independents, he would be president.   Romney won independents by 5 points.  On election day he, and his campaign, were certain they had won.

Based on the Romney assumptions, most of the public pollsters, whose livelihood depends on accuracy, were wrong because they were oversampling Democrats.  The polls were correct.  Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 6 percent.  The key is that Obama won moderates by 15 percent while loosing independents by 5.  There was only a tiny squishy tootsie roll center of unaffiliated, undecided moderate independents.  The rest were hard coated partisan blue or red voters.   Some Republicans may have self identified as independents, because they were even more conservative than the GOP.

Romney's one foray into modern electioneering  was Orca, an expensive get out the vote mobile app, developed to communicate the voting of targeted voters between headquarters and the field.  It was a beached whale.  Accepted on faith, it was never field tested.  It crashed.  The Romney campaign had to rely on CNN for voting information.  It could have been worse.  They might have needed to depend on Rachel Maddow.