The Victory Lab (41 page)

Indeed, as they talked with voters around the country, Obama’s field operatives lost faith in the turnout scores that Strasma’s algorithms were
sending them. The two major variables that went into them were vote history and the self-reported answer when survey callers asked how likely someone was to vote. Strasma liked to think of the first as measuring if someone was a regular voter, and the second as a gauge of their current enthusiasm. He knew that people always overestimated their chances of voting when asked by a stranger, but now vote history was becoming increasingly problematic for planning turnout. Until Barack Obama won Iowa there had never before been a viable African-American candidate for president, and Strasma’s algorithms struggled to measure this historic change. Predictive models were built on established behaviors, and Obama’s campaign was now operating in a space without precedent.

The support scores, fed with new IDs from paid call centers and volunteer contacts, moved around in a way that accurately reflected the volatility of the race. They showed that the spine of the Iowa microtargeting model remained intact: voters were unlikely to change their views on issues or their election-year priorities, and the attributes that made someone a likely Obama caucus backer traveled well. Highly educated and upscale voters pulled high Obama-support scores around the country, as did African-Americans and the young. But it was evident from any newspaper poll that voters were moving around among candidates. Edwards was fading from contention, allowing Clinton to solidify her position as the candidate of older, rural white voters.

To the outside world, Obama’s campaign had become notable for its digital prowess, which was given much of the credit for his ability to outmaneuver Clinton’s establishment support. But in Chicago, the long march through what turned out to be fifty-six primaries and caucuses exposed major weaknesses in a data infrastructure that Carson likened to a Rube Goldberg apparatus. The campaign was gathering an unprecedented volume of information that individual Americans volunteered about themselves.
There were the thirteen million people who would sign up for updates from the campaign website, plus those who gave their phone numbers to receive a text-message alert announcing Obama’s vice presidential
selection.
There were the three million donors, many of them contributing small amounts but supplying the campaign with personal data required by federal campaign finance law. Then there were the regular streams of those who put their names on a sign-in sheet at a field office or a clipboard outside a campaign rally.

But the campaign was unable to bring these rivers of data together. Chris Hughes, a founding executive of Facebook who became Obama’s director of online organizing, battled often with Blue State Digital, the consulting firm that had grown out of Dean’s campaign and built Obama’s website. The parts of the online operation facing outward performed brilliantly, engaging supporters in volunteer activity and raising money from them. But the Blue State site was incapable of linking to databases used by other parts of the campaign, leaving different types of personal records—financial contributions, online contacts, field IDs—isolated in their own silos. The campaign didn’t know whether a Marjorie Jackson who gave one hundred dollars to attend a concert fund-raiser was the same one who put in two volunteer canvassing shifts the previous weekend—and if she was a married white Republican living in the suburbs, Strasma’s algorithms may have predicted her to be a likely McCain voter. If she had written in an online sign-up form that she cared about the environment or a woman’s right to choose, that information was unlikely to find its way to someone planning a direct-mail piece addressing one of those issues.

As the primaries wound down, Plouffe decided to reorganize the campaign’s data and targeting operations entirely for the general election. He assigned chief of staff Jim Messina to enter surreptitious negotiations with Catalist on a deal to use its voter files rather than rely on those built by the Democratic National Committee, despite the fact that the company was distrusted by many Obama supporters because it had close ties to Hillary Clinton’s world and had supplied her campaign with its data. At the same time, Carson convened a group tasked with designing a new targeting structure and invited Wagner and Roeder to be part of it.

Like many junior staffers pushed into roles as targeting analysts, they
had chafed throughout the primaries at their inability to know exactly how Strasma made the projections behind his scores. There were active debates about different statistical techniques for finding relationships between variables, and Strasma’s black box relied on a complex formula that combined several of them. But none of the campaign staffers who spent their days processing data for Strasma’s algorithms was able to see how they actually worked. It was the way business traditionally worked for an outside consultant or vendor like Strasma, who felt he had a unique skill to protect: the campaign ordered a service from him, and he delivered a final product. No one had ever expected a media consultant to publish the f-number to which he set his cameras so that campaign staffers could try to reverse-engineer the distinctive look of his ads. Why should Strasma be expected to explain his algorithms? Yet for the Obama staffers who came from academic backgrounds, where researchers published all their formulae for wider review—or merely tech geeks from a generation with an open-source attitude toward collaborative software development—the opacity of Strasma’s shop was particularly frustrating.

Carson believed that the process Obama’s campaign had used during the primaries, with Strasma’s firm producing models as they became necessary and analysts like Wagner scrambling to interpret them, didn’t make sense for the general election. Instead he recommended to Plouffe that the campaign bring its data and targeting operation in-house. Strasma would maintain a consultant’s role overseeing it all, and his computers on Capitol Hill would continue to churn out the scores. But data would now be treated as a core internal function with day-to-day needs, like communications and research, and not a boutique service that had to be done by a specialist off-premises. “It was the beginning of the move away from the Wizard of Oz model of microtargeting,” says Michael Simon, who had worked with Strasma on Kerry’s campaign and joined Obama’s.

That shift was soon reflected in the campaign’s feng shui. Along an east-facing wall at headquarters, staffers had moved furniture to create a daisy chain of six pods that would be called Team 270. There was one
pod per region—the Great Lakes, Midwest, Southwest, West, South, and Northeast—each with seven specialists, covering such basic campaign functions as press and scheduling visits by surrogate campaigners. Regional desks were nothing new in campaigns, but the presence of a specialist each for data and targeting was; in the states, another set of officials would also do nothing else. Each state headquarters would have a data manager, who was charged with managing the voter file and augmenting it with unique sources of information by acquiring lists of veterans collected by local governments or persuading state parties to share their IDs from past campaigns. A separate targeting director would help translate the models for those on the campaign who used the scores for voter contact.

The campaign’s obsession with documenting metrics meant that it was generating far more potentially useful data than any of the pods would have time to sift through. Simon, who became Team 270’s lead targeting analyst, enlisted a group of Democratic consultants who weren’t formally affiliated with the campaign as what he called the targeting desk’s “kitchen cabinet,” a panel able to take on discrete research questions beyond the purview of his department’s daily operations.

Simon introduced the kitchen cabinet to a largely secret stockpile of data known within the Obama campaign as the Matrix. It was a centralized repository that would gather every instance of the campaign “touching” a voter, as field operatives like to put it, including each piece of mail, doorstep visit, and phone call, whether from a volunteer or a paid phone bank. It had its origins in the Iowa Contact Matrix, which compiled each contact that came in through the VAN so field staffers could track their activity. When, two months before the caucuses, Strasma noticed that one woman had been reached 103 times and remained undecided, he considered asking Obama to call her personally.

For the general election, the Matrix was expanded to include non-targeted communication to which an individual was exposed, including broadcast and cable ads and candidate visits to their media market. This created a ready-made data set that could be used to answer questions
that campaigns rarely tried to ask, let alone answer, with any methodical rigor. (Obama’s campaign never seriously undertook randomized field experiments for individual voter contact. There had been talk, shortly after Obama won the primaries, about sending rounds of general-election persuasion mail and measuring their effects through polls, much as the AFL had done four years before, but campaign officials felt they were too cramped for time to properly build such a system.)

At one point, Simon invited Aaron Strauss, who worked for pollster Mark Mellman’s firm, to see if he could identify whether Obama’s travel schedule and television buys were moving voters’ support scores. “The effects of any campaign activity are ephemeral,” Strauss says of his findings. “Just because you touched someone in, let’s say, the beginning of October doesn’t mean they’ll be with you two weeks or even one week later.” Strauss’s project never changed the campaign’s tactics for the sake of research—Obama and his ads still went where Plouffe and his strategists thought they would be most electorally effective—but the massive volume of existing data being automatically collected by Chicago’s computers opened up rich new possibilities to measure the campaign’s impact. “The presidential campaign was just nothing like anything else that ever exists,” says Judith Freeman, Obama’s new-media field director. “You could try out things with all the data—it was totally just scale.”

ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 3
, Barack Obama strode to a podium at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, unsubtly chosen as the place where Republicans would formally nominate John McCain exactly three months later. McCain had already been campaigning against Obama for three months, having vanquished the last of his primary opponents in March. Obama had continued to battle Hillary Clinton during that time, straight through the final primaries in Montana and South Dakota, where
polls had just closed as Obama prepared to speak in Minnesota. The race had been decided on the accumulation of delegates, a reality to which Clinton’s team had not adjusted until it was too late. “
Because of you,” Obama said, “tonight I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for the president of the United States of America.”

In Portland, Oregon, sixty Obama staffers and volunteers watched the speech on MSNBC, making their way through cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Obama’s campaign had cleared out of its state
headquarters in a former Wild Oats natural foods market after his resounding victory in the Oregon primary two weeks earlier, but the workspace still had its computers plugged in, so it became host to a “data camp.” The assembled group represented, by traditional campaign standards, a gang of misfits. The only prerequisites for winning an invitation to Portland—and a subsequent job in the new regime—was being “someone who understood field, and the usefulness of data,” as Simon put it. By that measure, many arrived in Portland well prepared, having bounced around among primaries in as many as a half-dozen states, each time refining their procedures and trying new things. “They had been working on the most sophisticated campaign in history for a year,” says Mike Moffo, the Nevada caucus field director. “That’s real experience even if it’s your first campaign.”

Over the two-week-long data camp, Strasma and Simon led basic training that gave many in the room their only formal introduction to the world of voter files and models. Simon took them through a voter file, projecting a list of individual records onto the wall as though a simple spreadsheet: in the leftmost column, there was the VAN ID, the unique code that a voter unknowingly ported through life. Then columns rained down from left to right, each an individual attribute: an address, gender, age, race, party registration, vote history. Simon would go through a row, using demographics to sketch a person in profile: the young Hispanic woman or the middle-age white man with a Rural Free Delivery address.

“What is this voter?” Simon asked. “Obama or McCain?”

Most of the time it was comically obvious, something anyone with a basic understanding of American politics would intuit. “The human eye is pretty good at figuring it out,” says Simon.

Simon would let another column fill in, the result of hard IDs gleaned by volunteers that showed voters’ stated preference between the two candidates. But for the 100 voters in the spreadsheet, the campaign had hard IDs for only 10. The task of the modeler, Simon explained, was to direct computers to solve for X, assigning a candidate preference into each of the 90 empty cells based on the 10 that were full. The algorithms that would make those calculations could simultaneously pull in thousands of variables to test for the weight each of them should have in the equation. Strasma had built the core infrastructure with thousands of individual- and precinct-level variables already attached permanently to each record on the voter file. New information that would come in from paid phone IDs could help hone the predictions to reflect enthusiasm levels and preferences specific to the 2008 race.