President Obama: Math is helpful.
- If you are a Presidential candidate who does not have a TON of small donors, you are in trouble. Super PACS can provide a lot of organizational money, but citizens who give even $5 to a candidate are emotionally invested in the campaign and likely to turn out on Election Day. A top-heavy campaign is unlikely to succeed.
- During the latter days of the election, even respected and sane pundits like Chuck Todd were sure that there was a huge enthusiasm gap that favored the GOP, that Romney’s supporters were much more likely to show up at the voting booth on November 6. I don’t have access to all the numbers Todd and others do, but I don’t doubt that they were reading the information correctly. Why, then, was the outcome contrary to this info? I think that no matter what people tell you during a phone survey, those excited about their own candidate are much more likely to turn out than those who don’t like the other party’s choice. Most times, we are voting for, not against.
- No one again is getting elected to the Oval Office (in part) because Peggy Noonan wrote just the right nursery rhyme or Newt or Karl came up with the perfect bullshit phrase, not in this post-verbal, data-rich society. But no one should think that data mining is just another way to manipulate the citizenry. Data can’t control anything, not when every voter is potentially a fact-checker, when the media has become so diffuse. It can only let you know where your strengths are, what the best paths to take are. Data is vital, but it can only maximize your candidate, not make him or her.•