Campaigns use new software to tally hard numbers

Of all the dull chores of politics, tabulating field results is typically among the dullest: After a day of knocking on doors and calling strangers, volunteers report their totals to junior staffers, who email the numbers to midlevel staffers, who forward them to more senior staffers, whose deputies enter them into typo-ridden spreadsheets, printed out in the wee hours of the morning for campaign managers and field chiefs. That, at least, is the way it’s typically done and the way they were doing it in the Savannah, Ga., field office of the 2008 Obama campaign, a long-shot outpost in a state on the margins of the year’s battle. While Obama lost Georgia, a software program devised by three staffers in that office has since changed the mechanics of Democratic campaigns. The company they started, the NationalField, has evolved to host an internal social network for political campaigns and is branching outside the political market.