What Data Crunchers Did for Obama

Throughout the campaign, Obama and his team not only bested his Democratic and Republican rivals in social networking and fund-raising through the Internet, they also engaged in a data battle to locate potential swing voters. These efforts zeroed in on hotly contested states and congressional districts, where the shift of 1,000 or 2,000 voters could prove decisive—meaning the focus was on only a tiny fraction of the voting public. But to find those swing voters, both sides hired tech wizards to sift through mountains of consumer and demographic details. They scrutinized nearly everyone they could find. One Democratic consultancy, Spotlight Analysis, took this hunt to extraordinary lengths. Working on behalf of Democratic candidates, though not directly for the Obama campaign, Spotlight crunched neighborhood details, family sizes, and purchasing behavior. It then grouped nearly every American of voting age—175 million of us—into 10 "values" tribes. Fellow tribe members may not share the same race or religion, or fall into the same income bracket, but they have common feelings about issues that transcend politics: God, community, responsibility, and opportunity. Spotlight believes that one of these tribes, a morally guided (but not necessarily religious) grouping of some 14 million voters—dubbed "Barn Raisers"—held the key to the contest between Obama and his Republican challenger, Arizona Senator John McCain.