How the Obama campaign won the race for voter data

In one of their first conversations about 2012, campaign manager Jim Messina said he told the President that they could not rerun 2008. Messina said too much had changed. For one thing, Obama was now an incumbent with a record. But technology had also leapfrogged forward, with new devices, new platforms and vastly more opportunities to exploit social media.

The whole campaign would have to be different. The Obama team was investing enormous amounts of time, money and creative energy in what resembled a high-tech political start-up whose main purpose was to put more people on the streets, armed with more information about the voters they were contacting, than any campaign had ever attempted. Message and media operated on one track. The other track focused on identifying, registering, mobilizing and ultimately turning out Obama voters.