A Short History of the Next Campaign

[Commentary] Campaigning is a brutal business, with winners, losers -- and a fickle American public making the choice. In the age of Moneyball, it’s getting even tougher. In the old days, media teams had one main job: to make TV ads and buy time on the networks. But there’s no such thing as a “TV ad” anymore; video needs to find voters on their laptops and phones, too. On a fast-changing campaign, analytics have to be continually updated to keep pace. It’s conceivable that, in the future, yard signs and billboards will be able to measure how many cars pass by. T-shirts and other campaign gear worn by field workers could automatically tally how many doors are knocked on and transmit this data back to a campaign’s central hub. We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.” Polling -- a kind of science built on sampling and models -- is about to become obsolete.

[Mele, lecturer, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government]