Sure, the poll numbers and economic data look bad for the president — hence the focus on attacking likely 2012 Republican opponents rather than defending the administration’s record. But the latest Bloomberg Businessweek offers an article that should alarm anyone who thinks the GOP can rely only on historical trends to predict the outcome of next year’s presidential race. A different set of numbers could help the president’s cause:
Day and night, Will St. Clair can be found sitting in the dark on an exercise ball in the back room of Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters, staring at a computer screen and typing intensely. Exactly what he’s doing in there for all those hours is a mystery even to some of the campaign’s senior staff. They hope the 23-year-old software engineer can use his skills to help them find ways to reassure wavering Obama supporters, and identify new ones.
St. Clair, who worked for a Chicago ad agency before joining the campaign, is one of more than a dozen developers and engineers toiling full time to reelect Obama. Their job is to write software that can make sense of the reams of voter data the campaign collects, searching for information that will enable a not-so-popular President running in a lousy economy to wring out every last vote he can. The idea is to take the now-standard practice of “microtargeting”—where a campaign repeatedly pesters supporters with phone calls, volunteer visits, and fundraising e-mails—one step further by tailoring their message to the concerns of individual voters.
