Chicago knew…
Romney's campaign had made 50 million voter contacts by mid October.
For the final push, they had recruited an unprecedented - for Republicans - army of 34,000 volunteers to help on election day, who targeted and fed info for 800 calling center staff who completed 6 million robocalls.
When Romney was to get about 60 million votes (actually ended up with about 58 million) that means that as they wanted to make 6 million calls on election day, Boston had a theoretical target of hitting 10% of their voters (if they were accurate enough to only hit Republicans).
No, thats merely a mob.
Thats a boy scouts club, 34 thousand volunteers.
Check this out.
The obama campaign had recruited a genuine army.
Over 300,000 volunteers. 109,000 of the volunteers were out in the field, to make 7 million visits to individual voter homes !!!
Yes, Obama had such a superiority in numbers, they were able to make more personal visits to homes, than Romney total contacts by phone.
And what of phone contacts?
Obama's volunteers had 200,000 manning the phone banks, who made 11 million phone calls.
But wait?
Romney had 800 people who made 6 million calls and Obama had 200,000 who made less than twice the number, at 11 million calls?
What gives?
Romney's 800 staff who made 6 million calls, did not talk to the people they called.
The Romney team directed robocalls to targeted area codes to reach phones in districts where there were many Republicans.
If we say those 800 were full-time employed and worked 8 hours, then they would need to process one robocall every 4 seconds.
At Obama's side, if we assume a volunteer worked a 2 hour shift, then doing phones made only 55 calls in two hours.
So an Obama phone bank volunteer spent on average 2 minutes per call.
Yes, Romney mostly pushed robocalls to their targets, while Obama's callers actually talked to the voters.
Obama callers would first, know if the person they reached was an actual voter - if you push a robocall, you just let the phone ring, and you move onto the next call.
Then, Obama's team would find out talking to the potential voter, if the person had already voted - very useful information.
And the Obama team could present useful arguments that this given potential voter might appreciate - an automobile worker would probably be interested in a different argument than a retired teacher or a young university student.
A huge difference!
And of that field staff monitoring the polling places?
Romney's team believed they can react to location-specific changes, and monitoring most relevant polling places would give them an advantage.
As Obama's team had tried that with their Project Houdini in 2008, and found it lacking (and crashing) they did have something like that, but at a far reduced scale, called Gordon (for the man who reportedly killed Houdini) as the Obama team knew they had far more relevant information through Narwhal/DreamCatcher and could target based on real voter preferences and behavior, rather than just by voting precinct.
So Axelrod directed most of the ground team to pound doors, to visit homes, rather than count voters at polling places.
This was both a lesson already learned by Chicago that Boston hadn't yet learned, and the power coming from far more deep insights into voter behavior, that was collected over many months.
Chicago was driven by the extensive and powerful data they were now mining.
November 12, 2012
Orca meets Narwhal - How the Obama Ground Game Crushed Romney - A look behind the math.
That is the difference, where it counted - the Battleground states where the 2012 election was decided.
Team Obama powered by its Narwhal machine, made twice as many contacts, hit three times as many of its own registered voters (or voters leaning Democratic), achievedfour times as many contacts with its own voters, and the real number where it matters,ended up activating five times more voters than Team Romney, powered by its Orca machine.
At the Battleground states, Team Obama was able to make an election day activation contact that reached 64% of its final voters on that day, and of the contacts attempted, 30% resulted in an activation.
By contrast, Team Romney was only able to make contacts that rached 13% of Romney voters, and a contact had only a 14% chance of activating that voter to vote on the day.
The Narwhal project of Team Obama is the biggest election-related voter list, supporter database and voting support system ever made.
It cost over $100 million to produce, and employed over 120 engineers, programmers and mathematicians who worked on the project for more than a year.
Its database covered over 175 million voters and massive amounts of data for real time use.
Narwhal was far more than just an election-day system, it was used to collect and analyze and even forecast data on most election activities from fundraising to TV advertisement placement.
By contrast, the Romney project called Orca was mostly an outsourced project rushed into production only over a few months, mostly with outside consultants and suppliers.
Its maximum capacity was 23 million voters.
On election day Orca was supported by several other databases and voter lists.
When analyzing the performance in the end, comparing the two systems by states where they were used vs states where not, and comparing the voter turnout gains compared to the 2008 election between Obama and McCain, a measure of voter turnout gain by Romney's Orca system was about 1.4% of Republican turnout (corresponding to a vote margin gain of 0.7% when comparing two candidates).
In real terms, Orca delivered about 200,000 votes to the Battleground states in 2012 for Romney, about 29% of his vote gains.
By contrast, Team Obama's Narwhal system achieved a 5.9% gain in Democratic voter turnout in the Battleground states (corresponding to a 2.95% gain in vote margin between two candidates).
In real terms, the gains of Narwhal amounted to about 900,000 actual votes cast in the Battleground states, which is exactly the vote margin Obama had in winning those nine states.
It is fair to say, that without running Narwhal, President Obama would have faced a dead heat in the election.
One should remember, that a Get-out-the-vote campaign effort is almost impossble to measure before the election actually happens, and the average of election polls just before election day suggested the election at almost even, with Obama having a tiny 0.7% edge according to the last RealClearPolitics average of polls on election eve.
That he won so handily can be attributed to project Narwhal, which seem to have turned a nailbiter election into a clear victory and re-election for President Obama.
If you want to understand how these numbers were achieved, or would like to understand more of how Narwhal and Orca worked, what they acheived, how their effects can be seen comparing Battleground states and non-Battleground states, etc, please follow the article after the fold here:
December 06, 2012
The Definitive Article on Numbers and Performance of Narwhal vs Orca - Obama vs Romney - Datamining and voter activation in 2012 US election
Hacer clic aquí.
sábado, 3 de agosto de 2013
Andy Tow,… Chicago knew…
“La Matanza: crónica ardiente de una batalla descarnada por la capital del peronismo”.
