Obama Wins: How Chicago's Data-Driven Campaign Triumphed

The intersection of politics and data warehousing gets deeper and deeper.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign, he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official chief scientist for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.