I'm not totally sure it's all bad. Like, when I think of an elected official representing a large group of people, it seems really hard to know what that group wants. Of course there will be the sub-groups that organize and voice their points, but it seems that the majority of that larger group isn't actively voicing their opinion. Through this data mining, the less active people are passively letting the official know what their preferences are.

Of course, this sorta means you're trusting the official to use your data for good and not evil. But me interacting with that official via social media would be indicative of me trusting them. So this data mine stuff might be a little scarier for the people that throw around their 'likes' all willy-nilly like.

I think this is fine. I knew the Obama people had my info, and I'm glad they used it with this kind of smarts and sophistication.

I don't share my personal information with anyone unless I really want them to know it. And I share what I choose, shielding what I don't want to give the world.

What is the difference between political parties gathering this information and the federal government itself?

Political parties are independent organizations, and the federal government runs the country.

(Do I win something, or was that rhetorical?)

Bad? This is awesome.

THhe only way to not participate in this is to not contribute to any online fora, sign up for any mailing lists or accounts, not to use any commercial browsers (they all sell their search and clickthrough data), to block all cookies, and turn off history logging.

This article was really fascinating.

My husband works in TV news and did a fair amount of campaign and election coverage. He said it was striking to him how young, overall, the Obama campaign staff appeared compared to the Romney staff.

We live in Ohio and for the past 2 months have been subject to about 15-20 robo-calls a day. Mostly we didn't pick up but occasionally we got fooled and answered and invariably those calls were from the Republicans. Extremely annoying. We weren't "undecided" but if we were those calls would have pushed us to the other side. Hopefully this type of campaign persuasion will go away.

Thanks for posting this Ardiril.

Well, there's no way around this. It is pretty awesome though, the power of utilising data intelligently.

Funnily enough, even though I'm in Singapore, I got Obama GOTV ads all day on Tuesday (our Wednesday).

I wonder if Romney's campaign wasn't doing this. It seems like a no-brainer.

I think the Romney campaign certainly had the money and technology, but lacked the smarts, the demographic alertness, and the understanding of the current scene that the Obama campaign had in 2008 and 2012. It is really old school, for example, to run expensive TV ads on CNN and other news shows.

I hope in their likely effort to do much better at this in 2014 and 2016, the Rs move much further toward the middle. They need to look hard at their message, not just their use of the mediums.

I hope in their likely effort to do much better at this in 2014 and 2016, the Rs move much further toward the middle. They need to look hard at their message, not just their use of the mediums.

Very good point, bearwife, and in fact, I see this article itself as an attempt by generally conservative Time magazine to divorce Obama's victory entirely from the overwhelming superiority of his policies, and attribute that victory solely to better electioneering precisely in order to allow Republicans to avoid coming to terms with the fact that they have devolved into the party of hatred, dirty tricks, and willful stupidity.

But both are true. They are better policies, but his organization is also far better tuned in to the everyday lives, habits, inclinations, and online and offline actions of people, just as they're also better tuned in to the challenges, concerns, and issues those people face. If you are one, you are the other, almost by default.