Democrats push to redeploy Obama’s voter database

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/democrats-push-to-redeploy-obamas-voter-database/2012/11/20/d14793a4-2e83-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html

[Excerpts]

The campaign invested heavily in engineers and technologists, including many who had never worked in politics before, and used Amazon Web Services to host the voter database on its cloud servers. The key was a program the campaign built — called Narwhal after a predatory whale whose single tusk makes it look a bit like a fat, finned unicorn — that consolidated lists of voters and donors, often collected over years by state party officials and campaigns.

Narwhal allowed related pieces of software, such as those used by field organizers and call center workers, to both draw on the information in the voter database and continually update it.

Slaby and others from the campaign said that while it relied on detailed analyses of cable television viewing habits and Web site traffic, personal information from those sources was made anonymous and did not flow back into the voter database.

The most important information, officials said, was provided by voters themselves whenever they had contact with the campaign, in person or online, enriching the database with e-mail addresses, cellphone numbers and, crucially, information about what issues most concerned them.

This allowed the campaign’s analysts to test the effectiveness of messages aimed at narrow demographic slices — single women in their 30s worried about health care, for example. Though often described as “microtargeting,” Slaby said the most important element was what he called “micro-listening.”

“If people tell us they’re interested in cats, we probably took that down,” he said.

Despite some glitches, Narwhal proved crucial in helping the campaign allocate resources, especially as voting finally began.

The Romney’s campaign computer system, which officials there dubbed Orca after one of the few known predators of narwhals, crashed so badly on Election Day that many Republicans have derisively rechristened it “the Fail Whale.” The term was popularized by users of Twitter, which showed a cartoon image of a flock of birds attempting to lift a smiling, chubby whale when the company’s systems were overmatched.

[interesting comment]

"Obama’s 2008 election was hailed for its technological sophistication, and especially its use of social media to cultivate energized communities of volunteers. But campaign officials now acknowledge that the operation fell far short of its hype." 
 
So when Obama was all the rage in 2008, it didn't match the hype, yet he had a wide margin of victory.  Now in 2012 its gained him a narrowest margin of victory. Hmmmm... to me this means in 2008 he won not so much because of this data mining, but with its aid. In 2012 its the only thing that gave him a shot at winning. Micro targeting groups, scaring the crap out of them and barely winning.