Mitt Romney's algorithmic campaign

By Alexis Madrigal

July 20, 2012

Sasha Issenberg has a fascinating exploration of the analytical approach at the heart of the Romney campaign. All campaigns use a lot of data these days, but the Romney team is drawing on a new, rich dataset: President Obama's appearances and ad buys themselves. Every detail of Obama's campaigning is feeding into Romney statistical models, from his ads' narrators' genders to the nominal audience they seem to be targeting. This a data-driven attempt to reverse engineer the Obama team's strategy.

"The Obama team had the luxury of knowing exactly what they'd be doing on July 1, 2012 because they've been planning for six years -- definitely three-and-a-half years," says Zac Moffatt, Romney's digital director. So instead of devoting their analytical energies to out-strategizing the president, Romney's advisers are trying to hack Obama's code and turn it against him.

As the dataset of Obama activity expands over the course of the campaign, the burden of finding those patterns will shift from the eyes of advisers huddled in weekly meetings to the statistical models they've written. Algorithms will test the association between vote goals and the candidates' travel and ad placement, staring through Obama's visible tactics to reveal a latent strategy beneath.