For the past nine months, we’ve been following how political campaigns use data about voters to target them in different ways. During the election, the Obama campaign, which had assembled a cutting-edge team of data scientists, developers, and digital advertising experts, refused to say anything about how it was targeting voters.
Now, members of the campaign are starting to open up about what their team actually did with all that data. Based on our own interviews with campaign officials, as well as reporting elsewhere, here’s an overview of some of the campaign’s key strategies, from connecting Facebook data to the national list of registered voters, to measuring how “persuadable” individual swing state voters might be.
