US President Barack Obama’s re-election team is building a vast digital operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never seen before.
Analysts see this as the first White House race in which Facebook will be a dominant force, the first “data election.” The social media giant has grown exponentially since the last election, making it a campaigning tool able to transform friendship into a political weapon.
Facebook is also a source of invaluable data on voters. The re-election team, Obama for America, will invite supporters to log on to the campaign Web site via Facebook, downloading their personal data into the campaign’s data store.
“Facebook is now ubiquitous,” said Dan Siroker, a former Google digital analyst who joined Obama’s campaign in 2008 and now runs his own consultancy. “Whichever candidate uses Facebook the most effectively could win the war.”
For the past nine months, some of the top digital brains in the US have occupied an entire floor of the Prudential building in Chicago devising a digital campaign from the bottom up. The team draws much of its style and inspiration from the corporate sector, to create a vote-garnering machine that is smooth and ruthlessly efficient.
Already more than 100 experts have been assembled, from an array of geeky disciplines: statisticians, predictive modelers, experts in data-mining and online ads, mathematicians, software engineers, bloggers and digital organizers.
At the core is a unified computer database that gathers and refines information on millions of committed and potential Obama voters. The database allows staff and volunteers at all levels — from the top strategists answering directly to Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, to the lowliest canvasser — to unlock knowledge about individual voters and use it to target personalized messages.
Every time an individual volunteers to help out — for instance, by offering to host a fund-raising party for the president — he or she will be asked to log on to the re-election Web site through Facebook. That will engage Facebook Connect, which shares a user’s personal information with a third party.
“If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you with all your relationships,” a campaign organizer who has worked on behalf of Obama said.
The potential benefits of the strategy can already be felt. The Obama campaign this year has attracted about 1.3 million donors, most contributing US$250 or less — that’s more than double the number at the same stage in 2008. At this rate, Obama is well on the way toward staging the world’s first US$1 billion campaign.
Under its motto “Bigger, better, 2012,” the Chicago team intends to create a campaign powerhouse that will seamlessly fuse fund-raising, advertising and political persuasion. The gamble is that such digital engagement will prove to have a greater impact in November than the mountain of cash from Republican-supporting moguls, such as the Koch brothers, that is likely to be spent on negative attack ads against Obama.
As Sam Graham-Felsen, Obama’s chief blogger in 2008, puts it: “This will be the geeks versus the billionaires election.”
Campaign insiders say the emphasis this year will be on efficiency more than technical wizardry, but that should not obscure how significant this year’s presidential election will be in putting to the test the first custom-made digital campaign.
Mark Sullivan, founder of Voter Activation Network — which manages the Democratic Party’s database known as Vote Builder — said: “What we will see in 2012 will make 2008 look really primitive.”
Judith Freeman, of the New Organizing Institute, who worked on former Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s 2004 and Obama’s 2008 campaigns, said there is a leap forward in technology every presidential election and this year would be no exception.
“There’s a deadline — it’s got to be done by election day — and that provides a huge push to make things happen,” Freeman said.
In 2008, the Obama team was lauded around the world for its groundbreaking work on Internet fund-raising. Yet in fact it struggled through much of that year as a result of the separation of its data on voters into several distinct silos.
The Obama team in 2008 began to tear down those walls, releasing extraordinary fund-raising energy that raised about US$500 million online. This year the Chicago team has not so much knocked down the walls as dispensed with them altogether. They have built from scratch a unified database that incorporates and connects everything the campaign knows about a voter, but the centralized database may raise privacy issues.
“This is beyond J. Edgar Hoover’s dream. In its rush to exploit the power of digital data to win re-election, the Obama campaign appears to be ignoring the ethical and moral implications,” said Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy, an advertising watchdog that has been calling for regulators to review digital marketing in politics.
However, from the vantage point of the campaign, the benefits are evident.
“Fusing your data into one central store is cheaper, quicker and allows you to be more targeted,” said Jim Pugh, who was part of Obama’s 2008 team and who now works for a progressive group, Rebuild the Dream.
The Obama database has Vote Builder built into it. This stores information such as age, address, occupation and voting history drawn from the files of 190 million people. It matches those voter files with data gathered from online interactions with supporters — notably millions of pieces of information an army of canvassers collected in 2008, a list of e-mail addresses of supporters that now stands at about 23 million, as well as the details of Obama’s 25 million Facebook fans.
Facebook itself has been transformed as a campaign tool since 2008, simply by its exponential growth. Four years ago there were about 40 million Facebook users in the US, now there are more than 160 million — incorporating almost all voters.
“This is the Moneyball moment for politics,” Graham-Felsen said. “If you can figure out how to leverage the power of friendship, that opens up incredible possibilities.”
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) were born under the sign of Gemini. Geminis are known for their intelligence, creativity, adaptability and flexibility. It is unlikely, then, that the trade conflict between the US and China would escalate into a catastrophic collision. It is more probable that both sides would seek a way to de-escalate, paving the way for a Trump-Xi summit that allows the global economy some breathing room. Practically speaking, China and the US have vulnerabilities, and a prolonged trade war would be damaging for both. In the US, the electoral system means that public opinion
They did it again. For the whole world to see: an image of a Taiwan flag crushed by an industrial press, and the horrifying warning that “it’s closer than you think.” All with the seal of authenticity that only a reputable international media outlet can give. The Economist turned what looks like a pastiche of a poster for a grim horror movie into a truth everyone can digest, accept, and use to support exactly the opinion China wants you to have: It is over and done, Taiwan is doomed. Four years after inaccurately naming Taiwan the most dangerous place on
Wherever one looks, the United States is ceding ground to China. From foreign aid to foreign trade, and from reorganizations to organizational guidance, the Trump administration has embarked on a stunning effort to hobble itself in grappling with what his own secretary of state calls “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” The problems start at the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that the world has returned to multipolarity, with “multi-great powers in different parts of the
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
RSS