[ryansloan]

I look forward to the inevitable postmortems/analysis of this process after the election is over. Some interesting research and writing came out of both of Obama's campaigns.

It's interesting to me that this article focuses on how they might be using data to understand who can be persuaded. I recently read a book by Eitan Hersh called Hacking the Electorate about how campaigns use data to perceive voters (and how they primarily focus on public data). Hersh suggests that persuadability isn't a focus of campaign initiatives because it's too hard to do in a way that is cost-effective. He suggests this is the main reason campaigns focus on mobilizing people who are likely to vote for their candidate. It will be interesting to see if campaigns are able to build better models for persuasion this year.