[tptacek]

How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we deriving that conclusion?

Two countervailing arguments:

First, the narrative about Obama's digital success is itself extraordinarily powerful and was used throughout the marketing industry to sell marketing services and products to commercial organizations; many of the obvious Google searches about Obama's campaign effectiveness will turn up a first SERP filled mostly with appeals to social media programs.

Second, people have written that the impact of digital marketing on Obama's campaign might be overblown. Here's an example: https://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/just-good-obama-ca...

[throwawaywego]

> How successful was Obama's digital campaign? From what sources are we deriving that conclusion?

I'd agree that it may have been overblown (just like the Russian interference may have been overblown). Also, of course the marketeers ran with it and turned it into a sales pitch.

But that detracts just a little from the effectiveness of Obama's digital campaign. As it was the first of its kind, relative to other campaigns that lacked a modern digital strategy, it gave a significant edge. Your argument seems of the form: "Hercules is strong. Some say he is really really strong. Ergo, Hercules was not strong".

2008: > The key technological innovation that brought Barack Obama to the White House wasn’t his tweets or a smartphone app. It was the Obama campaign’s novel integration of e-mail, cell phones, and websites. The young, technology-savvy staffers didn’t just use the web to convey the candidate’s message; they also enabled supporters to connect and self-organize, pioneering the ways grassroots movements would adapt and adopt platforms in the campaign cycles to come.

> but a network of supporters who used a distributed model of phone banking to organize and get out the vote, helped raise a record-breaking $600 million, and created all manner of media clips that were viewed millions of times. It was an online movement that begot offline behavior, including producing youth voter turnout that may have supplied the margin of victory.

> All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero.

2012: > Once again, the Obama campaign built a dream team of nerds to create the software that drove many aspects of the campaign. From messaging to fund-­raising to canvassing to organizing to targeting resources to key districts and media buys, the reelection effort took the political application of data science to unprecedented heights. The Obama team created sophisticated analytic models that personalized social and e-mail messaging using data generated by social-media activity.

> The Republican side, too, tried to create smarter tools, but it botched them. The Romney campaign’s “Orca,” a platform for marshaling volunteers to get out the vote on election day, suffered severe technical problems, becoming a cautionary tale of how not to manage a large IT project. For the moment, the technology gap between Democrats and Republicans remained wide.

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.htm...

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611823/us-election-campai...

[tptacek]

Neither of these sources cite any social science up to back their conclusions. I guess I'm interested in the fact that David Carr believed Obama's digital campaign was important, because I sort of generally liked David Carr. But this is color commentary, not analysis.

[throwawaywego]

It is difficult to provide a counterfactual here (would Obama have won if his campaign hadn't put any effort in digital?), so I am not sure if you are requiring that.

For factual analysis of the effects and strategies employed by Obama (on a casual glance, most of which support the statement that Obama's campaign was highly successful), do a search on Google Scholar. Here are a few highly cited political science sources I was able to pull (need to get back to work now).

> Digital media in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012: Adaptation to the personalized political communication environment

> This essay provides a descriptive interpretation of the role of digital media in the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 with a focus on two themes: personalized political communication and the commodification of digital media as tools. The essay covers campaign finance strategy, voter mobilization on the ground, innovation in social media, and data analytics, and why the Obama organizations were more innovative than those of his opponents. The essay provides a point of contrast for the other articles in this special issue, which describe sometimes quite different campaign practices in recent elections across Europe.

> From Networked Nominee to Networked Nation: Examining the Impact of Web 2.0 and Social Media on Political Participation and Civic Engagement in the 2008 Obama Campaign

> This article explores the uses of Web 2.0 and social media by the 2008 Obama presidential campaign and asks three primary questions: (1) What techniques allowed the Obama campaign to translate online activity to on-the-ground activism? (2) What sociotechnical factors enabled the Obama campaign to generate so many campaign contributions? (3) Did the Obama campaign facilitate the development of an ongoing social movement that will influence his administration and governance? Qualitative data were collected from social media tools used by the Obama ‘08 campaign (e.g., Obama ‘08 Web site, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, e-mails, iPhone application, and the Change.gov site created by the Obama-Biden Transition Team) and public information. The authors find that the Obama ‘08 campaign created a nationwide virtual organization that motivated 3.1 million individual contributors and mobilized a grassroots movement of more than 5 million volunteers. Clearly, the Obama campaign utilized these tools to go beyond educating the public and raising money to mobilizing the ground game, enhancing political participation, and getting out the vote. The use of these tools also raised significant national security and privacy considerations. Finally, the Obama-Biden transition and administration utilized many of the same strategies in their attempt to transform political participation and civic engagement.

> The Internet's Role in Campaign 2008

> A majority of American adults went online in 2008 to keep informed about political developments and to get involved with the election.