Moneyball Myths

When we read Issenberg later this semester, keep the following in mind.  David Lauter writes at the Los Angeles Times:

“Moneyball did not win the election. Even Obama’s data crunchers will freely tell you that,” Lynn Vavreck of UCLA and John Sides of George Washington University wrote in an article in the online Pacific Standard. The article extends the analysis the two produced in their book on the 2012 campaign, “The Gamble.”

The Obama campaign innovated in several areas involving data. ..Perhaps most important, an experiment in February 2012 involving 300,000 phone calls by volunteers allowed the campaign to build a model to estimate how “persuadable” different types of voters might be. That model helped guide subsequent voter contacts.

But some widely hyped aspects of data analysis actually contributed little or nothing, Sides and Vavreck report. For example, despite reports to the contrary, the campaign made very little use of consumer data, such as the favorite sports of potential voters, what beers they prefer or what cars they drive. In the end, a person’s race, income, gender and voting history tell campaigns pretty much everything they need to know, data analysts from both parties said.

And micro-targeted messages aimed at specific voting groups turn out to be not all that useful in the context of a presidential campaign. When they compared targeted messages with broader ones, “Usually the winning email was universal,” the two political scientists quote Obama’s director of digital analytics, Amelia Showalter, as saying.

In all, the campaign’s efforts probably contributed “two points … at most” to Obama’s eventual four-point victory margin, Elan Kriegel, who directed Obama’s analytics efforts in battleground states, told the two. Other senior campaign officials said they wouldn’t hazard a guess on how much difference the work made in the final margin.