Welcome everyone to NYU Wagner's Government 3.0 class blog dedicated to politics.
While the blog will primarily examine how data is involved in campaigns, it will also look at how campaigns and citizens interact after the campaign is over.
Football fields of data was collected last year, how will campaigns use it? Data was primarily used for campaigns to speak to voters. Can voters now speak to those candidates that have won? Or are campaigns simply interested in the demographic and vote reliability information?
The campaign season may be over, but campaigns use of data is not, and how they use it should be of interest to voters and future campaigns alike. Finally, this blog will from time to time look to an elected officials use of data, because while they don't campaign every day, many officials today have a "permanent campaign" and are already looking to the next election. And it is the next election that this blog is most interested in informing.
Thanks for stopping by and taking a look, and please leave any comments you may have.
Using technology for the sake of using technology, or to say that you used the newest and coolest gadget can be problematic. This is especially true when there is no solid organization, reasoning, or coherent thought behind the use of technology. If one gets distracted by technology because it is shiny and new, rather than it will help you accomplish something more efficiently and effectively, you are more like Dug from the movie Up! than a technology entrepreneur.
While I see this fact on a weekly basis, the prime example was the get out the vote effort in the last presidential campaign. The Obama campaign knew how to use technology, the Romney Campaign didn't.
The Obama Get Out the Vote Effort:
While there are many articles (and books) regarding how precise and analytical the Obama campaign's outreach program was. Author of Victory Lab, Sasha Issenberg probably has the greatest insight for a journalist of the analytics behind the Obama machine. As he wrote,
The Obama campaign’s algorithms ran the numbers and predicted the likelihood that every voter in the country would cast a ballot, assigning each a turnout score. Obama’s analysts knew how good their support score was because they polled a new group of voters to validate it: 87 percent of the time it would accurately predict an individual’s preference.
And this dominance was not limited to back room math equations, it also extended to social media and smartphone apps. As the New York Times reported, the clipboard was replaced by the phone in 2012 and door knocking was simplified by a person's phone. (And if no one knows how unruly using printed handouts can be, trust me--it is a beast.) The Caucus Blog writes,
The app, which is available on Tuesday, will allow supporters of Mr. Obama’s to download a list of names in their neighborhood from the campaign’s central database. No longer will they have to stop by the local campaign headquarters to get started.
And once they knock on a door, the response — positive, negative, on-the-fence — can be wirelessly slung back to the campaign’s computer system instantly.
The Romney Get Out the Vote Effort
While the Obama campaign knew how to use technology, the Romney campaign did not. Their much touted Project Orca was supposed to be a technology driven poll watching apparatus that could send the campaign up to the second information on how election day was going. As the Atlantic Wire writes, it clearly failed:
On the day after the election, complaints started pouring in from the volunteers themselves indicating that not only did Project Orca not improve the process, it may have actually hindered it. John Ekdahl, a volunteer who writes at Ace Of Spades HQ, outlined the various glitches and breakdowns of the system. Instead of handing out voter lists at local offices, volunteers were emailed 60+ page PDF files and told to print them out at home the night before the election. They weren't given official poll watcher certificates or told that those were required to enter most polling places. The "app" wasn't really an app at all, it was a secure website, creating confusion for volunteers trying to find it in the iTunes store. It also didn't auto-forward users who didn't know to add an S to the http:// protocol in the app's URL (which most browsers don't ask you to type anymore), leaving numerous user lost on a broken webpage.
So, while social media and new technology can do amazing things, if you don't have the thought and organization behind it, it isn't going to . . .
While I've spoken on it a little bit, I wanted today to more fully discuss the impact of big data on how accruately people are able to predict the outcomes of elections. Unlike Dewey vs. Truman (below), pundits, statisticians, and newspapers can predict the outcome of national elections pretty accurately. (At least getting the winner correct). This is a result of big data, the hundreds and hundreds of polls conducted on a regular basis during a presidental election.
And this has allowed those people who work with poll numbers create extremely accurate predictions about elections, or as The Chronicle of Higher Education put it, allowed "The Rise of the Poll Quants."
The most popular of these poll quants--mentioned in an earlier post--has to be Nate Silver of the New York Times. It helps that he was President Obama's and Democrat's "rock, [and] foundation" (the winning team) this last election. It also helps that he has the backing and fiscal support of the New York Times.
It will be interesting to see if this accuracy continues.
A note of caution, however. Oftentimes, big data is synonomous with more openness. This isn't the case here. Here, most of those making predictions are very tight lipped about what exactly goes into their models or how much weight they give certain data: see Nate Silver's methodology. Additionally, many organizations that conduct the polls only release limited information to general public. While the newspapers can report many numbers, they actually don't release the numbers and questions behind those final answer (such as how the questions are worded or how much weight they give to certain demographics, for example). This information is only released to a limited number of people. Finally, just because some people are very good at predictions, their analysis isn't free, and certainly not cheap.
Therefore, while big data is helping predictions of elections, there should be a warning similar to that of weight loss programs: Your Results May be Different.
Political Campaigns (PC): You are one of the first people that I know that used updated vote counts from early voting and absentee ballots in order to target voter contact. How had the process changed from when you first began and had to retrieve information on CDs in some districts to today?
Wes Skiles (WS): Well, I think the biggest change to elections and ballot chasing came about after the 2000 presidential election, the ensuing lawsuit and commensurate legislation (the Help America Vote Act). There was also a big push through Secretary of State Project (2006), a 527 dedicated to helping Democrats get elected to this key office. The project touted same-day registration; win, lose or draw elections, all mail ballots and other election reform. In short, the Florida debacle in 2000 forced states to modernize and create more transparency and efficiency in voting. The result of this was a tremendous benefit to campaigns who were savvy enough to capitalize on the newly aggregated and digital data made available first through county clerks and recorders, and more recently streamlined through secretaries of state.
PC: National parties have spent substantial funds on creating databases of voters and then distributing and training local campaigns and candidates on those databases. Do you think that this top down approach was successful? Did you rely on these databases? How were they improved from cycle to cycle and how could they be improved in the future?
WS: The 2000 and 2004 elections represent a significant shift in campaigns from huge marketing and large format strategies to retail politics and micro-targeting. Because campaigns had access to data, they no longer had to send out 22,000 of the same piece; they could splice the audience up into sub-groups and target mail to specific voters - often for less money than the older method. Polling data was key to this strategy - and it worked for a while. Then social media entered the game in 2006. Information was available through a whole new, burgeoning network no longer dependent upon news editors, deadlines, fact-checking itself. In 1999 and 2001 we all sat glued to our television sets watching the tragedies of the Columbine shooting and the events of 9/11. Last year, I learned about the Aurora theater shooting on my iPhone through Facebook. The facts came later, but the news that the event had occurred at all came through a social network. In 2008, the Obama campaign was able to harness the power of social networks and combine it with a huge reform (in the non-pejorative sense of the word) movement. The game changed again and this time irrevocably. It's not about stodgy old politicians who only speak from a dais and with the aid of a script. Now, it's stream-of-consciousness. It's what I'm looking at right now and what I'm feeling right now. Republicans in 2012 tried desperately to duplicate, nee improve upon what Democrats were able to accomplish in 2008, and they came up short. In 2008, and again in 2012, any number of 'one off' Democratic groups (Rock the Vote, Progress Now, etc.) held numerous events around Denver. Some included last-minute speakers like Bill Clinton or musicians like Norah Jones. These events were free - all you had to do was bring something to donate toward a community non-profit (canned good, clothing, etc.) and provide your cell phone number and email address. The strategy clearly worked and businesses now are building similar models to reach out to potential customers.
PC: Along the same lines--much has been made about President Obama's successful use of technology in targeting voters and getting them to the polls as well as Governor Romney's attempt to recreate similar success. As a local campaign manager, did you see any benefit of these technologies for your candidates? How could national campaigns and committees improve information sharing? Do you think it should be somewhat "open source" information?
WS: I already answered some of this in the previous question. What I'll add is this: data is only good if it's accurate (e.g., current, real, reliable, etc.). The Democrats have run a tight ship and invested a lot of money in various efforts and causes to reach out to anyone who might buy in to even a splinter of one of their party planks. Republicans just gathered information and had no method to verify data or confirm its veracity. Polling samples were skewed. The result was disaster on Election Night 2012. The Democrats built a quality system in 2008 and simply improved upon a working model. Republicans threw together a database, asked volunteers to make some calls and fill in some bubble sheets, and then were surprised in November when the results of the election were so far out of whack to what actually occurred.
PS: You have a person that you worked with to manage the data. What insights did you gain from him regarding what technology can do in order to increase voter contact and get them to the polls?
WS: Numbers don't lie. If can slice and dice previous election results and form thoughtful queries, you can call any race within four points. The key question for any campaign manager is where will you get the votes. In a heavily populated Republican or Democrat district, the math doesn't matter as much. But with so many competitive districts and with unaffiliated voters representing 1/3 of active voters, you must have the numbers, and they must be correct. After that, it's simple math.
PC: What new technology or social media platform not necessarily created for political campaigns been the most beneficial to local political campaigns? Which technology is the most overrated?
WS: I'm not convinced there's any one trick to winning an election. It's all work, and the truth is much of it comes down to walking precincts - kissing babies and shaking hands. Voters remember that forever and are often enamored with the fact that a person running for office was willing to stop and chat with him/her. That said, I think YouTube is an incredibly valuable resource to campaigns. Nothing beats seeing a candidate, and if he or she doesn't show up at your door and you don't attend an event where he or she will be present - watching a candidate on You Tube is pretty remarkable. Facebook ads can be helpful, but I'm still no believer that you can run on social media and skip some traditional method. The average voter is still >50 years old. Twitter is amusing and then obnoxious. Unless you're a total politics freak, I think Twitter is largely ineffective.
PC: Overall, how do you see campaigns using technology in the future? If you had unlimited funds and man power, what technology would you want to develop to help local candidates win elections?
WS: I would approach a company like FirstData Corps. and ask them to help me build a database.
Often, when you hear about data and campaigns, you think of "The Victory Lab" and using big data to run sophisticated experiments regarding voters preferences. However, the book and articles like it discuss changes only on the margins (and discuss campaigns that have millions of dollars in the bank). But giant national campaigns are not the same as small local races. And national campaigns are usually secretive about their findings.
So what are local campaigns to do? Big campaigns may talk about their constantly updating databases, but I remember not too long ago having to travel constantly to County Clerk offices to get CDs with voter information. And then we had to input that information. Not exactly your most advance use of technology.
But that doesn't mean that local campaigns aren't using technology to the best of your ability.
One person that I know of--Wes Skiles--has been innovative and in the forefront of using technology in the campaigns that he ran.
Within the next week, I am going to post a discussion that I had with Wes regarding how he has used technology in local elections in the past and where he sees local campaigns going in the future.
As reported in many newspapers today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had some antithetical views on the use of social media that many Gov 3.0 advocates take. According to the NY Times:
"The mayor noted that technology, despite its benefits, can add new pitfalls to an already grueling process. “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments” in cities, Mr. Bloomberg said.
“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” he said. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”"
I truly agree with Mayor Bloomberg when it comes to elections (which hasn't happened lately--my protest driven Dunkin Donuts' styrofoam cup of coffee as evidence).
In today's culture of 24/7 news cycles, short attention spans, and 140 characters, it may be difficult to focus on the long term of society rather than the here and now. If funding was decided day to day or only funded like we do in spaces such as Kickstarter, new libraries may be funded, but what of sanitation plants or garbage dumps? There are those ugly sides of running an organized society that many people don't want to look to or even acknowledge (prisons), but are necessary for our prosperity. So an election process on a yearly basis allows people, on the whole, to say whether society is going in the right or wrong direction instead of being dictated by the pet projects people think up day to day, hour to hour, or minute to minute.
Robert Draper has written an article about the GOP, campaigns, and data for this weekend's New York Times Magazine. And while it mostly is a discussion about how data "techies" and younger people feel about the Party, technology is a metaphor for a symptom of the larger problem for the Party.
Generally, I agree with this, because as Draper states:
Romney’s senior strategist, Stuart Stevens, may well be remembered by historians, as one House Republican senior staff member put it to me, “as the last guy to run a presidential campaign who never tweeted.” (“It was raised many times with him,” a senior Romney official told me, “and he was very categorical about not wanting to and not thinking it was worth it.”)
So, can the Party really be able to communicate with younger generations (and voters of the future) when they fail to use communication tools to connect with these voters? Another compelling question for the Party.
In Aeon Magazine (a relatively new online magazine of "ideas and culture"), Nathaniel Tkacz has written an engaging article about the Open Government initiative. While his entire article is worth a read, I think Tkacz's makes a very good point about the new computer programming language of open government:
Does this latest rise of openness have any distinctive political content of its own? To begin with, we should note that it is a politics modelled after a highly idealised version of software development. It aims to be collaborative, which really means it aims to function as a ‘babbling bazaar’, reinventing the activities of government as competition between members ‘inside and out’. Participation adds numbers to the collaboration game and transparency is necessary for genuine competition. Thus the goal of open politics is not fairness, better working conditions or some other recognisable political desire, but innovation through competition. That is, it is not a politics geared towards specific changes, but towards change in general.
With its bugs, programs, sources and platforms, it’s also no exaggeration to say that the new open politics is entirely enmeshed in computational metaphors. Our technical environments have always structured our thinking, so the mere fact that software-inspired politics reeks of technological determinism may be no reason to write it off. Yet politics modelled after bazaar-style software development looks, at best, like a new twist in the continuing march of market principles into government. And there’s no reason to think that computational metaphors add much to the mix. Quite the reverse: it might be that we need new political metaphors to understand what’s going on in these supposedly exemplary software practices. As it turns out, open source development doesn’t quite function as a bazaar: Nikolai Bezroukov observed as early as 1999 that it is more like a special type of academic research.
I find this to be a good point, primarily because over history, I believe, technological revolutions haven't really changed how the American political system has functioned. Rather, it has sped up (and not necessarily improved) how government and it's people communicate. Most of the change that it has accomplished has been at the margins. How politicians make law, get elected, and stay elected have largely stayed the same. Now it is just more transparent in some areas (to root out corruption) but less transparent in others (due to national security concerns).
Therefore, Tkacz's point that it may just be the language that has changed is compelling, as is his point that we should stay away from a programming language. Because when I was first told of using more technology my first thought (pessimistic, I admit) was, "Hopefully there are not many bugs," because unlike bugs in a computer program, bugs in our government program won't only cost money, but possibly our citizen's lives as well.
One thing that often gets overlooked in campaigns is the pundits. These experienced outsiders have the ability, early on, to make or break a campaign, and towards the end are constantly on television, making predictions about what will happen. These predictions sometimes have the ability to change the course of elections (remember, networks calling Florida early in 2000 may have depressed turnout in the Panhandle).
So, with pundits having so much sway, who is keeping them accountable?
PunditTracker seeks to do just that. The site attempts to score how wrong or correct a pundit has been in his or her predictions (with most political pundits retaining scores of F's at the moment).
However, one problem with the system is likely that PunditTracker does not track if a pundit is right or wrong, but it also takes into account how "bold" the prediction is (so the asterisk doesn't mean he or she was pontificating while on performance enhancing drugs):
The traditional method to score pundits employs what’s called a “hit rate” or “batting average” approach: take the number of correct calls and divide it by the number of total calls. Make ten calls and get seven right, and the hit rate is 70%. The problem is that this figure is useless without context. The daily prediction “the sun will rise tomorrow” would (hopefully) yield a perfect hit rate, after all.
Our solution is to calibrate each prediction for boldness. We measure this by asking our users how likely they think a given prediction is to occur. If everyone says “unlikely,” then the call is bold, and the pundit, if correct, should receive more credit than he would for a called deemed “likely”. This moment-in-time gauge of consensus opinion underpins our scoring algorithm.
Pundits who have made at least 25 graded calls are awarded a letter grade (A through F range, C being average) based on this boldness-adjusted accuracy metric.
To me, this seems as if PunditTracker is simply doing what pundits are doing--but just asking more people. If the prediction is the conventional wisdom a pundit will get more "points" than if it is a shot in the dark. Therefore, PunditTracker doesn't really seem to care if a pundit is correct most of the time, but rather if he or she can make that one in a million call (which they probably already did once and may not be likely to do again, see Karl Rove or James Carville).
With time (they don't use historical data) and more participation, it may lead to more correct answers in how bold a prediction is and if the prediction is correct.
For example, while entertaining, James Carville currently has an A+ rating for predicting that Gov. Mitt Romney would be the Republican nominee for president. The community that voted said that this prediction was of a Medium-High boldness.
However, a National Journal's Insider Poll on January 6, 2011 said that of Republican insiders Romney was a 2:1 favorite to win the nominee (which was actually down from the year before). So, what PunditTracker says was of a Medium-High boldness was actually not that bold (and should more likely have been considered a foregone conclusion given the nature of Republican presidential primaries).
Therefore--while it may work better in the future--at the moment I would just rely on the statisticians predictions and leave it at that.
Even if made with good intentions,
Russia’s Open Government Plan (OGP) is fundamentally flawed.
With a “Not Free”
classification from Freedom House, an OGP is a strong way to creep toward a “Free”
classification. However, Russia’s OGP chooses to disregard one of the largest
reasons it is currently not free--political openness.
In March 2012, President Vladimir Putin was elected
to his third term in office. Yet, it wasn’t election as most other countries
in the Open Government initiative would define it--rather it was a foregone
conclusion. Elections in Russia have been that way since 1996. For a government
to be open, elections should not be foregone conclusions, rife with
allegations of government funding of Mr. Putin and ballot stuffing. While an
improvement, being able to say that the election was less corrupt than previous
elections is not enough.
Rather, Russia should open it's election and use technology to make sure future elections are free and open. One place it should look to for inspiration is another Open Government nation with a history of unfree elections: Kenya.
Kenya, unlike Russia, has acknowledged the problems
that it has had with elections in the past and it attempting to overcome it.
One of it's goals is to:
“Promote transparency and accountability in the
management of elections by making available voter register, constituency and
boundary information in electronic format online, improving the transmission of
election results through technology and making them available online in open
data format.”
Further, Kenya has used technology in an effort to
reduce the violence that has marred Kenyan elections in the past and threaten to
overtake the country again. This election, however, they are attempting to
stem the tide of violence by monitoring Facebook and Twitter.
While many
developed countries would balk at the idea of a government monitoring social
networking sites, in places like Kenya the use of technology to increase
military presence in volatile areas may be what they need to reduce violence
and make for freer elections.
Overall, Russia states that:
“Transparency and openness in
politics will improve quality of decision-making and quality of the state
mechanism in general and also will form the new culture for Russia of
interaction, searching for compromise and mutually beneficial decisions.”
To increase transparency and openness, it hopes to
involve society in the decision-making process. The best way to do this is for
Russia to work on opening it's elections because involving society in
decision-making begins with allowing citizens to choose their elected officials
in the first place.
Governing Magazine posted an article last month about how technology assisted voters in finding their polling place on election day. I found it interesting how New Jersey used the Voter Information Project to send voters updates regarding changed polling places due to Hurrican Sandy. However, while text messages were probably helpful to thousands of people in normal circumstances, I think Gov. Christie overlooked the fact that if voters don't have power in their home, there is some likelihood they don't have power in their cellphones either.
This column also reminded me of Sasha Issenberg's "The Victory Lab" discussion of how the Obama campaign got people to vote during the 2008 Iowa Caucuses: an experiment showed that a link saying "find my caucus location" was clicked less than the link stating "confirm my caucus location" (because people of course know where to caucus, but just wanted to make sure). Therefore, anytime a voter went to a campaign website to look up their polling location, they just clicked the link to confirm the information, rather than find it out in the first place.
Maybe in the next four years, governments can use experiments like this one to hone in on what tactics are more likely to get people to vote. Or for those people that have an option of a local voting place or a vote center: which has shorter lines. Because if ERs can do it, so can campaigns.
