This is a brief, 7 minute clip of Porter’s session – to attend a complete, revealing session, attend PAW San Francisco(March 2014), PAW Toronto (May 2014), or PAW Chicago (June 2014).
Prior to President Obama’s reelection campaign, standard practices for persuading voters—that is, changing their minds—were unscientific and driven by long-standing assumptions and hunches. Campaigns targeted broad categories of typically “independent” voters and assumed that these voters would respond to a persuasive message. That all changed with the Obama reelection. Campaign leadership knew that 2012 would be different from 2008. Turning out likely supporters was not enough; the campaign had to persuade voters that President Obama was a better choice than Mitt Romney. Daniel Porter, Director of Statistical Modeling for the Obama Campaign, will discuss how his team used the results from a large-scale randomized, controlled experiment to model which individual voters were most likely to be persuaded, and how this model served as the basis for targeting decisions across many aspects of campaign.
Daniel Porter is the cofounder of BlueLabs, a Washington DC based analytics, data and technology company whose clients include political campaigns, nonprofits and corporations.