The Power of Targeting

FiveThirtyEight is, as any reader of the morning Must-Reads probably knows, one of my favorite political sites on the web. Recently they’ve been branching out from their typical statistical analysis content, and today they’ve put up an interview with Ken Strasma, Obama’s national targeting director in 2008 and of the participants in our inaugural ShopTalk feature.Strasma says that targeting was essential in helping Obama to flip states in various regions across the country:

Once you start looking at voters on the individual level, rather than as monolithic blocks, there are a lot of similarities between these states. There are pockets of similar voters in all of these states, but the share of the electorate made up by the various groups differed dramatically.

He also predicts which states are the most likely to flip blue in three years, and which Republicans he’s most worried about. Check out the full interview at FiveThirtyEight.