Business Analytics in Politics

Anyone who is paying half a mind to politics has heard how Obama leveraged social media and business analytics to win the 2008 election.  Set aside, if you will, my admiration for Barack Obama the person, and take note of this very forward-thinking endeavor.  His campaign out-posted John McCain's campaign by 3:1 on social media. By pulling in data from communications channels Obama was able to leverage a reliable method of polling while simultaneously building a database of millions of passionate followers at a relatively early stage in the digital BI game.  I have no qualms with John McCain, but Obama was able to leverage the progressive youth of this nation to win the campaign, and that was not easily or  successfully repeated at a pivotal level by Hillary Clinton, despite what would seem like her obvious political and operational advantages and four years of preparation and hind-sighting.  Does that mean that at the end of the day it has less to do with analytics and social media than it has to do with branding?  After all, one cannot be Hillary and Bernie (a person with distinctly differentiated values and mannerism who God bless him, undermined his party's centrist platform) all at one time, and still be non-bipolar and believable.

As a result of Sacred Heart University's decision to host (cough, sponsor) a Trump rally, I signed up to follow him, and to leave a few seats purposefully unfilled in that Fall 2016 event.  Here was a candidate who incorporated  a relatively small amount of social media posts, email outreach, or mobile outreach, compared to Hillary's campaign which bombarded me with activity and fundraising requests, typically via email but also through 3rd party personas.  Full disclosure, I attended her undergrad alma mater, so whatever she did on social media I believe I experienced through school affiliations primarily.

Earlier today while listening to a guest political reporter on NPR, I heard yet again that Trump listens and watches television news outlets with great dedication to see how he and his agendas are being represented to the people.  Does it all come down to heuristics, which he can intuit by cycling from one mainstream and core market news source after another?  Do politicians really need neural networks to tell them what geniuses already understand?  Less Moonves is Chairman of the Board, CEO, and President of CBS and is known as the brain behind many of the network's top show selections, to the point that people believe there are few other decision makers pulling the strings.  

I guess what I'm asking is, do BI tools democratize extraordinary human insight?  And if so, why are more marketers not driving harder at mastering this field for themselves?

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