Campaign Analytics: What Separates The Good From The Bad

Donald Trump, as a candidate for President last year, expressed great skepticism about the use of analytics
in an election campaign.  Hillary Clinton made a big deal about her campaign’s use of analytics. Before that, President Obama’s campaigns received great credit for their analytics.

If you compare these experiences, you can begin to understand what separates good from bad in campaign analytics.

Let’s start with the Clinton campaign, whose use of analytics was breathlessly reported, including this Politico story about “Hillary’s Nerd Squad” eighteen months before the election.

However, a newly released book, titled Shattered, provides a kind of autopsy of the campaign and its major weaknesses. A CBS News review of the book highlighted this
weakness in particular:

“Campaign manager Robby Mook put a lot of faith in the campaign’s computer algorithm, Ada, which was supposed to give them a leg up in turning out likely voters. But the Clinton campaign’s use of the highly complex algorithm focused on ensuring voter turnout, rather than attracting voters from across party lines.

“According to the book, Mook was insistent that the software would be revered as the campaign’s secret weapon once Clinton won the White House. With his commitment to Ada and the provided data analytics, Mook often butted heads with Democratic Party officials, who were concerned about the lack of attention in persuading undecided voters in Clinton’s favor.  Those Democratic officials, as it turned out, had a point.”

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Of course, this had become part of the conventional wisdom since the day after the election. For example, on November 9, 2016, the Washington Post had a story “Clinton’s data-driven campaign relied heavily on an algorithm named Ada. What didn’t she see?”:

“Ada is a complex computer algorithm that the campaign was prepared to publicly unveil after the election as its invisible guiding hand … the algorithm was said to play a role in virtually every strategic decision Clinton aides made, including where and when to deploy the candidate and her battalion of surrogates and where to air television ads … The campaign’s deployment of other resources — including county-level campaign offices and the staging of high-profile concerts with stars like Jay Z and Beyoncé — was largely dependent on Ada’s work, as well.”

But the story had another point about Ada:

“Like the candidate herself, she had a penchant for secrecy and a private server … the particulars of Ada’s work were kept under tight wraps, according to aides. The algorithm operated on a separate computer server than the rest of the Clinton operation as a security precaution, and only a few senior aides were able to access it.”

While the algorithm clearly wasn’t the only or perhaps even the most important reason for the failure of the campaign, that last piece illustrates why the Clinton use of analytics wasn’t more successful. It had in common with many other failed analytics initiatives an atmosphere of secretiveness and arrogance – “we’re the smartest guys around here” so let us do our thing.

The successful uses of analytics in campaigns or elsewhere try to use (and then test) the best insights of the people with long experience in a field. They will even help the analyst look at the right questions –
in the case of the Clinton campaign, converting undecided voters

The best analytics efforts are a two-way conversation that helps the “experts” to understand better which of their beliefs are still correct and helps the analytics staff to understand where they should be looking for predictive factors.

Again, analytics wasn’t the only factor that led to President Obama’s winning elections in 2008 and 2012, but the Obama campaign’s use of analytics felt different than Clinton’s. One article went “Inside the Obama Campaign’s Big Data Analytics Culture” and described “an archetypical story of an analytics-driven organization that aligned people, business processes and technologies around a clear mission” instead of focusing on the secret sauce and a top-down, often strife-filled, environment.

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InfoWorld’s story about the 2012 campaign described a widely dispersed use of analytics –

“Of the 100 analytics staffers, 50 worked in a dedicated analytics department, 20 analysts were spread throughout the campaign’s various headquarters, and another 30 were in the field interpreting the data.” So, there was plenty of opportunity for analytics staffers to learn from others in the campaign.

And the organizational culture was molded to make this successful as well –

“barriers between disparate data sets – as well as between analysts – were lowered, so everyone could work together effectively. In a nutshell, the campaign sought a friction-free analytic environment.”

Obama’s successful use of analytics was a wake-up call to many politicians, Hillary Clinton included. But did they learn all the lessons of his success? Apparently not.

Coming back to the 2016 election, there is then the Trump campaign. Despite the candidate’s statements, his campaign also used analytics, employing Cambridge Analytica, the British firm that helped the Brexit forces to win in the UK. Thus, 2016 wasn’t as much of a test of analytics vs. no analytics as has sometimes been reported.

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But, if an article, “The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked”, published two weeks ago in the British newspaper, the Guardian, is even close to the mark, there is a different question about the good and bad uses of analytics in both the Trump and Brexit campaigns. In part scary and perhaps in others too jaundiced, this story raises questions for the future – as analytic tools get better, will the people using those tools realize they face not only technical challenges.

The good and bad use of analytics will not just be a question as to whether the results are being executed well or poorly – whether the necessary changes and learning among all members of an organization take place. But it will also be a question whether analytics tools are being used in ways that are good or bad in an ethical sense.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved. @NormanJacknis

Doing More Than Just Remembering The Forgotten America

Much has been written about how the results of this year’s Presidential election reflected the feeling on the part of people who live in rural areas and small towns that they have been overlooked and that the severe problems in those areas have not received sufficient attention by public and business leaders.

This Washington Post story, sub-headed “How an electorate fed up with the elite propelled Donald Trump to victory”, is a good example.

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Although we frequently hear that 80% of Americans live in cities now, that still means there are 60,000,000 Americans in the countryside – not an insignificant number as we saw last month.

Even the news stories that feature broad economic trends don’t highlight the uneven nature of those trends in these areas. For example, the decline in manufacturing employment was a standard talking point on the recent campaign trail. But many observers seem to have forgotten that many bigger manufacturing plants had long since departed cities for the countryside. So when manufacturing employment declined, it hit the countryside more deeply, even while that pain was less visible.

So, sadly, the feeling in rural America of being forgotten is not unfounded.

To make matters worse, in too many small cities and rural areas, many people speak negatively of the prospects for the area. This helps create a downward spiral by persuading the brightest young people to leave.

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As sociologists, Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, wrote in their 2009 book, “Hollowing Out The Middle:

“The biggest question facing anyone who grows up in a small town is whether he or she should leave or stay. A little further down the road, those who make the initial decision to leave, usually after graduating high school, must decide whether to return to the cozy familiarity of their hometown or to continue building lives elsewhere. The fact that this small-town rite of passage should be so intimately bound up with the very future of the Heartland allows us to see how the hollowing-out phenomenon plays out in the lives and decisions of young people, and how their pathways are shaped by the communities and people who surround them as they grow up.”

“The Heartland’s most valuable export is not crops or hogs but its educated young people.”

For the last couple of years, I’ve been working with the Intelligent Community Forum helping these communities to take advantage of new opportunities open to them in a new century in which close physical proximity of millions of people is not necessarily the only strategy for economic success.

I’ve written before about how technology enables rural residents to take advantage of the kind of resources that you used to be almost exclusively available to residents of big cities — global economic connections, education and culture, even world-class health care — while maintaining the quality of life that draws them or keeps them in the countryside.

With all this on my mind a few weeks ago, I was asked by the Aspen Institute to keynote a community dialog in Sutter County (Yuba City), California. This was part of my participation in the small working group advising Aspen’s project on the future of libraries.

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Although Sutter County is not, by any means, among the most devastated of rural communities, it is still concerned about its future. My observation was that they had some strong assets that are otherwise underappreciated in the conventional economic development perspective.

First, I was impressed by the local leadership, which seemed to have its act together. Leaders who have vision and an understanding of where the world is going are essential for community development.

Second, they have a diverse population, with a variety of experiences including an understanding of entrepreneurial success. Like some other flourishing small cities around the country, Yuba City also has its immigrant groups. It is, for example, known all over North America and India for its long-established Sikh community, which draws tens of thousands of people to the city each year – and can be a connection to the global economy.

Third, they have a library that is prepared to play its role as the central institution of the knowledge economy and help the residents of Sutter County take advantage of new opportunities that I see in a new connected countryside. Much of the Aspen workshop/dialog was focused on the steps the library can take to make this a reality.

It will be interesting to see how well Sutter County achieves its vision and what other communities can learn from it.

And, perhaps for a short time, the situation in the countryside will get a little attention among public officials and the media. But even being remembered, once in a while, really isn’t much of a program.

While Sutter County and places like it across the country are trying to assure their future, it would be easier if national policy recognized and helped them respond to the socio-economic-technological challenges and opportunities facing them. More than merely reducing the sense of being forgotten, it could help accelerate a renaissance in the countryside.

© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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Are Government Officials Trying To Make Too Many Decisions?

This is a follow up to last week’s post about people in positions of power whose decisions are flawed because of that powerful position.

Almost
every President relishes his image as a decision maker.  In the current
election, there’s also much talk about temperament, with both major
candidates claiming how good they are at making judgments and decisions.

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But
there’s little discussion about whether – out of ego, ambition, policy
concerns or whatever – they end up trying to make too many decisions.
Huh?  Isn’t that what the job is all about?

That’s what you would
believe if you listened to candidates and President.  It’s almost as if
they are like baseball players toting up how many hits they’ve had this
season – why I made 1,000 important decisions last year!

Many academics also focus on Presidential decision-making.  Here’s a statement for students:

“Can
you imagine being the president of the United States?  Think about all
the important decisions that must be made.  A president must exercise
wise decision-making skills.  Decision making is simply the thought
process of selecting a logical choice from the available options.  For
the president, the available options must seem endless!”

John Dean, famously, formerly on the staff of President Nixon, writing just a few years ago about President Obama, stated:

“Nothing
is more important in the American presidency than decision-making.  It
is, in fact, the very essence of the job.  Presidential decisions can
and do shape our history, for better or worse.  Rarely, though, does the
decision-making style of presidential candidates receive much attention
during a campaign.”

Well, on top of the flaws in each individual decision, things only get worse when someone is making too many decisions.

When I originally wrote about this in 2011, one of the most popular articles on the New York Times website was John Tierney’s “Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?”.  (It’s still one of the top hits when you search the subject.)

He
pointed out how the quality of decisions declines as too many are made,
in part because the decision makers have not conserved their willpower
for the tough decisions.  He cited a now frequently cited study of
parole decisions:

“[A]s researchers discovered by analyzing more
than 1,100 decisions over the course of a year, Judges, who would hear
the prisoners’ appeals and then get advice from the other members of the
board, approved parole in about a third of the cases, but the
probability of being paroled fluctuated wildly throughout the day.  
Prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about 70
percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were
paroled less than 10 percent of the time.”

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This pattern is a reflection of decision fatigue,
trying to make too many decisions.  It is tied to the general limit on
each person’s ability to sustain will power (and, for that matter,
rationality) over the more natural emotional instincts as the day goes
on.

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The American Psychological Association has a website
devoted to will-power – the ability to make decisions that are based on
long-term, rational goals rather than immediate gratification.  While
elaborating on the various ways that having stronger will-power leads to
lives that are more successful, they also note the numerous studies
that show it is a limited resource which can be depleted after a series
of difficult decisions.

You can find all sorts of self-help
articles about how to boost your will power, including eating more to
overcome low glucose periods of the day.  FastCompany magazine even credited President Obama with reducing his decision fatigue by wearing the same suit every day.

Notwithstanding
the best efforts of even President Obama, the demands on public
officials – Presidents/governors/mayors, even legislative bodies – to
make all kinds of decisions explains a lot of some of the otherwise
inexplicable decisions we’ve observed. 

Are they too suffering from
decision fatigue?

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© 2016 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved

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