The 2012 Obama campaign applied behavioral surplus prediction directly to voter targeting

Evidence

Political correspondent Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times account of the data scientists’ seminal role in the 2012 Obama victory offers a vivid picture of the capture and analysis of behavioral surplus as a political methodology. The campaign knew “every single wavering voter in the country that it needed to persuade to vote for Obama, by name, address, race, sex, and income,” and it had figured out how to target its television ads to these individuals. One breakthrough was the “persuasion score” that identified how easily each undecided voter could be persuaded to vote for the Democratic candidate. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 395

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later Cambridge Analytica coverage and to the general literature on microtargeting elections; also echoes the data-mining danger concerns that follow in the text. — connects to: Personality-based behavioral targeting moved from elections to commercial sales after 2016. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 865; The 2008 Obama campaign profiled over 250 million Americans with behavioral data — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 392; Predictive behavioral surplus proved directly applicable to winning elections — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 391 (+2 more)
• SEED: Angle: the ‘persuasion score’ as a case study of prediction markets applied to civic life — tracing how behavioral surplus migrated from commerce into politics.

Broader Connections

• Behavioral patterns over time best predict political action #expands (0.82) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1185
• PRIZM’s cluster profiles linked consumption habits directly to party voting patterns #expands (0.78) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 607