Obama e i data, giù il cappello

Peggy Noonan, opinionista di punta del mondo repubblicano americano e columnist del Wall Street Journal, ha scritto ieri un articolo sul suo giornale intitolato “About Those 2012 Political Predictions” in cui riguarda indietro ai suoi commenti all’anno elettorale e punta il dito sulle cose da lei indovinate e sulle molte errate. Un esercizio giornalistico molto interessante, una di quelle cose che dovrebbero fare tutti gli opinionisti – specie quelli politici – ogni dodici mesi. Fra le molte considerazioni sul Partito repubblicano e sulla sconfitta elettorale di Romney, c’è n’è una molto importante sui democratici, e riguarda lo scetticismo con cui lei per prima (ma non solo lei) accolse le molte notizie che filtravano su uno staff elettorale di Obama certo di vincere per via di uno scientifico lavoro su numeri e dati mai fatto prima, bollando il tutto come meccanico e poco umano. Mi sbagliavo e di grosso, dice la Noonan. Che scrive:

In writing about what struck as the president’s essential aloofness, I said there were echoes of it even in his organization. I referred to a recent hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. “It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’ “

This struck me as “high tech and bloodless.” I didn’t quite say it, but it all struck me as inhuman, unlike any politics I’d ever seen.

It was unlike any politics I’d ever seen. And it won the 2012 campaign. Those “Martians” were reinventing how national campaigns are done. They didn’t just write a new political chapter with their Internet outreach, vote-tracking data-mining and voter engagement, especially in the battleground states. They wrote a whole new book. And it was a masterpiece.

Hats off. In some presidential elections, something big changes, and if you’re watching close you can learn a lesson. This was mine: The national game itself has changed. And it’s probably going to be a while before national Republicans can duplicate or better what the Democrats have done.