The Playbook

Going Inside the Cave

Patrick Ruffini

Posted in on Dec 20th, 2012

In the immediate aftermath of the 2012 presidential campaign – like any campaign – two things happened: the winners went to bragging and the losers started pointing fingers. One thing became clear. Obama for America’s digital, technology, and analytics teams were indispensable in securing the president’s reëlection.

OFA was, far and away, the most sophisticated political organization on the planet. And Republicans needed to learn from them. So we set about gathering insights, data, and anecdotes from hundreds of news articles, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and presentations. Our findings have been collected and organized into a single slide deck called Inside the Cave, which you can download here.

The Cave is what OFA called the windowless room that housed their analytics team. Like digital in 2008, analytics came of age in the 2012 campaign. OFA’s analytics team had 50 staffers. By comparison, the Romney-Ryan campaign had a data team of 4 people.

Veterans of OFA have been surprisingly forthcoming in providing details on how they leveraged the latest in technology and digital strategy to make their campaign as effective and efficient as possible.

In 2016, Republicans can’t afford to fight the battles of 2012. We have to look forward to the future and start preparing now.

Inside the Cave is required studying for anyone involved in electoral politics. Download it now.

  • Porter

    Thank you for making this. It will be very helpful. We should put that kind of effort and technology to work for advancing civilization and liberty, not for enslavement.

    [Reply]

  • TechFTW

    Thanks – a great and in-depth slide deck. Very fitting that the side that believes in science and technology made the best use of it.

    [Reply]

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  • Kristine

    very illuminating – thnx for sharing!

    [Reply]

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  • http://twitter.com/GeneSchwimmer Gene Schwimmer

    Very helpful to us Republicans to show that technology can trump ideas – we had all of the latter, but the Democrats had much more of the former. Next time, thanks to up-and-comers such as Cruz and Rubio, we will have both.

    [Reply]

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