Messina managed Obama’s 2012 campaign. He is now involved with the main superpac assisting Clinton, Priorities USA Action. He has the lead op ed in today’s New York Times, titled The Election Polls That Matter.
It explains in detail the approach he took to running Obama’s 2012 campaign, where despite some public polling to the contrary, he was confident of the 332 electoral votes Obama eventually won.
In light of reference to what happened with Brexit, and the multitude of polls with which we are being inundated with less than a week in this cycle, he notes that is not just ordinary folks who were worried about the public polls, his candidate did in 2012.
“Gallup has me down by three points, and other polls have me trailing, tied or with a slight lead,” the president said. “Your models have this race basically over. Why are we right and they are wrong?”
The best campaigns don’t bother with national polls — I’ve come to hate public polling, period. In the 2012 race we focused on a “golden report,” which included 62,000 simulations to determine Mr. Obama’s chances of winning battleground states. It included state tracking polls and nightly calls from volunteers, but no national tracking polls.
That “golden report” turned out to be precisely accurate.
Messina also writes
Today, campaigns can target voters so well that they can personalize conversations. That is the only way, when any candidate asks about the state of the race, to offer a true assessment.
Hillary Clinton can do that. To my knowledge, Donald J. Trump, who has bragged that he doesn’t care about data in campaigns, can’t.
Messina provides a wealth of information and explanation of how this works. One things that is key can be seen here:
“Big data” is a buzzword, but that concept is outdated. Campaigns have entered the era of “little data.” Huge data sets are often less helpful in understanding an electorate than one or two key data points — for instance, what issue is most important to a particular undecided voter.
With only a few data points, one can then customize — especially to millennials — a highly personalized “conversation” with individual voters,
like an ad on a voter’s Facebook page addressing an issue the voter is passionate about.
Messina explains the breakdown of the effectiveness of traditional methods of polling, including cellphone only households, people who prefer a language other than English(especially Spanish), that young people are especially hard to reach. All of this presents barriers to getting a representative sample.
He tells us
Smart campaigns can use “little data” to solve these problems. They look at public data sets that list each registered voter’s name, address, party registration and election participation history. By analyzing these voter files, they develop an accurate idea of the makeup of the electorate. Rather than rely on voters’ (frequently inaccurate) estimates of their own likelihood to vote, these campaigns look at their turnout record, thus getting a very precise idea of who “likely voters” really are. The media outlets that conduct national polls usually can’t afford to do this.
Taking this approach, Messina points out, he can break things into much narrower groups — for example, younger Cuban Americans are very different than older Cuban Americans. His campaigns can identify the voters they want to target with far greater specificity.
This leads to a more productive effort in turning-out early voters. He suggests that the relative lack of TV spending in Nevada by the Trump campaign is because they already know the impact of the early voting patterns about which John Ralston comments so frequently. I note that is also explaines why public polls, which do a very poor job of reaching Latino voters, badly underestimated Harry Reid’s performance against Angle in 2010 and are overstating Trump’s performance in this cycle within Nevada.
Messina concludes by writing
As we move into the final days of the 2016 election cycle, the smart money is on the campaigns — like Mrs. Clinton’s — that are leveraging the power of data to find every last vote they can.
Look, I often write about public polls, both national and state, to try to explain what I think is valuable in them and where I think they are problematic. I try to persuade people not to get overly elated by a single positive poll or panicked about a single or even several negative polls.
Many of the data people from Obama’s campaigns are now involved with Clinton’s, or as in Messina’s case with things like Priorities USA or other Democratic efforts. These kinds of efforts are key to the ground game, both for early and absentee voting, and for GOTV on election day itself. It is because the Democrats are so much better than this that I think public polls may understate Mrs. Clinton’s final performance by several percent. It is not that Trump does not have access to such information. He has a data operation based in Texas. But Republicans are still not guided by data the way Democrats are, in part because of Trump’s approach to campaigning. It is another reason I have never wavered in my belief that Mrs. Clinton was going to be our next President.
Go read Messina’s complete piece. It will give you a more complete understanding of why I am so confident.