Keys To Obama Victory, Part XVII

In the language of entertainment awards, these folks were the best supporting actors.

If you read this blog regularly, you've heard of Catalist, the data warehousing company, the National Committee for an Effective Congress, a longtime Democratic targeting firm, Project New West, which works in the West, and the Analyst Institute, which conducted randomized control trials for these groups.

They're the spine of the party, working on the back end, segregating data, segregating demographic groups and providing statistically valid data to election planners. In 2004, Republicans' targeting accuracy contributed to President Bush's victory.

The data released today show that Democrats have clearly caught up.

Looking ahead for Democrats: they'll have to focus on motivating 10,000,000 first-time Obama voters, and maintain and build on Obama gains with higher-income, Western, Hispanic and suburban voters.

Republicans enter 2010 "with a much smaller pool of presidential-year surge voters to pull from," according to the presenters. They need to win back independents who supported Obama, and keep the backing "of lower income white, rural voters who may have not supported Obama, but have supported Democratic governor candidates." 

NCEC's data shows that Republican turnout was depressed across the board...with the exception of a belt of counties reaching through Appalachia, areas across the south were Sen. John Kerry's performance signifiantly exceeded that of Barack Obama's:

According to Catalist data,  even when controlled for county-level demographics, get-out-the-vote activity influenced the vote in favor of Obama -- individual contacts, voter registration efforts and paid media. So did..

From Catalist, counties with new registrant activity and a high number of contracts per voter were more likely to see Obama outperform Kerry's 2004 vote share:

From Project New West, check out net percentage of registered Democrats as compared to the percentage of registered Republicans in Nevada, Colorado and Arizona: 

Todd Rogers of the Analyst Institute used randomized, controlled experiments to assess whether the political activities of organizations like the AFL-CIO lived up to their promises. Mostly, they did: he found that Rock the Vote's text messaging added, on average, about 3.6% to vote totals for a given sample.