Big Brother likes this
Osceola Country, Fla. It’s a small part at the centre of that most southern U.S. state and, according to the eminent authority Wikipedia, was named for a Seminole leader whose name, oddly enough, translates into Black Drink Cry.
Its largest city, Kissimmee, is similar in size to Prince George at about 60,000 strong and is, unfortunately, notable as the birthplace of A.J. McLean of the Backstreet Boys.
It’s the place that could one day change how you vote before you know it.
In the nifty parlance of U.S. election speak, Osceoloa is part of the I-4 corridor, for the highway that connects the handful of counties a presidential candidate must sway if he (or she in the case of Hillary Clinton) is to capture Florida.
Take Florida and the candidate, in the most recent case Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, has secured one of the biggest of the handful of so-called swing states that ultimately decides becomes president. It’s a nail in the shoe of the horse for want of whether the battle is won or lost.
Now, two weeks ago, the aforementioned Romney was supposed to beat the aforeelected Obama in Florida.
Instead, the president overtook his Republican challenger by around 74,000 votes out of 8.27 million cast, 50 to 49.1 per cent.
Here’s what really pains Republicans. In 2004, George W. Bush took the county, before Obama claimed it for the Democrats in 2008 with 59,962 votes over McCain’s 40,086.
Two weeks ago, Obama won it again, only this time he captured 67,717 votes – over Romney’s 40,561 – taking 7,280 more ballots this time around. Where did they come from? All told the county provided about 37 per cent – 27,156 votes – of Obama’s margin of victory in Florida.
It’s a result that the New York Times said “stunned Mr. Romney’s aides on election night, as they saw voters they never even knew existed turn out in places like Osceola Country.” And it wasn’t just in Florida. George W. Bush political mastermind turned Fox News shill Karl Rove ended up screaming like a Cossack being slowly crushed by a tank because he couldn’t understand how the networks had called Ohio for the president.
But ABC News pointed out why Rove and the Republicans had it so wrong – the rural votes they were counting on that hadn’t been tallied numbered 150,000 while the untallied urban votes Democrats were waiting on came to a massive 750,000.
It turns out the Republicans weren’t just fighting hope, change and whatever but perhaps the most sophisticated campaign war engine modern democracy has ever seen.
What happened in Osceola County was “baked-in,” to use another hipster trope of this latest U.S. election cycle, far before Nov. 6, 2012.
Part of it is demographics – Romney’s anti-immigration stance cost him among a Hispanic population that made up 46.3 per cent of the area. But it was old-fashioned organization that proved his undoing – according to Bloomberg, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 59,652 to 40,486 in 2008; in 2012, the margin was 71,197 to 43,588.
“It’s one thing to say you are going to do it; it’s another thing to actually get out there and do it,” said one Republican official.
Republicans are supposed to outorganize Democrats – they’ve got the grassroots, Christian-powered support while the Dems rely on callow youth and broken unions.
But while the Republicans, according to Slate, were stuck matching voter rolls to church membership lists (“Pretty much what we did in 2000,” said one Bush organizer), Obama’s campaign, according to the Times, “recruited a team of behaviourial scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters.”
No doubt other factors – the Republican’s draconian social policies, Romney’s back-of-the-napkin economic plan, the president’s incumbent position – played strongly into the Obama win. But one of the emerging themes of Obama’s re-election, from The Economist to Slate to The Guardian to – most notably – Michael Scherer’s piece in Time, is the president’s digitally-engineered, crowd-sourced, cloudcomputed, quant-generated campaign.
Or, to paraphrase Darth Vader, this technological terror he’s constructed.
The Obama cybercampaign started with the database, which took all of the information the campaign had from 2008 – from polls, donor lists, emails, and door-to-door canvassing – but was stored in different places, and consolidated it in one place.
That vast pool was then wired and tapped with a variety of gadgetry, such as Dashboard, which let individual volunteers record data, canvas and receive instructions direct from the campaign and, most notably, Facebook.
According to the Guardian, Facebook encompassed 40 million U.S. users in 2008; in 2012, it was 160 million, almost the entire American voting public.
With Facebook’s growth also came new tools, including the ability to access, through Obama’s 25 million Facebook friends, the personal history, interests, thoughts, and contacts of voters.
With the help of computer models, Internet tracking cookies, and constant experimentation from teams of scientists and researchers, the campaign could tailor its message, whether by TV, text or tweet, with unprecedented precision.
It enabled the campaign to raise close to $1 billion in donations, a historical first; to identify and register Democrat voters, like the ghosts of Osceola; use people’s friends or people with similar interests to make direct contact with prospective voters; and harness volunteers to churn out the vote county-bycounty, precinct-by-precinct.
“This is the Moneyball of politics,” said one Obama techie to the Guardian.
“If you can figure out how to leverage the power of friendship, it opens up incredible possibilities.” Did it make a difference? Obama won the popular vote, according to The Economist, by 2.4 per cent, the lowest of any re-elected president, overcoming a disasterous first debate performance and the highest unemployment rate of any Oval Office winner since FDR.
It’s a campaign for a Brave New World –a silent, innocuous background process composed of hundreds of millions of i’s, all individually dotted instantly, constantly, collectively. But is it necessarily healthy? Remember The Dark Knight, when Batman created a machine that tapped into every cellphone in Gotham City and turned them into his personal surveillance devices as well as high-frequency sonars that allowed the caped crusader to virtually image the entire city?
It’s ludicrous and quaint next to Obama’s device, which allows the president to track, profile and engage hundreds of millions of people in real time.
“Beautiful, unethical, dangerous,” is how Lucius Fox describes Batman’s machine. “This is wrong. This is too much power for one person.”
Batman had the common sense to destroy his machine. Obama isn’t that kind of superhero. Orwell got it almost right. Big Brother isn’t just watching – he’s smiling and making friends in Osceola Country, in Florida, across the entire United States.