The good news? Continued employment for us computer geeks. You don’t have to be for one candidate over the other to appreciate the lessons learned here.
This story tells the tale of the Obama team’s data mining efforts:
How Obama’s data crunchers helped him win
On Nov. 4, a group of senior campaign advisers agreed to describe their cutting-edge efforts with TIME on the condition that they not be named and that the information not be published until after the winner was declared.
What they revealed as they pulled back the curtain was a massive data effort that helped Obama raise $1 billion, remade the process of targeting TV ads and created detailed models of swing-state voters that could be used to increase the effectiveness of everything from phone calls and door knocks to direct mailings and social media.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/tech/web/obama-campaign-tech-team/index.html?hpt=hp_bn5
This story describes the problems encountered by the Romney team’s get-out-the-vote system:
An inside look behind Romney’s loss: An epic failure of its Orca big-data app
The system was designed to identify likely Romney voters who had not yet voted on Election Day, and then get them to vote. But it continually crashed and people didn’t know how to use it.