National Journal, By Cory Bennett, November 17, 2012
The Political Landscape is a weekly conversation with National Journal writers, editors, and outside experts on the news of the day.
Part 1 of the podcast focused on drone strikes.
Part 2 discussed data mining with New York Times writer Charles Duhigg, author of the book, "The Power of Habit", which revealed how Target, based on tracking customer's shopping habits, figured out that a teen girl was pregnant before her father did. Duhigg will explain what the Obama campaign did with the information gathered by 76 tracking cookies it had on barackobama.com in September, more than Best Buy had in a same period.
The podcast also features
Professor Lisa Garcia Bedolla, who co-authored the book
"Mobilizing Inclusion", which summarizes years of research on what makes for effective get-out-the-vote campaigns. She'll explain why providing voters with information about the candidates and issues may have little impact on voter turnout.
The conventional wisdom has been that the "air war" - the amount of advertising on TV and Radio matters more than the "ground war" - the size of the volunteer pool, said Charles Duhigg. Now the conventional wisdom is that most important factor is the size of the volunteer base.
Other interesting findings are that if you offer people prizes for volunteering, they are actually less likely to volunteer.
Listen to the podcast here.
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