Marc Ambinder has a good post detailing the "hows" of the Obama operation. Not why did it win, but what was it's strategy. As always with these things, it's a bit hard to say how much the ground game and the smart tactics and the early voting accounted for. Maybe not that much. But maybe a lot. And what comes trough extremely clearly is what an empirical, data-driven organization this was. Usually, post-election recaps have a lot of strategists patting themselves on the back for the brilliant lines they thought up and the resonant rhetorical approach they tapped into. But that's now what we're seeing in the Obama retrospectives. Rather, we're looking at a tremendous operation that was not primarily focused on the soft arts of politics -- great attack ads and messages and news cycle wins and so forth - but on the hard and quantifiable data points of elections. It was a Sabermetrics campaign. And the question now becomes whether such an orientation can be used in governance. The same data that helps you win districts should help you pressure congressmen from those districts and the same technology that lets your precinct captains build field organizations should be applicable to a grassroots effort in service of legislation.
