Every morning when Barack Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina turned on his computer, he saw a snapshot of the state of the race. Campaign software engineers had built him a dashboard that showed how many doors volunteers had knocked on the night before, how many phone calls they had made, how much money had been raised, and what was moving on Twitter and other social networks. It also included a feed of traditional news feeds. “That allowed me to get a good sense in the morning of what was going on in our world.” Messina says it was about 10 days before Election Day when he looked at those numbers and the early-vote tallies that he began to smile. “That’s when I started to feel pretty good. I looked at the numbers and we were crushing it out there.”
—Jim Messina offers his tips on how Barack Obama’s campaign team beat Mitt Romney. - Slate Magazine