November 11, 2016 at 12:56AM
"Hillary Clinton's Vaunted GOTV Operation May Have Turned Out Trump Voters" #readingToday

The rise of something we call "small organizing" is a big part of the problem. Small organizing is the product of a complex and ultimately toxic stew that includes professionalization of politics, attempts by the liberal establishment to channel radical impulses of working class people and people of color into incrementalist politics, and the ascendancy of a bipartisan technocratic elite in both parties that has been accelerating the concentration of power in the hands of an increasingly small number of mega corporations and institutions.

In small organizing, a campaign invests in a "big data" approach to narrow the number of people that must be engaged. They do this usually by engaging an expensive consulting firm that relies on predictive modeling, micro targeting, and message testing and segmentation to design a get out the vote program that staff and volunteers then execute.

A focus on big data over people may have backfired.