ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on important aspect of the 2012 presidential campaign. The campaign's department identified key constituencies, their concerns, and their patterns of media usage. The resulting product expanded the population of people that the Obama campaign would target and identified how it could most effectively communicate with them-whether through TV advertising, social media, or personal contact. The efficacy of the fund-raising campaign-through social media and traditional e-mail-provided resources to enable the campaign to compete in any state that it wanted to in the weeks leading up to election day. The Obama campaign's "get out the vote" (GOTV) effort surpassed any presidential campaign in the modern era. The Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 have redefined how presidential campaigns are run. The Romney campaign also had digital research and communications, but far less is known about this aspect of the Romney campaign because most of this work was contracted to consulting and marketing firms.
