Sasha Issenberg: “From a technological perspective, the 2012 campaign
will look to many voters much the same as 2008 did. There will not be a
major innovation that seems to herald a new era in electioneering, like
1996’s debut of candidate Web pages or their use in fundraising four
years later; like online organizing for campaign events in 2004 or the
subsequent emergence of social media as a mass-communication tool in
2008. This year’s looming innovations in campaign mechanics will be
imperceptible to the electorate, and the engineers at Obama’s Chicago
headquarters…may be at work at one of the most important. If
successful, Narwhal would fuse the multiple identities of the engaged
citizen–the online activist, the offline voter, the donor, the
volunteer–into a single, unified political profile.”
“More broadly,
Narwhal would bring new efficiency across the campaign’s operations. No
longer will canvassers be dispatched to knock on the doors of people who
have already volunteered to support Obama. And if a donor has given the
maximum $2,500 in permitted contributions, emails will stop hitting him
up for money and start asking him to volunteer instead.”
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