Tuesday, April 26

US Elections : The one who leverages Big Data will win the elections !

It is said that in 2012, "Obama's campaign began the election campaign knowing the name of each one of the 69,456,000 Americans votes who had voted him to White House."  So Obama knows each American who voted for him! Don't worry, it's not just Obama, by now Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton & all other presidential candidates know a lot about each American voter.

Scary? Well don't blame the candidates, the digital foot print that each one of us leaves every minute of the day creates enough data so that even the dumbest computer with 512mb RAM knows more about you then you can imagine! What you buy, what you read, what you say on social network, what you like and what you dislike, who you associate with, what your mood is morning/noon/night, where you work, what you do, what is your health situation, where you've donated, what clothing styles you like, what car models you buy, your favorite Cola brand, your favorite phone brand, the medicine you buy-- all of that information is available to those with the budget to buy the relevant data & have the algorithms to aggregate and analyze the data. One Super market chain was once rumored to have predicted 'pregnancy of its woman consumers based on their digital footprint and they did not even use the social media data' (think about it when you post personal opinion on social media)

So how do political analyst use this data? Assume you were a soccer mom, a broke- & angry, a comfortable middle-aged guy, etc. Each of those demographic and psycho graphic categories will help decide a campaign target resources. All the candidates need is a team that can use some data crunching and parallel processing software like Haddop along with analytic dashboard to fit you into a category, overlay that to a region, and they have their campaign plan along with 'draft' for the candidate speech that mentions what to cover in the speech and what not to cover.
Using Big Data & Analytics one can identify favorable localities for the candidate, identify the top demand and concerns that matter to the voters of each locality, identify active voters by age group in each locality and that helps define 1/more profiles of the voters of a region which can be used to plan strategy for the campaign. The campaign teams knows what ads to put, what issues to raise in local ads, how to collect funds and what should be the content of the speech.  If they have smart Predictive Analytic software I am sure the presidential candidates know who you are going to vote for even before you have thought about it. Scary but true.
            We used a set of social media data available on the web to find if it comes to Hillary vs Trump showdown who would win. The results were interesting as Donald Trump seemed to have an edge in  Jan 2016 but in 3 months public sentiments seem to have changed and social media favours Hillary Clinton and she could be a clear winner with 20% higher votes if she becomes the democratic nominee!  So if Ms Hillary Clinton' team is using Big Data Predictive Analytics & her team is giving him smart insights to strategize her campaign, which I am sure they are, then Hillary Clinton would be the next US President.  Don't forget you read it here first!

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