THE ELECTION RECYCLE CAMPAIGN TECH NEEDS R&D, NOT CONSTANT DO-OVERS

摘要

It was late November 2008, and Dan Wagner's post-Election Day high was wearing off. Just a few weeks before, the Obama for America team had gotten their guy elected, and people like Wagner, a member of the analytics staff, were getting a whole lot of credit. Headlines hailed Obama's campaign as the most digital-savvy in history. For Wagner, winning felt good. 1 But weeks after the Election Day rush, as Wagner was lying in bed in Michigan, a crushing realization hit him: Every tool he had built, every algorithm he had written, all the work he had done was about to spend the next three years rotting at the bottom of a code base in Chicago. "It was pretty brutal," Wagner says. "The incredible contribution that dozens of engineers and analysts made was just lost overnight."