The analytics team used four streams of polling data to build a detailed picture of voters in key states. In the past month, said one official, the analytics team had polling data from about 29,000 people in Ohio alone — a whopping sample that composed nearly half of 1% of all voters there — allowing for deep dives into exactly where each demographic and regional group was trending at any given moment. This was a huge advantage: when polls started to slip after the first debate, they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not.

It was this database that helped steady campaign aides in October’s choppy waters, assuring them that most of the Ohioans in motion were not Obama backers but likely Romney supporters whom Romney had lost because of his September blunders. “We were much calmer than others,” said one of the officials. The polling and voter-contact data were processed and reprocessed nightly to account for every imaginable scenario. “We ran the election 66,000 times every night,” said a senior official, describing the computer simulations the campaign ran to figure out Obama’s odds of winning each swing state. “And every morning we got the spit-out — here are your chances of winning these states. And that is how we allocated resources.”

Team Romney has therefore devised a clever app that finds which friends are most likely to be influential on Election Day, given their geography and history of Facebook political activity.

Ref: Inside the Secret World of the Data Cruncher Who Helped Obama Win – The Time
Ref: Wrath of the Math: Obama Wins Nerdiest Election Ever – Wired
Ref: Romney’s New Facebook App Knows Which Friends Are Most Influential – TechCrunch
Ref: Google, Facebook And Twitter Want You To Use Their Election 2012 Web Tools – TPM