Target Point

White House Salaries

The White House, as required by federal law, has released their annual report to Congress on the salaries of White House staffers.  For the second time, this data has been released as a downloadable, machine readable CSV file.  Because of this I was able to link it back to the previous year’s data.  This means we can see who got raises and promotions.  Here’s a very quick data dump of what I found:

MicroTargeting for Political Campaigns

MicroTargeting is a tool for candidates,and campaigns that helps to answer their most fundamental questions: Who supports my candidate? Where do I find them? How do I persuade others to support my candidate? When should I talk to them? Who should my messenger be? When done right, MicroTargeting answers each of these questions and does it in ways traditional targeting cannot. 

The process works at the crossroads of three related disciplines...

Personal Democracy Forum - Chart Wars

Watch TargetPoint VP give an updated version of his Chart Wars presentation to the crowd at 2010's Personal Democracy Forum, where he does a quick walk through of what he considers to be some of the best political visualizations of the last year...

Who Does the Tea Party Support for President in 2012?

Now that the tea party movement has shown its teeth, everyone seems to be talking about its potential impact on the rest of this year’s elections.

But let's look further ahead to 2012. Using data from our Tax Day Tea Party exit poll, we can get a sense of who the tea party movement favors as a presidential nominee.

Twitter as Pollster

Over at Pollster.com, I've got a piece that digs a little deeper into the recent study by Carnegie Mellon researchers that uses data from Twitter to approximate various measures of public opinion.  

In discussing the implications, I cover a fair amount of ground, but one part in particular merits special attention here on our pages...