Nate Silver is helping me out

Self proclaimed libertarian/liberal Nate Silver is helping me out.  The man who has had an extremely successful political prognostication record is aiding me in my Yahoo football pool.  Not directly or personally, but via his Five Thirty Eight NFL prediction lab.  Silver's initial forays into notoriety were as a baseball analyst.  Let's face it, sports statistics are powerful tools, just as political statistics are.

Predictive analytics are a wonderful field and so powerful in being able to effectively predict many things.  While our political alignments are not synchronous, I really respect Silver's analytic abilities.  

And when it comes to football, where I previously used to use a model I had created to predict winners (albeit an unsophisticated model), and I did pretty well, I have not kept it up and have regressed to a feel-based approach with some rudimentary analysis appended to it.  Silver's picks year to date have outperformed my fairly significantly; so why not leverage his insights, I figure?

Go Packers. Maybe.

Romney's right, but don't run Mitt.

Is Mitt Romney thinking of running in 2016, or is this just trying to help the Republican party take down Hillary Clinton, whom almost everyone on the right feels would be a disastrous follow-up to an Obama presidency?  It could be either, but it's just good to see him out there making this point.

Romney, asked about President Barack Obama's foreign policy towards Russia, pivoted to mock Clinton, Obama's former secretary of state, for presenting a literal "reset button" to Russia's foreign minister in 2009. Relations between the U.S. and Russia have since sharply deteriorated.

"I worry about the country," Romney said. "The president got those things wrong. Unfortunately he underestimated Russia. This whole 'reset policy' with Hillary Clinton — smiling ear from ear, pressing a red reset button — I think is one of the most embarrassing incidents in American foreign policy."

In July, Clinton defended the "reset" policy, insisting it worked at the time.

"The reset worked," Clinton said, according to CNN. "It was an effort to try to obtain Russian cooperation on some key objectives while Medvedev was president."

Hillary's simply dead wrong on her assessment and even she probably realizes it.  Kudos to Romney for calling it out.

I don't know that Mitt Romney would have made a good president but America right now needs a CEO type president - one who can make things happen.  Romney certainly would have handled things far better than Obama has done, but that's a low bar.  It's good on him for calling out things like this.  But I think Romney's opportunity is passed.  His effectiveness as a CEO is in question because he's not adapting to new circumstances the way a good CEO does.  It was proved when he lost to Obama by not leveraging the power of analytics in his campaign.  Had he done so, he would be the one facing down Putin and ISIS now.

Perhaps he'd make a good Secretary of something under a different Republican president.

Hey Republicans, get this wrong and you will keep losing

I have been arguing for years that one very important place where Republicans keep getting their hats handed to them by Democrats is in the realm of advanced analytics and data modeling. Modeling has been used to do everything from effectively predicting successful wine vintages without even tasting the product, to predicting which consumers will respond to which marketing offers, to diagnosing disease, to helping Obama maximize his 2012 presidential campaign spending by working the get out the vote effort in key swing districts far more effectively than Mitt Romney did with his campaign.

Advanced analytics represents the future of just about everything. Have you heard the Big Data buzzwords floating around your corporate office? Big data is a marketing term describing basically analytics. I know. I've been working in analytics for over 15 years. There is true power in what mathematics can do. It's been shown in physics, in computer science and other sciences - mathematics is power.

One of the big problems with the GOP, is they are still, two elections of Obama later, slow to grasp this power. They are still working behind the curve. Yes, outreach is important. Yes crafting a message that connects with voters is vital. But without the power of advanced analytics, the GOP is going to keep losing in the key battlegrounds because they don't even know where those battlegrounds are.

I'm not alone in my thinking on this, thankfully. But are the GOP listening at all?

Marketing Logic and the GOP

In my non-blogging life, I work in direct marketing, using databases and sophisticated models and customer segmentation to best target - well, junk mail and telemarketing campaigns among other things. In that regard, you develop knowledge about how to maximize the benefit of your efforts. You test theories and you constantly try to improve on your results through the use of post analysis using statistical methods and an understanding of the business and the marketplace.