How Big Data - and lessons from Obama - swung Senegal’s presidential election

When a United States senator from Chicago decided to run for president, one of his first volunteers was a student from Senegal. They met at a campaign event. “Pleased to meet you, Oumar Ba,” said the senator.During the 2008 campaign, Ba knocked on more than a thousand doors, collecting information from potential voters who would prove decisive in Barack Obama’s victory.

With help from another former Obama staffer — Lex Paulson, a strategist who also advised Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in France in 2017 — Ba recruited more than 4 630 volunteers to knock on doors in every city, town and village in the country, covering each of Senegal’s 552 counties. The volunteers wore no party branding, because that may have scared off people not interested in politics or sympathetic to the opposition.

It was not always easy. Sometimes the data collection volunteers got tired, or lazy, and made up their own answers instead of bothering with going from door to door. These volunteers were swiftly axed by Ba. In other cases, the team had to adapt their usual approach before anyone would speak to them. “In some communities, if you come in with pants and a T-shirt, people won’t listen to you. You have to wear your African outfit. In some communities if you wear short pants people will put you out.

As Ba explained: “If you visit Mohamed today, he talks to you about how it’s important to clean up the neighbourhood because there are too many crimes and so on. Then you go out there and come back two weeks later, and say: ‘Mohamed, I think that’s what we are going to do, that’s a great idea.’ Two weeks later, if Mohamed hears your candidate talking about the same issue, Mohamed knows he has been listened to and he knows we care.

“The opposition was surprised because they didn’t see us coming, they didn’t understand what was happening. And that explains why they failed. Collective intelligence is a killer tool. You can make people with it, or you can wreck people with it.” And in Uganda, autocratic President Yoweri Museveni — in power for 33 years and counting — is so intrigued by the power of Big Data that he recently requested that data specialists in the office of Kenya’s deputy president, William Ruto, travel to Kampala to give his team a crash course on the subject, said a senior Kenyan official.

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