Two longish stories about politics that you must read sometime

Today has been a busy one, and so I provide you with two longish bits of reporting/description about the same general topic. Perhaps you can save them for the weekend! Over toast and eggs?

First up: Sasha Issenberg tells us, for Slate, how Barack Obama’s data-management operation has given Democrats a major electoral advantage that Republicans simply can’t match — partly because of cultural obstacles.

Schaeffer attributes the imbalance to the mutual discomfort between academia and conservative political professionals, which has limited Republicans’ ability to modernize campaign methods. The biggest technical and conceptual developments these days are coming from the social sciences, whose more practically-minded scholars regularly collaborate with candidates and interest groups on the left. As a result, the electioneering right is suffering from what amounts to a lost generation; they have simply failed to keep up with advances in voter targeting and communications since Bush’s re-election. The left, meanwhile, has arrived at crucial insights that have upended the conventional wisdom about how you convert citizens to your cause. Right now, only one team is on the field with the tools to most effectively find potential supporters and win their votes.

Meanwhile, for GQ, Reid Cherlin lays out how Obama’s strategy changes depending on the voter. It’s data-management applied to a level never before seen in electoral politics.

The real campaign is startlingly simple: it is the Obama team’s fanatical pursuit, behind the scenes, diagram by diagram, plan by plan, of what politicos call the “base vote.” These are the Democratic leaners who will be deciding not between Obama and Romney, but between voting for Obama and not voting at all. Starting in the spring, the Obama campaign launched elaborate efforts to reach the different communities of such base-voters in every key state: African-Americans, Latinos, women, gay men and women—each is now getting bombarded with tailor-made messaging and organizing. A barbershop and beauty shop program for black voters, for example; visibility at Pride events for LGBT voters; Spanish-language radio ads for Latinos. As a strategy, it’s a rabbit-from-the hat kind of move, trying to pull votes out of nowhere.