How the race was won

>>> got to round up some votes.

>> all right.

>> and the spotlight tonight how the race was won. on election day team obama had more than 109,000 people canvassing and knocking on doors. more than 200,000 people working the phones including for a short time the president himself. on election day , president obama won 303 electoral votes . florida is still outstanding but the president is leading mitt romney there and if that lead holds team obama will have one all but two of the battleground states that went for bush in 2002 and team obama in 2008 . team romney was shellshocked. we wept into the evening confident we had a good path to victory. i don't think there was one person who saw this coming. romney was shellshocked. those people just don't watch enough msnbc and have never heard of nate silver . team obama was not shocked by tuesday's result. campaign managers who won a bear hug from the president for his efforts said it came down to a laser focus on the battleground ta states. 3.7% compared to 20085.3 showing our advantage in the battleground states . how did the campaign manage to keep better margins in the battleground states ?

>> we got the coop on november 4th on the condition that time not use names and public anything until after election day . in the past month said one official the team had polling data from about 29,000 people in ohio alone. a whopping samp that composed nearly half of one percent of voters there allowing for deep dives into the group. this was a huge advantage when the polls started to slip after the first debate. they could check to see which voters were changing sides and which were not. joining me now. steve , campaigning shall never be the same. i'm going to say 1,800 different e-mails from the obama campaign , i think i stopped falling for that trig early on. i shutter. this worked. this is going to be something that anybody running for office anywhere is going to try to replicate in the years ahead. karen, if you do a big poll in a state like iowa. you will have a sample of 1400 people. here is the obama team with 29,000 people. a sample of 29,000 telling them how they are reacting to different events in the course of the campaign. including debate reaction

>> not that long after the 2004 , 2005 campaign a lot of what both sides were looking at is how do you import some of those tactics. this is like commercial data. this is like the same kind of thing that advertisers do. we are going to have more than ever before. but it is understanding those lists and who your voters are and where they are and what they care about. what issue is it going to take to persuade them and hold them. by knowing that 29,000 they were able to figure out where those shifts were happening and how do we stop it. it is a way to campaign and it starts a year in advance because you start with a larger swath of data and you can then build up the profiles on each of those individuals.

>> the wonderful piece of information that we learned in politico where jim said the signature moment of the campaign came when he ran into a middle-aged woman during a visit to a columbus, ohio field office. i know everyone in my neighborhood the ones that will vote and don't and what it takes to get them. she added they just shipped in a romney staffer a couple of weeks ago. how do you think is going to win around here? steve , that is the story. yes, and a lot of this you have that quote saying that we didn't see this coming. there was an assumption saying that was showing up in the polls. the republicans were saying what they didn't have was the infrastructure in place to bring that into a reality. part of it is they were bogged down in a primary. and part of it too was that is the nature of relying on the religious groups. and they hoped and sort of out sourced the gotv.

>> i'm actually surprised steve , when governor dean became chairman in 2005 , karl rove he used this methodology don't you remember the 72 hour strategy, we developed the under pinnings that became what the obama campaign did and one of the things that is so important about the quote that the woman made, to this day the most effective way to get a vote is a person to person contact. the woman new who needed to contact that person in order to sway their vote. whether it was a neighbor a veteran. or a nurse or teacher. so again this personalized contact with voters on the issues that they care about. knowing where they are and who they are. at the end of the day going back to the old fashioned thing which is talking to people. and somehow the republicans forgot all of that. if i have people putting up yard signs, that is not true in modern campaigned anymore. an obama volunteer has to give them a reason to vote at the same time. karen finny, thank you both very much forg joining me tonight. coming up. the rest of the senators elect need to listen to the one piece of advice i have for them. they need to know the trick of get ago long with their senate colleagues and the trick to getting re-elected. that is coming up and it is just for senators elect. no one else should watch this. that is coming up. i wish