Earlier this year I posted a blog titled “Hardwiring and the Hard Sell.” It discussed the possibility of integrating statistically predicted genetic tendencies with demonstrated past behaviors to create a powerful, highly specific marketing tool. I closed with the following, cautionary observation

“Consumer profiling on this level might appear to be a marketer’s dream, but carry it forward to the political arena and it becomes a potential nightmare. Political parties have long based their election strategies on what they believe we want to hear; imagine them being able to shape their messaging on an individual basis. Joe McGinniss wrote The Selling of the President 1968 to explore the profound effect that television had on the Kennedy-Nixon race for the White House; the digital media sequel is waiting to be written.”

Sitting, as we are, amid the political rubble of the most expensive presidential campaign in U.S. history, the above passage seems to be a lot less speculative. It was no accident that Obama squeaked by Romney by less than 3% of the popular vote, but won by a landslide of nearly 62% of the votes in the Electoral College. While the Republicans dumped bushels of Super-PAC dollars into traditional advertising and campaign techniques, the Democrats concentrated on sophisticated data mining techniques; behavioral research; and boots-on-the-ground, grass-roots work by local volunteers.

It isn’t that the Romney campaign didn’t employ data mining in their strategies. They just didn’t seem to know how to use the information most effectively. Obama’s people were able to go down to the level of the individual voter to determine who were on-the-fence voters, first-time voters, and Obama supporters with poor voting habits. They reached out to them directly with hyper-local staging hubs and a corps of volunteers that signed up for 700,000 shifts of knocking on doors during the four days leading up to Election Day. Not just any doors, mind you, but the right ones.

The Democrats were also adept at putting their time and money where they would be most effective – particularly in the swing states, which they essentially swept. It’s been reported that Obama’s people modeled Election Day variables with 66,000 computer simulations each day, just to determine how best to use their resources. They succeeded at getting undecided voters to choose Obama; getting new, Obama-leaning voters registered; and encouraging Obama supporters to get out and vote.

While I don’t have the numbers, my gut feeling as a New Yorker was that Romney’s TV spots outnumbered Obama’s by at least three to one. Obama still carried the state by 62.6% of the vote, as both parties knew he would from the start. The Democrats did not spend their money preaching to the choir; they were busy ensuring victory in the all important swing states.

I’ve heard it referred to by the press as “political moneyball.” Actually, it’s really just solid marketing in the digital age, and it mirrors what good marketing and advertising firms try to do for their clients.

There is a deeper issue here, however. To put it in marketing terms, it’s the question of the Republican “business model” and the need for it to change.

Look at the election map and you’ll see that the red states are primarily in the Old South and the Midwest, where the white male and evangelical Christian votes dominate. As we found out on November 6th, you can no longer win a presidential election by focusing on them, because they no longer represent a sufficient number of electoral votes. It will not be good enough to try to copy the strategies and tactics the Democrats employed for marketing the presidency without acknowledging fundamental changes in the “marketplace”. No amount of marketing and advertising could have kept Netflix and Redbox from eating Blockbuster’s lunch.

Decades ago, the Republicans did a brilliant job of converting the staunchly Democratic South of my youth into a bastion of Republican power. Can they now reinvent themselves in order to present a more marketable product in 2016? For those of us in the marketing and advertising business, it should be a lot of fun to watch.