Now that the election is over, all kinds of inside stories are starting to work their way out of the tightly controlled Obama campaign headquarters in Chicago. Here, in a video taken last August during a visit President Obama paid to his staff, but just uploaded Saturday, two young staffers, Sara El-Amine (the campaign's national training director) and Matthew Saniie, tell the President how they had gotten engaged during the campaign. It's impossible not to enjoy. We especially liked Obama's instant familiarity with Beyonce, and thought we'd commemorate it for all time with a few .gifs. Read More

A new video from the Obama campaign showing the President letting his guard down and talking openly with his campaign staff in Chicago is taking off on YouTube. It's reminiscent of a similar talk he gave to his team in June 2008, and raises questions about where he may thinking of taking his movement and presidency next. Read More

While Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, math nerd and poll-meister supreme, has gotten a tremendous amount of attention of late for his confident prediction of an Obama victory in tomorrow's election, the largely unwritten story of 2012 includes a different group of math nerds who specialize in figuring out which voters might be persuaded to vote for their candidate and then making sure that they maximize the number of people who actually come out to vote that way. We know very little about their work for two big reasons. First, neither campaign has wanted to tip off their opponent to what they're doing, and second, with just a few rare exceptions, political reporters and their story-assignment editors aren't even looking to find out. But tomorrow is the biggest test yet for their analytic approach to targeting, persuading and turning out voters. Read More

While the presidential campaign appears to have tightened in the polls, in the last month Barack Obama has been trouncing Mitt Romney on YouTube, garnering nearly five times as many views overall. Here's how the two campaigns' strategies with online video differ, and why it matters. Read More

Micah Sifry writes: It's the "'meh'-ing" of the president, says Roger Simon. "The 2012 campaign is the smallest ever," says another headline in Politico. All over the political landscape, signs abound of a dismal political season.

Now the Pew Research Center For the People & The Press is out with a meaty new survey that confirms that voter engagement with the 2012 election is down compared to the campaign of 2008. Last time around, at this point in the race, 63% of registered voters polled said they were "more interested" in the election than previously; that's now dropped to just 48% saying they're more interested than four years ago. That is, one is six registered voters have tuned DOWN their interest in the presidential battle compared to four years ago. Read More

The stats in Mitt Romney's newly released infographic are impressive-looking, but they're actually not that big a deal. A little reverse-engineering of the math embedded in that statement suggests that people are spending about 42 seconds per page view on the Romney site. This is respectable but not particularly high. Jim Pugh, the former director of analytics and development for Organizing for America, told me that "a time of 40 seconds is pretty average for political sites." Read More