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Teddy Goff ’07: Obama’s digital guru schools the oldsters.

By the staff | 11:49am December 06 2012

“One area we should freak out about is technology,” a Republican campaign manager says. “The GOP is far behind there.”

Introducing Teddy Goff ’07, the Obama campaign’s digital director and part of the reason for the Republican freakout. Appearing at a recent Harvard Institute of Politics conference on the 2012 campaign—along with the aforementioned GOP operative and a slew of other politicos—Goff dished about how the Obama team used social media to track down “those people who simply otherwise couldn’t be reached”: 18-to-29-year-old voters who had been identified as supporters but for whom the campaign had no phone numbers. They found an astonishing 85 percent by enlisting fans of the Barack Obama Facebook page to reach out to their friends.

Yalie Zeke Miller ’11, writing at Buzzfeed, calls the powwow “Republicans Go to Obama School” and reports that the Romney campaign tried to hire Goff away. Meanwhile, another Obama campaign staffer tells the story behind Goff’s role in tweeting the famous Election Night hug photo—shot by campaign photographer Scout Tufankjian ’00 in Iowa earlier this year.

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