At Slate, Sasha Issenberg describes Mitt Romney’s unconventional, data-driven strategy for winning Iowa:

In the end, Romney was able to carry the caucuses without assembling much of the heavy apparatus the media typically validate as a “ground game” or “organization”—the congeries of campaign offices, phone banks, field staffers, and phalanxes of volunteers—whose primary objective for much of the pre-caucus season is to maintain a dynamic census of potential caucus-goers. Romney maintained that census through statistical work and new technology, all built on having survived a dry run four years ago in which a profligate Romney spent $10 million on an embarrassing second-place finish.
Confident in what his data was telling him about his chances in the caucuses, Romney spent his final days in the state this year quoting from patriotic songs while rarely drawing any contrasts with his opponents. “We weren’t as concerned with persuasion as we were last time,” says Michael Meyers, a data analyst who with his partner Alexander Gage has advised Romney for the past decade. “We spent a lot more time ensuring we could turn our people out.”

Issenberg elaborates on how Meyers and Gage drew on best practices from the commercial world to create a new, more cost-effective method of activating supporters and persuading fence-sitters:

Instead of trying to win over potential Romney voters with broadcast or online ads, conspicuous direct mail, or cultivating media coverage, the campaign used a new tool to narrowly target potential 2012 voters. So-called tele-town halls would ring an individual voter’s phone with a recorded message inviting him or her to participate in a conference call with the candidate. When a voter chose to participate, an automated prompt would ask for the same information that would be solicited by volunteer ID calls: who a voter supported, how likely they were to caucus. Romney’s team was able to put together different universes for each. Supporters would be invited to “friends and allies” calls (in one, Romney assuaged those made uneasy about attacks on his health care record). Persuasion targets who were modeled to care about the economy were invited to hear Romney introduce his jobs plan; those concerned about immigration were alerted to a call with Arizona sheriff Paul Babeu, a Romney surrogate.
The tele-town halls proved popular—often tens of thousands of voters would listen in—and, at only pennies each, fused a persuasive medium like a radio ad or a candidate visit with the ability of automated survey calls to measure response. Most of the Republican caucus campaigns used these tele-town halls to inexpensively reach voters spread out geographically, but they had a particular value to Romney as he tried to add voters who hadn’t been with him in 2008. The tele-town halls allowed him to make his case to targeted groups of Iowans on specific issues without raising media alerts that he was aggressively contesting the state.

We’ll soon what other tricks the various Republican campaigns have up their sleeves.