More than 4 million people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 did not vote this year. But by applying new voter science, Obama nudged enough replacements in key states -- many who were rare or first-time voters -- to give him his margin of victory (leveraged even larger by the Electoral College).

Years of stealthy multimillion-dollar efforts paid off forAmerica’s left in the 2008 and 2012 victories by President Barack Obama. Using new voter science to get rare and first-time voters to go to the polls, the races have changedAmerica’s electorate -- those who make the country’s decisions by showing up and voting.

Aided by $5 million minimum from George Soros, plus millions more from others, at least two secretive institutions were created to enable this effort by focused research on behavioral science. Their results are made available only to liberals and their causes.

Those are findings from writer Sasha Issenberg. In an interview with me on my “Istook Live!” radio program, Issenberg put a special spotlight on the Analyst Institute (AI), which he has called “a firm quietly founded in 2007 by AFL-CIO officials and liberal allies.”

The AI has been quietly stacked with behavioral scientists, mostly PhDs or PhD candidates from Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale,Princeton, andDartmouth(with Notre Dame andUniversityofChicagothrown in for good measure). They coordinate with market researchers for various commercial products. AI materials brag that the Institute supports “a community of 400 data analysts and related professionals in collaborating and sharing their findings through monthly Analyst Group meetings and retreats.”

Issenberg’s book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns details more history, as do his articles written for Salon.com.

As Issenberg told me, “The big leap in the last five or six years has come from Democrats looking to commercial markets. Campaigns are able to see in the real world what is pushing voters to change their behavior.” He says this has reversed the advantage that Republicans had enjoyed after 2004 when they began using micro-targeting to categorize voters.

The progressive cause’s analysts look for “sweet spots in the electorate,” gathering as many as 1,000 points of data on each voter, far more than in most surveys.

Although not made public, the findings are shared with the other special organization that Issenberg explains was created to apply the research. This is Catalist, headed by longtime Democrat operative Harold Ickes, a former deputy chief of staff in the Bill Clinton White House.

Catalist’s website describes its mission: “To provide progressive organizations with the data and services needed to better identify, understand, and communicate with the people they need to persuade and mobilize.”

Their website, http://www.catalist.us, identifies 237 clients, including more than 50 Members of Congress, Planned Parenthood, Rock the Vote, the Democratic Governors Association, AFL-CIO, Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Human Rights Campaign, ACLU, Emily’s List, Sierra Club, Families USA -- basically the entire inner circle of the Left.

Catalist helps its clients to apply the research done by the Analyst Institute...

Issenberg told the radio audience:

“The Obama campaign wrote a $22,000 check every month to the Analyst Institute; it looked like a consulting contract the same way they would pay a media consultant to make their ads. The Analyst Institute was consulting with them on how to run experiments and had a full-time staff member stationed in Chicago…So it serves all the sort of functions and the intellectual culture of the left of a think tank but has all the secrecy that a consulting firm would…They don’t have to actually show who their investors are or any sort of audit.”

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