Presidential campaigns aren't what they used to be. No longer do candidates like Mitt Romney and Barack Obama solely rely on getting the vote by their campaigns going door-to-door with a list of registered voters who they hope to mobilize for their cause based on party registration. Statistics, data, and technology have changed the game entirely, according to author and journalist Sasha Issenberg.

"Now databases have gotten so good in politics that every time a campaign is contacting you - every time a committee person or ward leader or a volunteer is knocking on a door asking you, 'Do you plan to vote?' 'Who do you plan to vote for?' and what issues are important to you - that information is not getting thrown out on a clipboard at the end of the year but is sticking around," says Issenberg. "Now there are thousands of data points on each voter."

"Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns," by Issenberg explores the new science behind campaigning. The book Politico calls "Moneyball for politics" shows how cutting-edge social science and analytics are reshaping the modern political campaign.

Brave new strategists are shattering the long accepted wisdom of political scientists and old guard campaign managers and establishing a new political era where the key to success is always buried in the data. "The Victory Lab" tells the story of the analytical revolution upending the way political campaigns are run in the 21st century.

With research results from behavioral psychology and randomized experiments that treat voters as "unwitting guinea pigs," the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do, according to Issenberg.

"You can run these complex statistical models, basically algorithms, that will give campaigns the confidence that they can predict ... to a percentage probability - how likely you are to vote, who you're going to vote for, and what issues you're likely to care about," says Issenberg.

Revolution has arrived, Issenberg says, because "all of a sudden people in politics realized, 'Wait, we can go and measure what we're doing - we can disentangle cause and effect.'"

But the analytical movement in politics wasn't met without resistance. A passage from Issenberg's book finds political consultant Alexander Gage presenting his new data targeting system to Mitt Romney's 2002 gubernatorial campaign.

Gage had combined consumer records with political voting history to identify potential Romney supporters among nontraditional Republican voting blocks. Gage thinks his work is revolutionary, possibly a first for research, period. But just as he completes his presentation, Romney's deputy campaign manager Alex Dunn raises his hand and deadpans: "You mean you don't do this in politics."

"The Victory Lab" is numbers heavy and full of political experiments that drive the way modern campaigns run. An especially relevant anecdote tells the story of Michigan political consultant Mark Grebner. In 2005, Grebner collaborated with two political scientists from Yale who were interested in finding new ways to motivate people to vote.

One experiment involved sending voters a copy of their recent voting record and those of their neighbors, along with a promise to repeat the disclosure (all based on publicly available information) after the election. That threat increased voter turnout by 20 percent.

According to Issenberg, for proof of analytics' hold on modern campaigning, look in your mail this month.

"I would look at the mail you get and try to deduce why somebody is sending it to you and think about if their assumptions seem right," Issenberg says. "Campaigns are sending you mail because they either think you're very likely to vote, so you're a regular voter, but that you're persuadable - or that you're someone who supports them and they're trying to get out the vote because you don't normally vote.

"If you're someone who votes often and you're a hard Obama supporter or a hard Romney supporter and either campaign is sending you mail, they're doing it wrong, and that probably means there's bad data or bad analysis underneath it."

Issenberg is a columnist for Slate and the Washington correspondent for Monocle.  He covered the 2008 election as a national political correspondent for The Boston Globe, and his work has also appeared in New York, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine.  His first book, "The Sushi Economy," was published in 2007.

"I had a sense of how much data campaigns had about individual voters; there had been plenty of awestruck (and, I now know from my reporting, almost entirely fanciful) stories after the 2004 election about how George W. Bush's team had figured out how to identify Republican voters by knowing that they were more likely to drink bourbon and Coors," said Issenberg in a recent interview with CBS News.

"What I didn't appreciate until well into my reporting was how much about an individual's political attitudes and behaviors campaign analysts thought they could predict from that data," he continued.

"In 2008, the Obama campaign generated individual statistical probabilities for every voter in America - predicting the likelihood that he or she would turn out to vote, would support Obama, would be open to voting for a black candidate for president - and updated them weekly. Basically Obama's targeters thought these predictive-modeling tools had turned them into fortune-tellers. 'We knew who these people were going to vote for before they decided,' the campaign's microtargeting consultant Ken Strasma told me."

"The Victory Lab" is available now.