Harper Reed, chief technology officer for U.S. President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, center, speaks to engineer Clint Ecker, right, at campaign headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011. The Obama campagn has hired more than a dozen developers to leverage technology to wring out more votes in what Obama's advisers say may be an election as close as the contested 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Photographer: Joel Kowsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images
But the connection to the campaign's success runs deeper.
The operation's chief technology officer hailed from this working-class city, influencing how, when and where hundreds of thousands of volunteers reached out to voters nationwide.
The Obama supporters who showed up on your doorstep just past dawn or the politically tinged Facebook message from an out-of-state friend you hardly speak with probably came as result of behind-the-scenes work led, in part, by Harper Reed.
He helped build the system that filtered data from a wide array of sources - digital and in paper form - so that the right volunteer knocked on the right door, at the right time, with the right message.
Read more of Andy Vuong's story in the Denver Post.
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