Obama Campaign's Vast Effort to Re-Enlist "08 Supporters Daniel Borris for The New York Times Inside a Chicago office complex, Obama aides sift through reams of data about supporters. CHICAGO - With a "chief scientist" specializing in consumer behavior, an "analytics department" monitoring voter trends, and a squad of dozens huddled at computer screens editing video or writing code, the sprawling office complex inside One Prudential Plaza looks like a corporate research and development lab - Ping-Pong table and all. There may always be a role for campaign buttons, but inside the Prudential Plaza building, the Obama re-election team is taking a much more high-tech approach. But it is home to the largely secret engine of President Obama's re-election campaign, where scores of political strategists, data analysts, corporate marketers and Web producers are sifting through information gleaned from Facebook, voter logs and hundreds of thousands of telephone or in-person conversations to reassemble and re-energize the scattered coalition of supporters who swept Mr. Obama into the White House four years ago. Mr. Obama has already begun reprising his election-style appearances of 2008, attacking Republicans and defending his record as he did in a White House press briefing on Tuesday. And his team is ready to begin a major election-year advertising blitz at a moment's notice once the Republican nominating contest appears to be drawing to a close. But a huge part of the effort here is dedicated to less flashy yet potentially vital behind-the-scenes work to address some of Mr. Obama's more hidden political challenges. Many of the small donors who gave early and often in 2008 have failed to rematerialize, (though officials say that with new donors and increasing enthusiasm they have no doubt that they will at least raise the $750 million they did then). Some of the volunteers who went to work enlisting friends and neighbors have been turned off by unmet expectations and the hard realities of partisan Washington, though the Republican attacks on Mr. Obama this year have helped bring some back into the fray. And, campaign officials say, they have literally lost track of many reliable Democratic voters, particularly lower-income people who have lost their homes or their jobs or both, and can no longer be reached at the addresses or phone numbers the campaign has on file. So Mr. Obama's re-election team is sifting through reams of data available through the Internet or fed to it by its hundreds of staff members on the ground in all 50 states, identifying past or potential supporters and donors and testing e-mail and Web-based messages that can entice them back into the fold. Campaign officials said the Republican fight for the nomination had bought them critical time to develop their campaign machinery. They have been carefully tracking the comments of Mitt Romney and his rivals, holding a news conference Wednesday, for instance, where they sought to portray Mr. Romney's performance in the Super Tuesday nominating contests in the most negative light possible. But for now, "that is a side show," Jim Messina, the campaign manager, said in an interview. The president's re-election base here looks more like a company than a campaign. For the last year, an office that appears nearly as long and as wide as a football field has steadily grown, with more than 300 workers now sitting bunched together. The campaign declines to say how many additional employees are posted in offices across the county, but a payroll of $3 million in January suggests the staff is larger than any ever assembled for a presidential race. Having spent $48 million already, the campaign invested heavily in its effort to find and reconnect with past donors and volunteers, as well as identify potential supporters, and to entice them all to engage, through small donations, say, or by volunteering for one of the thousands of neighborhood "teams" the campaign is seeking to build across the nation. For instance, with the help of Web developers recruited from the private sector, it has dedicated considerable hours creating technology that can make its Web site, barackobama.com, fit perfectly onto any screen, be it an iPhone, Blackberry or Droid - a seemingly small detail that campaign officials say can make a huge difference when it comes to enticing donors or volunteers to stay connected or click a "donate" button.