Politics Transformed: The High Tech Battle for Your Vote is an in-depth look at how digital media is affecting elections. Mashable explores the trends changing politics in 2012 and beyond in these special reports.

A recent Pew Research Center study found that 66% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 in the United States own a smartphone, and smartphone usage among all adults is up 10% year-over-year. Not only that, the number jumps to 68% for people living with household incomes of $75,000 or higher.

Political campaigns, like any organization or business looking to gain supporters, are taking note of these statistics. Both the Obama and Romney camps have revamped their digital strategies to utilize mobile to its fullest potential.

Mobile Politics, an app and website that allows U.S. political candidates to interact with their constituents, estimates that more than 80 million voters in the United States will access political information critical to their decision making process via their smartphones. If accurate, this is more than a 200% increase from the 2008 presidential race.

Whether it's announcing a vice presidential pick or accepting SMS donations, mobile is clearly a major player in this year's election. Here's a look at how the presidential contenders and their digital strategists are working to engage voters through their mobile devices.

Fundraising

"Both campaigns have successfully used their respective mobile apps to inform their supporters of campaign news and polling information," Michael Galloway, co-founder and chief technical officer of Mobile Politics, tells Mashable. But when it comes to fundraising, says Galloway, Obama appears to own the mobile advantage. In August 2012, 98% of the Obama campaign's 1.1 million donors were small-dollar amounts (less than $250) compared to 31% for the Romney campaign. Since mobile donations are generally small amounts, this points to a likely advantage for Obama, at least when it comes to fundraising.

Evidence suggest that supporters are more apt to give the lower the barrier to do so, which is why true SMS donations could be a boon to campaign fundraising efforts.

In late August, the Obama campaign became the first to accept donations via SMS. He beat Romney by about a week. This is a potentially game-changing development, made possible by changes to Federal Election Commission rules in June. Text message donations have been employed by non-profit organizations for years and have proven extremely effective. Following Haiti's devastating earthquake in 2010, the Red Cross raised over $20 million by SMS in about a week, which accounted for close to 19% of all donations to the organization's relief fund for that disaster.

Earlier this year, the Obama campaign tested a more rudimentary version of text-to-give, for supporters who already had credit cards on file. The program reportedly had a 20 times greater response rate than past text campaigns that just directed people to online giving gateways. Evidence suggest that supporters are more apt to give the lower the barrier to do so, which is why true SMS donations could be a boon to campaign fundraising efforts.

The Romney campaign has been playing catch-up the entire election cycle — though often only by a few days — when it comes to mobile fundraising technology. In January, when Obama's camp announced that it would start using mobile payment platform Square for fundraising, Romney's campaign made a similar announcement later that same day.

Square allows any political fundraising team to accept credit cards using a small square-shaped card swiper dongle that plugs into mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, making it very easy for supporters to donate at events.

On the Obama side, all campaign staff and approved volunteers can use the devices, while the Republicans shipped 5,000 Square units to the Republican National Convention to pass out to staff and volunteers. The devices were also used at the convention to accept donations. The Romney campaign won't release any precise numbers about how much it has raised with Square until after the election, but one staffer at a convention campaign store told a Mashable reporter that the readers had been “very, very successful.”

"Square helps streamline the process for campaigns because staffers and volunteers are now able to easily collect contribution information — like names and email addresses — within the application itself, which could save campaigns endless hours of contribution processing operations," says Katie Baynes, a spokesperson for Square.

Apps

Despite the Obama campaign's apparent mobile donor triumph in August, the Romney campaign is hardly inept when it comes to mobile. The team has rolled out a steady barrage of apps this year: With Mitt, Mitt's VP, Romney-Ryan and, most recently, Mitt Events.

With Mitt, an iPhone app that allows people to take photos of events, add pro-Romney banners and easily post the images to Twitter and Facebook, is probably the best known, though not for a reason the Romney campaign was probably anticipating. The app infamously misspelled America as "Amercia," a gaffe that quickly went viral. Over time, the digital team added several updates for functionality, features and spelling corrections.

The Mitt's VP app simply announced Romney's choice for his vice presidential candidate. Despite being essentially a one-trick pony, the app was very popular. It had 200,000 downloads within the first 48 hours, and hundreds of thousands thereafter.

“The threshold to download the app is pretty high, relative to people's engagement on a campaign, relative to liking something on Twitter or Facebook."

"I think that the threshold to download the app is pretty high, relative to people's engagement on a campaign, relative to liking something on Twitter or Facebook," said Zac Moffatt, digital director of Romney's campaign. "We wanted to tie that action to something that really provided value, and we thought the VP announcement was that play for us."

The other two apps in the Romney-Ryan collection offer information about the candidates and their events, as well as ways to share content and order tickets to see the candidates speak.

Meanwhile, the centerpiece of the Obama campaign's mobile efforts is the Dashboard tool, the mobile component released earlier this summer. The Dashboard acts a sort of digital desk for supporters and volunteers, where they can search through options for getting involved with the campaign. The tool streamlines online and offline data, integrates existing social networks and localizes information and events according to the user's geographical area.

The team also put out the Obama for America app, which rolled out at the end of July and follows the innovative Obama '08 app from four years ago. It provides information to supporters regarding the president's policies, news, events, community activities, volunteer opportunities and information on how to register to vote.

"As we push through the few weeks [prior to] this election, our focus remains on helping to make grassroots organizing as easy and accessible as possible for the volunteers and supporters that are the heart and soul of this campaign," Adam Fetcher, an Obama campaign spokesperson, tells Mashable. "We’ve designed our online organizing tools to help break down the distinction between online and offline organizing. This isn’t about being flashy — we’re giving people the tools they need to make the biggest possible difference between now and Election Day."

Advertising

Though Obama might be raising more money via mobile, Romney seems to be spending more aggressively on those platforms. Even though mobile advertising as an industry is still in its infancy, both campaigns have dabbled in using mobile to push across paid political messages. However, the Romney campaign appears to have the clear advantage.



Click here to download our entire special report as an e-book. It features exclusive interviews with digital’s political game changers.

The Obama campaign recently made headlines for placing advertisements in Electronic Arts (EA) mobile games — such as Battleship, Tetris and Scrabble, but the Romney campaign has used mobile advertising on Facebook and purchased ads on both Apple's iAds and Google's mobile platforms.

Both campaigns are using Google, but Romney is ahead in his use of iAds and is reportedly also working with Google to target Android users through ads specific to that platform.

"We've done an aggressive amount of advertising," Moffatt said. "We were the first with mobile advertising on Facebook, and I think we're one of the largest advertisers in the world now with Facebook Mobile."

Moffatt told the crowd at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that engagement through Facebook's mobile advertising platform has been much higher than with similar web ads. The Romney camp also used mobile advertising to boost download numbers of its mobile apps.

Mobile: A Campaign Imperative

A month before Election Day, it's unclear whether Obama or Romney will become the president of the United States for the next four years. But there's one thing we already know: Each campaign has set a mobile precedent for future political races.

The candidates' efforts to reach younger and tech-savvy voters over the past several months have proved useful, and perhaps necessary. Both camps have seen success thus far, but only in November will we be able to elect a winner.

Image courtesy of Alex Fitzpatrick Illustration by Bob Al-Greene

More in-depth coverage from Mashable's special politics report: