Mark Blumenthal writes about some of the elaborate analyses done by Catalist and other political consulting firms that helped organize the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote efforts in 2008. Presumably the Republicans will be doing this next time as well. It brings swing-voter targeting to the next level. It would also be interesting to do some multilevel modeling to put together their county- and individual-level analyses (and, soon, their precinct-level analyses). Also it’s worth thinking about how national politics might change as these techniques become more widely used.
I agree that a next step to political modeling will be multilevel analysis combining contact points, with unique individuals, with a geographical boundary such as county, precinct, census block group, media market, etc.
It may also be interesting to experiment with person-aggregators that are not geographically based, although I don't have any specific ones in mind.
Some challenges with a multilevel model are that fewer researchers in the academic community have access to individual level data (although many of the presenters look like they did), and it's a whole lot of data to standardize and incorporate.
Nonetheless, I'd love to see solid research done using multilevel models, and I'm definitely sure that things are moving in that direction. Thanks for the insight.