How did Sarah Jessica Parker end up hosting a fundraiser for President Obama's re-election campaign? It wasn't because the first lady liked "Sex and the City." A Time piece reveals that the Obama camp used intense data crunching to decide just about everything, down to how to reach women under age 35 in Miami-Dade County and which celebrity should host a dinner contest.

The number crunchers knew they'd had a huge fundraising success with George Clooney. "Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49," Time reports. "The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney -- and Obama."

The campaign wanted to repeat that success on the East Coast. The crunchers went to work mining the data they'd collected, stored and analyzed for the past two years, looking for the perfect East Coast celebrity to appeal to the same demographic. "We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options," a senior campaign adviser told Time, "but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker."

Parker hosted the next "Dinner with Barack" contest at her West Village brownstone.

h/t: TIME Magazine