The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
Sasha Issenberg
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0307954803
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
UPDATED FOR THE 2016 ELECTION
The book Politico calls “Moneyball for politics” shows how cutting-edge social science and analytics are reshaping the modern political campaign.
Renegade thinkers are crashing the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. We’ve seen it in sports, and now in The Victory Lab, journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the hidden story of the analytical revolution upending the way political campaigns are run in the 21st century.
The Victory Lab follows the academics and maverick operatives rocking the war room and re-engineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions. Armed with research from behavioural psychology and randomized experiments that treat voters as unwitting guinea pigs, the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do. Issenberg tracks these fascinating techniques—which include cutting edge persuasion experiments, innovative ways to mobilize voters, heavily researched electioneering methods—and shows how our most important figures, such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, are putting them to use with surprising skill and alacrity.
Provocative, clear-eyed and energetically reported, The Victory Lab offers iconoclastic insights into political marketing, human decision-making, and the increasing power of analytics.
professionals. “Their job is to run government,” says Mellman. “They certainly aren’t immersing themselves in the tactics and techniques of campaigning, and nor should they.” Meanwhile, the candidate sits atop an evanescent multimillion-dollar business that has only one goal: market share on a single Tuesday. Election outcomes end up being treated as their own measure of political success, even though everyone involved knows that the final tally is shaped by factors both bigger and smaller than
personal portraits of an American with a new brushstroke of data. While civil libertarians chafed at companies buying and selling personal consumer information, some of the most valuable details came from government itself. Bureaucratic applications, for gun licenses and construction permits, could say a lot about how much money someone had and how he or she spent it. With Acxiom’s individual dossiers, Gage realized, he could finally design clusters that were unmoored from geography. The
important force in nineteenth-century politics, which Merriam knew intimately: by keeping the Union intact, the Republican Party had earned his father’s undying fealty, which he passed down to his son. During the 1896 election, Charles and his brother teased their father for being so reliant on Republican Party doctrine that they joked he had to go to the train depot in their small Iowa town and wait for the newspapers to arrive before he could be sure of what he believed. When Charles got to
the oncology ward of a local children’s hospital. Most of Rogers’s fellow patients were much younger kids, and he kept a distance from them, and from the Happy Meals and video games their presence drew. Rogers further rebelled against the frivolity by proudly refusing to watch television and choosing instead, for the first time in his life, to read for pleasure. The first book he picked was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, which led him to other works of American transcendentalism. By the next
identify precincts with the best combination of young populations and Republican performance. It was in many ways a classic Gimpel subject: his specialty was political geography, with a focus on the spatial dimension of campaigns. His work with the RNC gave Gimpel access to the party’s national voter database, making him one of the rare political scientists comfortable with the same tools that campaign operatives used. None of the four academics who had signed on with Perry expected that they