Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns
All right everybody, Election Day in the United States is just a few days away and I'm here to officially endorse nobody because you should not be trying to get political advice from a podcaster that you like. I'm just a guy who does business and I've made a little bit of money on the internet. That does not make me an expert in politics. However, today's episode is about politics, but not in the way you might expect. I am fascinated by the marketing machine that is underneath political campaigns, regardless of which candidate you're going for, they're spending over a billion dollars trying to persuade people to do a thing. That's how business works too. There's a marketing machine trying to convince people to push a button at the end of the day. And I wanted to understand the science, the tactics, and the persuasion techniques that the different campaigns have used over the years, the best stories about what's actually going on under the hood. And so I invited on a guy named Sasha Eisenberg. He studied this for couple of decades now, and he wrote a book that I thought was really good called The Victory Lab. So I invited him on to come tell us some stories about how the marketing machines underneath political campaigns work. I think it's fascinating.
Enjoy this episode. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's try.
And it seems like there's this thing where, um, this whole industry that gets paid to help politicians get elected. I think it's something like $6 billion a year goes to this group of people whose job is to be marketing machines for political purposes. And when something works, the incentive is to go tell the world how genius you are and how it was your tactic that was the thing that worked. And when it doesn't work, it's like, politician had no charisma, nothing we could do there. Right? They need to deflect in order to survive. When you were writing your book, which is called The Victory Lab, did you, I guess, like, how did you get around that bias? Like, how could you figure out how open were these people in sharing what's actually working and not? And did you have to kind of like read between the lines to try to figure out where are they just sort of grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened?
Yeah, it's one of the most difficult things reporting in this area. So, you know, I was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles. If you go in right now, And you ask the Harris campaign or the Trump campaign or the super PACs working for them, you know, show me exactly how you're testing your ads on online platforms. They are, maybe they will tell you some stuff. They very selectively will leak out stuff if they think it'll help them raise money usually. So you'll read a story in Wired, one story in Wired that's like inside Kamala Harris's ad testing machine. And details are very carefully selected over the course of, you know, during the campaign to give out to one piece that then they can send out when they go out, when she goes to do a fundraising tour in Palo Alto, that can convince a bunch of tech executives that she's running a smart campaign. So during a campaign though, it's very difficult to get real details on what they're doing. They don't want to, the value of impressing their donors is up against not wanting to give away anything to the competition. Right. But after Election Day, the campaign basically ceases to exist. So everybody is onto another job. A lot of them are looking for work or return to their consulting firms or starting new firms, develop some trick or tool during the campaign.
Isn't there some conference where they all go to, like some beach resort area where they go and they all get drunk and start talking?
Yeah, I mean, so there's like a post-election sort of conference circuit where Democrats and Republicans come together to kind of trade notes, but they need to launch a business. I mean, it's basically like every 2 years there's like a new sort of window for startups and especially every 4 years. And so there's a window where they go from being afraid that they will get fired if they talk to a reporter, because if you are caught leaking even the most minor thing inside a Campaign that is, you know, fireable, immediately fireable offense because they don't want anybody but the spokesman or the candidate talking for them. And then 2 days later, they are trying to figure out what they're going to do with the rest of everybody in the campaign is, and so they're starting to take credit for everything they did. So, you know, I remember in 2012, you had this, um, the Obama analytics department, which is really pioneering out that they had like 52, 54 people in this analytics branch at the time was huge. They called it the cave. And these guys, I was reporting throughout the year for Slate at that point and was able to eke out bits of news over the course of the campaign through really judicious reporting. And I would hear stories about the campaign manager summoning people on the analytics department into his office to say, did you talk to Sasha? Because there was some inquest to find out. It was pretty sad. And then the day after, a whole bunch of them basically We're getting Eric Schmidt to launch a firm for them and we're out giving interviews to everybody who wanted and taking credit for a whole bunch of things that probably were not theirs alone to take credit for. And the issue with that campaign is it has a binary outcome, right? One candidate wins and the other one loses. And no one thing ever shapes that outcome. Not traditional things like, you know what, whatever happens on Tuesday, it did not happen because one of the candidates chose the right vice presidential nominee or not. It did not happen just because of the— just because, you know, Harris had a better debate performance than Trump. It did not happen just because turnout was up in Pennsylvania and down in Nevada. It was a confluence of dozens, hundreds of big and small things. And it's, it's a storytelling exercise to see who can basically tell the most convincing story about why the election turned out the way it did. And there are political actors who want to tell that story, right? Like Moderates in the Democratic Party, if Kamala Harris will win, will say because she took moderate positions on this and that. But there are people who from a sort of technical tactical perspective want to, will want to say it's because the TV ads are really persuasive or it's because our social media strategy was so good and you need a good bullshit meter and you know, and then the best way to do that is just really be alert to everybody's incentives for telling certain types of stories and be skeptical of, of of the times where people have a real, obviously transparent agenda. And I think, you know, from a reader's, viewer's perspective, be wary of any sort of monocausal explanation for anything in electoral politics. No one thing did anything, right? Right.
Well, I do think it's fascinating that you, you know, when you're talking about the behavioral change aspect, um, one of the great things any entrepreneur could do is sort of learn from adjacencies. And so basically saying, hey, if we want to win in politics, we could do things that have worked in politics, but maybe there's things that worked in the business world, or, you know, Cialdini wrote that book, you know, about persuasion, not for politics at all, but you could use things like that. I mean, it's like the way you describe that kind of like, hey, voter history is public, here's yours, um, and here's your neighbor's, and we'll be sending an update later. That's Elf on the Shelf, right? That's, that's, hey, the elf is watching and he's going to tell Santa if you've been naughty or nice. It's as simple as that. I don't need to explain the virtues and why you should be naughty or nice. It's just Very simple. Somebody's watching. And I think that that's a very powerful thing. I also found it interesting because what we traditionally hear, if you just go turn on the news, you turn on CNN, you're going to hear a talking head explaining. They're going to be talking about certain stories and they're going to be, they're going to bring on some expert pundit who's going to tell you about how this thing that the vice president said during the convention and how that has this huge ripple effect, but it's actually just the most recent thing that happened.
Yeah.
And one thing I found fascinating was the story that you wrote about Biden's 2020 campaign. And you talk in the, in the article you wrote about, they realized that they were flush with cash. They were going to have more funding than they, they were going to have more funding, not less funding than what they needed. And so I guess the campaign manager or somebody was, you know, asked somebody on their team to go, if you had an extra $10 million to spend to have the highest impact, where would you spend it? And there was this idea about misinformation and the, as Biden called it, the malarkey factory. And, um, I thought this was pretty fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about the malarkey factory and specifically this idea of the harm index? If you remember that, I can, I can kind of prompt you. It's what I found fascinating there.
So, you know, I think that in, in, in 2020, there was, um, the campaign called it disinformation, but I think really to step back, like they were trying to understand this new viral media environment. So, you know, if you go back just 8, 10 years in, in politics, campaign operatives would track communication by, you could get a record of all the TV ads that are bought by, by candidates. You could see all of them. There's services that will, that will record and allow you to access them digitally. You could see all your opponent's campaign finance reports. You have a pretty good sense of where they're getting money and how they're spending it. But you could have a, you and you could read the press coverage or see what's on the news. You had a pretty good idea of where voters were getting their information. What the internet had changed is now like basically anybody had the ability to launch a story and some of these get called disinformation 'cause they're transparently false. But for political operatives, the real thing was like stuff's moving that we don't know where it came from or where it's going and what the motives of the people behind it are. Right. Cause it's not coming from our opponent. Like we know what our opponent's trying to accomplish. They have the same brain we do. But if this is like Macedonian teenagers who are trying to gain like, uh, online clicks for, for ad revenue, or this is a foreign intelligence service, or this is somebody like in their basement doing it for, for the laughs, like we don't, we can't game out like what they're thinking.
Stories are going viral. It could have an impact and we don't know who or why it's, it's who's behind it.
Yeah. And so the initial impulse was, don't, you know, you, you'd have all these sort of lessons from the old world kind of media consultants, like don't let it an attack go unanswered, right? Always be on offense. And like, yeah, that makes sense if your opponent is attacking you on what you know is one of their big themes. But if like somebody in Saskatchewan is making something up about you, to impress their friends, maybe you shouldn't respond and maybe you can make the problem a whole lot worse by responding, right? Um, you elevate it, you can, you can end up engagement, uh, uh, algorithms can end up, could end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it. And so the Biden campaign's mentality was let's shift from thinking about this as a supply side problem, which is thinking about individual bits of content that are coming out every day and deciding how and when to respond to them. And basically, as they said, playing whack-a-mole with like whatever the new thing was trending that day. And let's think of this more as a demand side problem that most of the stuff we probably don't need to respond to. It's not actually going to change voters' opinions, but the stuff that we do need to respond to, the campaign said, is the stuff that meets existing anxieties that voters have about Biden or about Harris or about certain issues. And so let's preemptively try to understand which Viral narratives would be most damaging to the campaign, would do the most harm so that when they pop up on a given day, we have a framework for not overreacting or reacting to the wrong one.
So this was the harm index. That was the idea there.
Yeah, that's what we ended up with. This big survey over the course of the summer of, um, of 2020. And they, and they took a lot of storylines, some based in truth and, and, and a lot based in, in, uh, some version of lies. Um, that they targeted the ticket. So they, you know, and they would ask voters basically like 3 questions. One, are you familiar with this? Two, uh, does it, uh, do you think it's true? And three, do you, um, would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden?
That's very simple, right? 3, 3, 3 questions. And they're doing this in person.
This is online. How do they get this out? This was online. This was online panel testing. I think that they did.
And they would just show them a headline, right? They'd be like Hunter Biden's laptop, blah, blah, blah.
Corruption. Right. So yes. So the Hunter Biden corruption stuff, this was before the laptop, I think, but you know, Trump had already been impeached about trying to draw attention to his Ukraine ties. A lot of people said that they were familiar with this Hunter Biden stuff. Not that many people said that it would actually make them less likely to vote for Joe Biden. And then they did focus groups and it came out that people, people did not think that Biden was fundamentally driven by his personal financial gain. And so they might've thought it was. They might have been familiar with it. They might have even thought that there was some truth to it, but it didn't really change the way that they thought about Biden on a core issue. However, the stuff related to his age and his mental infirmity, that stuff, obviously a lot of people knew about it. Um, and at the same time though, a lot of persuadable voters said it would make them less likely to vote for Biden. And the focus groups revealed that it wasn't that they were actually— this wasn't news to the campaign that Biden had an age problem. In 2020. And the way that the communications staff on the campaign had dealt with this thus far was they would set up photo ops of him bicycling or tell him to jog up the stairs to his plane. And what came back from the focus groups was like, this was all wrong. Voters were not worried about his physical well-being. They weren't concerned that he wasn't going to get his steps in in the White House. They were they saw him as a fundamentally weak political figure. I think a lot of this had to do with being defined as vice president. He won the primaries. He's never the main character of that race. And there are a lot of voters who said basically, I kind of like the guy, but I don't really know what he cares about or what he wants to do or who he is going to listen to. And that manifested— it was about his political weakness, but it manifests itself in being susceptible to questions being raised about his physical condition and mental condition. And so what the, the way the campaign responded to those was first they went out and they started buying ads in places where people who would be exposed to that type of content, persuadable voters who would be exposed to that type of content were. So there'd been this effort on the left for a while to boycott Fox News and Breitbart websites. The Biden campaign said, no, we're buying advertising there because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing. Two, they bought like search. Terms. So if you typed in, you know, Biden and senile or something, you, you would probably get cookied and shown like a YouTube pre-roll ad. And they were things that if you were modeled as one of the persuadable voters who was sensitive on this age thing, you would get targeted, but you would not have any idea that it was about his age. The most successful ad that they tested to these people was 15 seconds of Biden to camera just talking about like, I grew up in Scranton and I have middle-class values and that's why I want to cut taxes on middle-class people and raise them on the rich or something like really banal. Because all the research suggested that these people just wanted to hear him in his own voice saying what he cared about and what he would do. That's the people who were, who could be turned off by the attack, by claims that he was senile, just wanted to hear that like he could articulate his basic, his basic worldview, right?
In, in a firm voice, direct to camera, not edited.
Like, you know, and they were suspicious of, of things that looked too glossy or too slick. Um, and so there was a sort of push away from kind of the traditional aesthetics of political advertising, right? Like a lot of like, here's a headline and here's a thing and here's a cut and here's something like, yeah, and here's and here's some stock footage of farmers, you know, eating ice cream. And like, no, it's like really something that very clearly looked unedited. Um, because the, because the people who were sort of open to this were, were ones who were sort of innately suspicious of political communication.
Right, right. And so this idea of they took the stories and they're like, yeah, the Sleepy Joe stories, you got the Creepy Joe stories, you got the Hunter Biden stories. Test it on people, figure out 3 questions. Have you heard about this? Do you think it's true? And is this going to like, you know, make you less likely to vote for, for, for Biden? Super simple. And then basically counter, figuring out what is the counter-programming message. At first they thought, hey, show them on a bike that counters the Sleepy Joe message. I think they had this score where on the X axis, it was like number of people who are aware of it on the Y axis. It's like. How much it's going to impact their vote. So they could just have a board that showed all the issues as like, oh, a lot of people are aware about this Hunter Biden thing, but it's not, not affecting the vote. Low harm score, a 25 harm score.
And then, yeah, I skipped that part, Sean, because like, I think the first rule of podcasting is describe charts. People love that. Yeah. The x-axis was the reach. So it's harm index. The x-axis was the reach, right? How many people had heard about it, right? And the y-axis was What the info— yeah, you know, impact. And so, you know, and basically the, the campaign's thinking tactically on this was, um, if it's in the bottom, if it's on the left of this thing, we don't need to worry about it. If it has high impact but low reach, let's keep an eye on it because if it spreads, if it makes the jump out of like some corner of 4chan to, to, you know, mass media or, you know, getting to normal people on Facebook, then we will have a problem. So let's be prepared. And then the stuff in the upper right-hand corner, it's reaching the voters we care about and it'll change their opinions. Like, that's where we need to act.
Right, right. What about, um, Trump? So you wrote that book in 2012, I think, 2011, 2012 time.
Yeah.
So then this guy who is, you know, this person at this TV personality comes from the business world, not a politician at all. Runs this campaign. I think he even has admitted that like, it wasn't like he didn't think he was going to win initially. And therefore he's talked about like, yeah, I didn't really have a plan because like, you know, nobody thought we would win. We just thought we were doing our best. And then when we got, when we won, I had to figure out the plan on day one. What do you, when you look at that, what do you see? Do you see this kind of like master marketer? Do you just see this anomaly? Do you, did he use the normal playbook? Was, did he throw out the normal playbook? What did, What did Trump do?
So Trump in 2016, what he did in the conventional sense was the big, the big shift was he went from a, uh, TV-dominated campaign for paid advertising. He obviously dominated TV almost every day of the year in terms of free media coverage, but his budget, um, which was much smaller than Hillary Clinton's, was typically— there's a lopsided indifference between TV spending and digital spending, and, and, and also by direct mail and some of the the non-digital tools. And I think he had, he had like half the money, which is like unheard of. The only place where you might see that these days is like a city council candidate in a place where it's too expensive to buy television and all they can do is, is, you know, spend $40,000 on Facebook ads, right? You never see high-level campaigns of any size that are, that are at parity of those two. And the reason Trump spent, was ready to spend money online starting, uh, in real ways starting in the spring of 2016 was that Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that this— Trump doesn't like spending money. Um, and he's, you know, hates—
he also doesn't use a computer. Yeah. So this is kind of amazing. Like, uh, did you see this clip that's going viral right now of him sitting there watching Kamala's speech? Have you seen this clip?
I haven't.
So it's, it's, uh, it's from some— I think there's like a documentary, I guess. This is like a clip from it. And so, uh, it's called The Art of the Surge.
I'm not sure if it's out. Right.
Yeah. And so he's sitting next to this blonde woman. I don't know who she is. And he's literally like orating his tweets. So he sees Kamala say something on TV and then he goes, um, no way we're going to let that happen! Exclamation point. Um, not on my watch. Send. And then she's typing and she says, and he just does like 16 of those in like this like clip. Because people never knew like, wait, this guy doesn't use a computer. Is he even behind his social? And they showed him doing that, which is hilarious.
At that point, he'd had a Twitter account for 5 years and he understood that to be a big part of his celebrity and ability to drive traditional news coverage. But spending real money on Facebook ads, not just on self-made content and hoping it spreads organically, that came because Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that instead of all the other things in the campaign where consultants are begging you to spend money and it goes out the door, that you could make this a revenue center for fundraising. So you Typically TV ads, you pay the money to try and change people's opinion and you hope you get votes afterwards. If you buy ads and you target them well and you have people who want to give you money, you can obviously, this is why charities do online fundraising and stuff. And so Trump started spending real money on Facebook because he was seeing a return on it and that resonated to him. It was the economic motive fundamentally more than it was part of a political strategy. And what he ended up doing, by the combination of his organic ability to draw attention online in ways that traditional politicians couldn't, and the fact that they were amplifying and catalyzing it through what ended up being eventually some real paid spending, mostly on Facebook advertising, but also a little bit on other platforms. He was able to create a community online that was, you know, really deep and meaningful, and to the people who were part of it. And, you know, I think that we thought at the time, you know, the idea was that Obama was the great digital era politician because he had, he had developed the best, you know, the best and biggest lists. That was the measure in 2016. The measure of a successful online politician was how many signups How many email addresses do you have? How many people have given you their cell phone number and opted into letting you text them? How many people followed you on platforms? And that basically was supporters that you can now communicate with for free, right? That's all that represents is you no longer have to pay to advertise to them. They have given you the information and authorization to talk to them. And, but what did Obama do with that? These tens of millions of supporters who had chosen to to, um, sign on in some way. Well, he basically asked them to give money and occasionally to volunteer or take some action. Um, but it was very transactional. It was very one-sided. Uh, and what we realize in retrospect, and that was true of basically every politician in the United States till Trump came along, and what Trump did mostly by instinct, not by any strategy or I think great abstract conception of like how to communicate digitally because just because he gets it in a, in an animalistic way, was that you should engage like a poster does, right? And that means Obama never like re-amplified his retweeted or shared his, his supporters' content. Why? Because if you're the Obama campaign in 2012, you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on opinion research, polling, focus groups, other qualitative research, testing your ads and your mail. You have come down at that point, you have come to that, to that syllable on what you want to say, on which issues, when, to whom, how. And the whole campaign is this command and control exercise to make sure that you are saying the exact right thing at the exact same time, at the right time to, to all the right people. So the idea that you would take your most enthusiastic supporter who's tweeting at you all day and just like share with your followers is so antithetical to the way that political professionals think about the best way to communicate. And Trump does it 'cause he does it impulsively. Haha, that's funny. Let's share it.
Right.
Um, and what he did was he created a community of people who were invested, who felt like they were part of the campaign, and they ended up You know, the whole meme culture around him, the online MAGA community is, is, is a, I think, a far more satisfying, satisfying place for its members to reside online because they get all this reinforcement from like-minded people that Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden never gave, even if they collected a lot of names of people who ended up giving them money online. Right. And that, I mean, that is, that is a gift that I have not seen We've seen politicians get some part of that for some period of time. Bernie Sanders had some of that, whatever else, but there's, you know, still the idea that you have to relinquish a certain amount of control over your communications. And there are very few politicians who, who are willing to do that.
That is fascinating to me that I did not know the, the story there of Kushner coming in and basically like changing the frame from we spend money to try to buy votes versus we spend money to to rake in more money, and then that $1 becomes $2, that $2 becomes $3, and $3 becomes $4, that we can just continue to fundraise this way. And then, and ultimately, if somebody's giving you their money, they're probably also going to give you their vote, right? So it's not like you're only doing one versus the other.
Japan's have always had a very clear divide, both in terms of like the org chart within the headquarters, in terms of the budget, and in terms of what you say and where. And some of it's because of regulations around, around political spending, but like fundraising communication is a very different beast inside a campaign than persuasion or, or get out the vote communication, right? And totally different offices in the campaign. But like what Trump, I think, sort of just naturally found out was if you're spending a lot of money prospecting on Facebook, telling people why you're great, um, some of that will go to people who will end up chipping in $10 and signing up for a recurring payment, right? Some of it will also, will go in front of people whose opinions you are helping to shape. Some of it will go help turn people who already support you into volunteers by getting them. And that campaigns did not typically think that they thought of it as we're having, we have our fundraising targets. We have our, who almost by definition are not your persuasion targets because your persuasion targets are people whose minds aren't made up. Your fundraising targets are people who already support you and you're trying to get them to give more.
Yes. Yes.
Okay.
So I like that. And it seems like, you know, Trump is this kind of blend of celebrities, like an influencer brand, right? In the same way that, you know, Kylie Jenner can sell, you know, makeup better than a makeup brand that doesn't have an influencer, or that, you know, George Clooney can sell alcohol, or, you know, Ryan Reynolds can go sell cell phone service through Metro Mobile. It seems like the ads using Trump worked, and it sounds like you've also kind of pointed out that he created a bit of a community, whereas, like, I can't even really tell you what is Kamala— like, I could tell you Trump's community, which is the MAGA movement. I kind of know who they are, what they look like, what they, what they stand for, and what they're all about. I don't even know what the name of the community would be for Kamala. Like, it would only be people who hate Trump, I think, is the only answer.
There was a little bit of— they call themselves the K-Hives. Um, uh, of like a little cluster of, of Kamala supporters. But that campaign did not last long for a reason, which is I don't think that there was a particularly broad-based, um, enthusiasm for her.
Never met a lot of K-Hivers.
Yeah, she has been at some disadvantage, and there have been advantages to starting a campaign in July, but a lot of disadvantages. And a lot of it is that, you know, audience— online audience takes a long time to build. And I think that she, I think there'll be an interesting conversation to have after the selection as to whether she will have had the shortest presidential campaign in modern American history by far. Right. I mean, the general tendency has been towards these 2-year campaigns and she's going to have a 4-month campaign.
Well, she's done a couple of things well, right? She raised a lot of money very quickly. She's, she's outraised Trump. She's also. I've, you know, her TikTok, when she started, she, you know, picked a medium and it seems like they were picking alternative mediums. So, you know, Trump has done a lot of podcasts. She's done a couple, but podcast seems to be a bigger part of the equation this, this time. She went super viral on TikTok right away and they had a bunch of songs and little earworms like, uh, you know, JD Vance's, you know, I'm a Never Trump Guy song. That, that, that was great. Now they've done a bunch of things like that. Um, you know, when he said the thing about eating the dogs, eating the cats, you know, within minutes it's viral on TikTok as a song that somebody remixed. And so I think they've done a lot of interesting things there. Does any of that stand out to you? Do you have opinions on any of that? I'm curious how you look at that.
You know, I think one other thing that they did, which is pretty novel, is that they have gotten into the like clipping and amplifying little bits of every crazy little thing that Trump says. I mean, there was this school of thought among Democrats. It was pretty prevailing, I think, for most of Trump's, which is don't give them oxygen. Don't give him exposure. You're only feeding the whatever. And they would scold journalists who were like, why are you taking his speeches live? And why are you guys sharing clips of everything he says? And now go to the Kamala HQ account and it will be, it's like those guys, the Media Matters guys or whatever else who are just clipping all these wild things that go on Fox News. Just these 7 seconds. He said that you can electrocute yourself with a car on the moon or something and look at this crazy old guy. And that's a very different mentality about how to go at Trump in particular than Democrats had. And so I think that they feel like they've, that the digital team in the campaign, which is basically inherited entirely from the Biden campaign, they feel a little unshackled. They have much more to work with. I think that there was, obviously they have a candidate who's more dynamic and closer to pop culture. They have more celebrities who are eager to be associated with the campaign. They also, I think that there was a sense that Biden so emphasized the dignity of the office and Trump is beneath this, that there was a sense of let's not get down in the mud and play Trump's game. And I think that there's a real freedom to do name calling and stuff that the Biden people would've thought is sort of pettier than their brand. And so yeah, I think that they've been far more willing to mix it up in online. I do think though this is an area where she probably, you know, and engage with influencers and such, but if she'd had an extra year to cultivate those relationships online, some of that would be showing fruit now in a way that they've just been scrambling to, I mean, and they were doing things in August that campaigns are usually doing the previous March, like designing a logo, right? I mean, like really, Like day one type, type things.
You've studied and covered elections for like more than 15 years, I think. Who do you think is running the better campaign right now? Not who's going to win, but who's running a better campaign?
I thought Trump for most of the year was running as good a campaign as he could run. Now I start to see a real mismatch between what they claim is their strategy and and the organization that they have been building for it, which is, you know, in short, so much of the Trump plan seems to be based on mobilizing young men, especially young men of color. Um, uh, and there's reasons in polling to suggest that there's real room for, for him to gain in a way that few Republicans have there. But the that's this job of basically going to people who are not voters and turning them into voters. And all the research I've written about suggests that the best way to do that is high-quality face-to-face interactions from a volunteer, between a volunteer from a voter's community and them to have these sort of socially meaningful interactions and give them really practical advice like where's your polling place and all of that stuff. And the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that, what people call ground game or field organization, but the real boots on the ground part of campaigning to America PAC, which is the Elon Musk-funded super PAC. And typically the division of labor on campaigns has been that sort of nuts and bolts labor-intensive work that does not scale up easily, right? That going from 100 people in West Philadelphia knocking on doors to 200 people knocking on doors in West Philadelphia takes twice as much work and capital. Going from 100 ads on TV in Pennsylvania to the same ads running twice as often takes basically no more effort. And so the way that there's been this big question for about 15 years about how do you divide responsibilities between campaigns and the super PACs outside, different sets of rules, different advantages for each of them. And typically the way it's broken down is that campaigns and the party committees will do that labor-intensive work that doesn't scale up. And the money on the outside will basically buy ads, mostly TV, some digital, that amplify the message because they can't coordinate with one another directly. The, the Trump people have blown up that model and they're now trusting this outside group that Musk runs to do this door knocking thing.
What is he doing? Because I actually haven't followed it fully. I saw he's going MrBeast. He's giving away $1 million a day. I don't even understand what that is. Can you explain that? What is Elon doing?
Um, and what is that? Why, why that?
I can come up with a few theories of what they could do with that information, but it seems like a pretty roundabout way to get information that's already available. Like, there's already a database of every voter in the state, and if I wanted to know people in Pennsylvania who care about, uh, you know, who are conservative or, you know, or MAGA or, and own a gun, like, that's a combination of publicly available or viable information. I shouldn't have to pay people to go collect it from their neighbors. Um, uh, and so it seems like a tactic you would use that's far better if you're trying to have a long-term movement organization building thing, which doesn't— I haven't seen any indication that Elon Musk is trying to build a generational movement here. Um, it does not seem like a particularly effective way to, to, to get people to, to vote for the first time or the second time in their, in their lives. So that's one big part of what they're doing. Then they're doing just a lot of basically hiring day laborers to go knock on doors. And there's been a bunch of reporting. Wired has some good reporting, Daily Beast, I think on it's like it is in any industry, hiring people off the street and paying them by the hour or per contact leads to a lot of bad work. And you have a lot of really poor incentives for people to either be inefficient or give you bad data if you're if you're paying them per complete. So I've sort of shifted my view on the competence of the Trump organization over the course of the year because it seems like they haven't aligned their strategy with their tactics and organization. And I think Kamala Harris is running a far more traditional Democratic campaign, and there's a kind of more sensible logic to it, even if she's made a few mistakes along the way.
It sounded like the thing Elon's doing, um, you know, he's trying to sign— you can't pay people to vote. That's illegal. So it's kind of like, I'll pay you to sign the petition. And the petition says something that sounds very like agreeable. Like I support free speech.
Yeah.
Who doesn't? Right? Like that sounds pretty reasonable, but like, it seems like there must be some, some 3D chess going on that I'm not, I don't fully understand, which is what do you do after that? What's the point of that?
Yeah. I mean, if you use that information and then you have a really good operation to call those people. Maybe target them with digital advertising, call them and knock on their door and say, I know you're a First and Second Amendment voter and you signed a petition devoting yourself to the cause. Now do this and this. Like there's actually a reason to think that works, but that's just then one step. That's just the first step in a 3 or 4 step process. And you need to be really good and targeted at the next few steps because, you know, one real difference that's important, I think for, for your audience, keep in mind when you Learning from adjacent fields is great and important. A lot of the breakthroughs I've written about have come from people in politics looking to business or elsewhere, but there are some really different, really important differences between business marketing and political marketing. And one of them is that the cost of a, of mistargeting out of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics, right? So if you are, if you have a consumer product and you're Coke and you put a Coke ad in front of somebody who's on a diet or doesn't like sugar, has diabetes or like whatever. Okay, you wasted 10 cents for that person. Big deal. If you are the Trump campaign and you send a door knocker to do a get out the vote reminder to somebody who is— your data tells you is— should be a Trump supporter, but they're not. Um, or there's one Trump supporter in that house, but you remind 3 other people the 3 women living with that one Trump supporter, that it's Election Day on Tuesday too, and it makes them more likely to vote. Or your person's just kind of inefficient, you know, like lazy, and they knock on the wrong door in the apartment complex and they end up going to the, to the Harris supporter and reminding them. You've not only— you haven't just wasted that interaction, you've created a vote for your opponent. There is nothing— the only thing like that in the marketing world where there's that cost to misidentifying your targets is maybe in insurance or credit cards, where if a company thinks that they can extend you a $10,000 credit limit and you're not good for it, they made a big mistake, right? If an insurer decides that you're, you know, should be a $500 premium and it turns out that you cost them a lot more, they've really screwed up. But most consumer marketing, like there's not a huge downside to getting your message in front of the wrong people. But politics, there is. And I think that's the big mistake that a lot of people, and perhaps Elon or the people around him, make, is they move from business to politics. They say, let's just throw resources at it. When I needed to, when I needed to build, you know, create interest in Tesla, I just bombarded all these people with digital advertising about Tesla, or offered them all a free test drive and, you know, a cocktail at our, at our at our cool, um, uh, showrooms. Like, that probably works to start building interest in Tesla. It's a terrible way to, to, to try to turn out voters for your candidate.
And when you've been looking into a space like this, like, how disillusioned do you get? And really, I guess the question is, you've now studied multiple election cycles, you've heard, you've talked to the teams behind this, and then the different subsections of this industry. What's like, you know, when I clean my house and I move the couch and I'm like, oh my God, there's 10 years of my kids' snacks under here. Like, what's the thing where you're like, I wish I didn't see that. I wish I didn't know that. What is the ugliest part of this that really has, you know, you saw or turns you off?
I mean, I think the disinformation stuff is, you know, I generally was encouraged in the early years of writing about this because the people who are at the cutting edge of using this data and experiments were generally in the business of trying to get more people to vote or giving voters information that was more relevant to them. And that struck me as like democracy was improving because of technology and innovation. If I used— campaigns have a lot of data about individual voters, that doesn't really scare me. A lot of people have a lot of data about voters and they're usually, instead of giving you some vague thing about, you know, Morning in America, if I think that you're likely to care a lot about about cancer research and I give you a more targeted message about what my campaign would do for cancer research, I think that that's generally good for the country. What has changed is I think you have so many people who have the ability to reach large numbers of voters now who are just not constrained by a lot of the expectations about honesty and can't be held accountable for what they say. And I think that that is scary to me.
What's going on now? Because AI has now made it easy to do deepfake audio. I can make, I can make it, I can make Donald Trump say anything for like, you know, 30 cents on my computer right now. I can make a video that shows, you know, something that I want happening. I could have, if, hey, if, if phone banking works, why can't I just spin up an army of AI phone agents to just call everybody? What is, what have you seen as the new tools? And is that, has that happened this cycle or you think it's next cycle?
Relatively, maybe less the cycle than I would've thought if we'd had this conversation a year ago. I think the campaigns, this is a place, there were some campaigns that wanted to be first 'cause they realized they'd get a lot of attention and wanted that. But I think most campaigns are afraid of the backlash of being associated with AI, even for not necessarily even from for manipulation, but just like, you know, non-live callers. And so I think that there's a hurdle that campaigns have from a kind of brand image perspective about being associated with new or potentially sort of invasive feeling technologies. And so there's been less of that. Where people are using AI the most in this campaign is like sort of the same way we all might use it, which is like brainstorming first drafts of fundraising emails. You know, like most fundraising emails, they need to come up with new ones every day to to people, they all basically use the same types of themes and messages. You're probably going to A/B test them anyway. So instead of having a bunch of, you know, 23-year-olds who just, you know, graduated from liberal arts colleges, like typing out your first drafts and trying to see whether the one that scares people into thinking you're losing is going to do better than the one that has like JLo's signature under it. Why not have the machine come up with 10 different JLo ones and test those? And that's, I think, like It's probably the most we're seeing AI or automation being used in this campaign, but I think obviously that'll change over the next few years.
Right. Why are, why is Kamala doing like a Fortnite map? They just released like a, they're basically like advertising in video games, which I think others have done in the past, but I mean, those people aren't even old enough to vote. I think the average Fortnite player, what's the psychology around that?
So it starts from the position of having more money than they know what to do with. And there being an unusual scarcity issue for political marketers, which is like one, you have one day by which all your sales have to be completed. I don't think there's another industry.
I mean, there's seasonal industries, I guess, but it's like a July 4th fireworks store. Yeah, exactly.
Right. So like, um, Halloween store probably makes some interesting pricing decisions on November 1st. Right. Um, so one thing is that they like have a lot of money. Have to get out the door. And all of the TV is bought up in, you know, we're down to 7 battleground states. The TV markets are saturated. There's a point at which you can no longer send out new direct mail. If you wanted to get more volunteers knocking on doors, you probably had to start building offices and having staff to train them months ago. And so at the end of the campaign, you start to see the end of the, you know, right before election day, you start to see campaigns making decisions that are driven less by efficient, like overall efficiency and more by basically where can we very quickly park some money. And I think that that's when you start to see like sound trucks and stuff like that because there's just nowhere else to put it.
Some people have called this election the sort of the podcast election because you have podcasts have become this huge medium. You have unedited, unfiltered conversations. Kind of one of the only ways you can actually see what a candidate is really like. I was joking with my buddy. I said, I think going on Theo Von's podcast should be a new federal standard for presidents. I just need to know if my president's a good hang or not. And Theo Von might be the only guy who could save us there. Trump did Rogan. JD Vance just did a 3-hour thing with Rogan. And famously, Kamala and Rogan said, hey, you can come out to Austin and let's do 2, 3 hours unedited in my studio.
She said no.
Um, there's two reactions to that. One was, wow, what a dropped ball. You could have gotten in front of 30 million people in a, like, super meaningful way. Another was, how dare you, Joe? She's the vice president and there's a few days left before the election. How dare you have demands? You should be, you know, crawling to her to do this. Um, and other people would say, you're not going to convince anybody who listens to Rogan to vote for you, for Kamala anyways. What do you think about the role of podcasts and was it a mistake for Kamala to not go on Rogan?
I think that her campaign, um, was slow to put her out in a lot of different venues. You know, there's that week where she did Call, uh, uh, and, and The View, and it was like, oh, and then maybe she did Colbert or Kimmel or something. It was like, oh, she's doing media now. And right, part of what was shocking about that was that she was doing so little of it early on, and like Again, they had to build a campaign from scratch really quickly at an inopportune point. She had to pick a VP. She had to get ready for a nomination speech, debates, all this stuff that she did not expect she was going to have to do a few weeks earlier. But also one of the advantages that Democrats had in dumping Biden from the ticket and getting her was you had somebody who, first of all, to send more energy. In theory, she can work a full day and do a bunch of things that Biden isn't expected to do. The other thing is she's more dynamic and she's more in tune with pop culture. And I think there was some sense that, wow, Democrats are going to go from somebody who does 3 rallies a week and his staff is afraid to put in on Face the Nation, not even Theo Vaughn, to somebody who can do 5 events a day and interviews nonstop and she's charismatic and telegenic and all these things. And That never really came to fruition. And I don't know how much this— I think might be one of the things we start to learn after the election when some journalists or book authors get a little access into what they were thinking. I think one of the questions is how much of that was just that they didn't have the time to do as much of it. And that would be, could be sensible to me. The other, or was it that the staff was fundamentally afraid that the downside of going into an unstructured 2 hours with Joe Rogan offsets the upside of getting in front of that audience.
Can you give me a couple minutes on your new book? So you got this new book out. What's the premise? And then can you give me maybe one of the juicy findings or learnings or stories that you had from it?
Yeah. So it's about this sort of new era. We've bounced in and out of this, but the new asymmetry that's created when in this digital environment where campaigns realize that their opposition is not their opponent. It's not another candidate or party. It could be, you know, the foreign intelligence service or somebody who's, you know, attacking you for shits and giggles or who knows what. And how sort of what the search for a playbook for learning how to communicate in that environment, because it blows up so many of the expectations about campaign strategies. And I write a bit about that Biden example in there, which I think was really a really important shift in starting to think about looking at the recipients of disinformation more than the producers of disinformation, which has been, I think, a big mistake that not just campaigns, but people in the media make in trying to understand what impact something will have. I also worried about a really interesting group called We Defend Truth that, um, this, this, uh, it's a progressive group that, uh, has been trying to fight basically conspiracy theories, um, around the 2020 election, around, around COVID vaccines. They basically have gone out and hired some of the more successful, like, GIF and meme makers online. Um, uh, you know, the guy who had like the most likes on Imgur and stuff. And their, their theory of the case is that you need to be engaging in the, in the, in the vernacular of the internet, meme warfare.
You have to, you have to fight memes with memes.
You have to fight memes with memes. And you need to be communicating in the way that, that online audiences expect to be communicated to, which means be coarse and be and be funny and be kind of in the pop culture conversation, do not feel like political communication, do not feel like marketing. And I quote one of their, the sort of head guy there. He says like, you need to earn the right to communicate with people. And to do that, you have to usually entertain or inform them first. And I think it's a really interesting way of starting to think about how traditional political communication has to fundamentally rethink itself from the one-way broadcast dynamic that a lot of the modern, um, uh, thinking about campaigning was shaped into the kind of, you know, two-way or multi-linear sort of environment that of social media.
It reminds me of like when you had TV and movies were like the dominant video like medium. And if you were making a TV show, you could afford to spend the first few minutes. If you watch the first couple minutes of a TV show, it'll be like The scene starts in New York, a guy's walking, we don't know who he is or what he's doing. And then there's like this harmless scene. And then it finally, like, you get to the characters and the story. Have you ever watched a TikTok or a YouTube video? Like, in the first 5 seconds, they're doing something to tell you, do not click away, stay on this video.
You gotta watch this video.
Like, I hang out with MrBeast and he's like, he could recite to me the first 40 seconds of script from a video he did 3 years ago because he drilled it so many times and every word was chosen of like, I cannot like leave this first minute up for grabs. Right. And what he talks about, cause I asked him, I said, you know, do you ever look at TV and what you could learn from them? And he goes, yeah, but what they could learn from us. I mean, he's like, dude, TV would never survive, uh, on YouTube. He's like, people would click away and have terrible retention rates, terrible click-through rates. They couldn't survive in our world. And so similarly, what you're talking about is in the old world where it's my message versus the other candidate's message, and it's just those two, it's a 1v1, you know, there's one playbook. And now you're saying you're just playing the field. There's the field of the internet where there's stories and information coming from all kinds of different people with all levels of accuracy and different levels of impact. How are you going to respond to not a 1v1, but sort of you versus the entire field of content that's out there right now and what's your playbook to win there?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're only now starting to get, you know, people have campaigns having a more instinctual understanding. It used to be so much of online campaigning, you know, in the 2000s, 2010s, was basically let's take things we're already doing offline and figure out how to move them online, right? Okay, so we know how to make 30-second videos and put them on TV. Let's just turn them into You know, maybe we have to go from vertical, horizontal to vertical or whatever, but let's just figure out how to get them onto social media platforms. Can we do something online that looks, can we basically take our direct mail program out of the USPS and put it into email? And now I think we're starting to get people in politics. Some of it's a generational shift. Some of it's Democrats realizing how poorly they've been outfoxed online during the Trump era to start it. Like we need to really step back and rethink. Some of these foundational questions of how and why you communicate to certain people.
I want to, I want to leave with one last question, which is, uh, what do you think is the most mispriced or misunderstood opportunity in elections? Meaning if somebody hired you and they're like, all right, you're gonna, you're our consultant. Um, and you got to give them input to do something that maybe they're not already doing, or maybe they're doing, but not enough of. Where would you place a bet that you think has sort of more upside than people are currently taking advantage of?
So less, maybe not economic upside, but sort of political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles. And I think there's a great example now. The best— I think we're going to— if Trump wins this election, we're going to look back and say arguably his best period was a period in 2021, 2022 when he was largely out of the news. Republicans were distancing themselves. The media wasn't covering him. Democrats had hoped he was gone and stopped attacking him. And he was able to start to build up some sense of nostalgia for the Trump years. A lot of it, like, not based in a real understanding of what 2020 was like when he was president. But distance helped him. And if Democrats had kept like a foot on his neck through advertising, reminding people, yes, the reason, you know, wherever unemployment was and inflation were in 2021 was because of the guy who was just there reminding people about some of the COVID dynamics. But like they pulled away from him at just the moment that they prop— they could have continue to define him. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Political money disappears out of cycle. You only get the surge of interest in cycle. But there's people starting to talk about party-based branding, right? So like so much of our political communication, paid media, TV ads are almost entirely about candidates. And yet, like when we started this conversation was that basically 45% of the country are Democrats and 45% are Republicans and they'll always vote for their party. And yet no political advertising is spent branding the parties. And I think there are advantages to doing that in a countercyclical way when people are not being bombarded by tons of TV ads, but be reminding people the Republican Party stands for this and this. Here's how the Democrats screwed up last time or vice versa. And try to think about not just winning votes in an election, but sort of long-term audience building for a party.
I like it. Uh, maybe you could also be one of these, these political, uh, consultant shops that are making bank. What's, what is the, what is the business that stunned you with how much it makes in the, uh, in this sort of election, in this election marketing business? Is there any, whether it's a polling company or a research company that like, is there any like multi-hundred million dollar companies out there that do this?
The business model that's still most astounding is, is, uh, media buyers who get paid a commission off of, off of the ads they place.
When percent of ad—
yeah, percent of ad spend. And, you know, digital advertising is more labor-intensive for them, but buying TV is, you know, there are only so many stations in, in Wisconsin that you could put ads on. And, you know, it doesn't take any more work to double the buy, and they get paid a commission off of it. And they're, you know, that, that, that's— and it's been that way for decades. And this is— is it Is there one like dominant ad buyer that, that like, yeah, I mean, there are a handful on in each party, but, um, and you know, they're, they're probably having revenue in the, some of them also make ads. And so they're part of a bigger media business. They're probably, you know, playing on the high end in the, in $100 million revenue range. We're not talking about, you know, huge companies, but, um, but it really does not require at this point a lot of savvy or, or right, or, or labor.
Ad buyers, one. Give me one more. Is there any other cool business that, uh, that maybe it's like a one-man shop that makes, you know, $10 million a year just doing a specific thing? Or is there any other interesting business niche that you just stumbled into?
There's still some interesting stuff to be done with data and modeling, um, especially, you know, there are a lot of sort of boutique firms that will do campaign-specific modeling. But what's happening now is that the Things that presidential campaigns were able to do, only presidential campaigns were able to do maybe 12 years ago. Now somebody running for county executive can use, and I'm not sure that there are, this is more an opportunity than people have mastered, but I think that there are probably opportunities to figure out how to package and translate that for small-scale campaigns that do not have professionals always working on them. The person running for state rep in your neighborhood. Her brother might be like the de facto campaign manager and whatever else. And often the delta between what a sort of engaged layperson trying to run a campaign can do and the sophistication of the tools and data available is just too much to bridge and they don't do it. But there probably is a way to price those and create tools that are more accessible. That's where I think that's a place that if people were looking to try to get into the sort of tech end of the political business, there's there's probably some opportunity.
Very cool. Sasha, I appreciate you coming on and giving us extra time, man. This is fascinating. Thank you so much. Where should people find you? Send them to your book. Tell them what they need to know.
Yeah, my new book's called The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age. And I have a website, sashaeisenberg.com, so it's my first name and last name. Um, you can find all my books there. My first one was about the global sushi business, which may be of interest to to, to you too. So, um, it's been really fun. I love talking about politics from an angle that's different than what people are saying on CNN on any given day. So thank you.
All right, thanks so much, man. That was great.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.