Election Expert: “We’re in the age of ‘meme warfare…”

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 C political campaigns regardless of which candidate you're going for they're

spending over a billion 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 uh 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 a 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 [Music] episode 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 dollar a year goes to this group of people whose job is to be you know marketing machines for for political purposes and when something works they you know 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 uh politician had no Charisma nothing we could do there right they they they need to deflect in order for 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 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 um difficult things reporting in this area so you know I 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 PC's working for them you know show me exactly how you're you're testing your ads on on online platforms they are the maybe they will tell you some stuff they very select will leak out stuff if they think it'll help them

raise money usually so you'll read a story and wired one story and wired that's like inside comma ais'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 you know in Palo Alto that can convince you know a bunch of of tech Executives that 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 you know give away any anything to the competition right but after election day the campaign basically ceases to exist so everybody is on to another job a lot of them are you know looking for work or be or returned to their consulting firms or starting new firms developed some trick or tool during the campaign isn't there like some conference where they all go to like some uh some beach resort area where they go and they all get drunk and start

talking yeah I mean so there there's like a post-election sort of conference circuit where Democrats and Republicans come together to um to kind of trade notes but they they need to launch a business I mean it's basically like every two years there's like a new sort of window for startups and and especially every four years and so there's a window where they go from being afraid that they will get fired if they T to a reporter because if you were 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 two 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 I remember in 2012 you had this um the Obama analytics Department which is really pioneering out that they had like 52 54 people and this analex Brown which at the time was huge they called it the cave and these guys you know

I I was reporting throughout the year for slate at that point and and was able to eek out bits of of 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 you know there were some inquest to find like it was pretty sad and then the day after you know a whole bunch of them basically we're getting Eric Schmidt to um 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 and and 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 were not it did not happen just because of it 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 turn out the way it did and there political actors who want to tell that story right like moderates in the Democratic party of K Harris wi 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 [ __ ] 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 a real obviously transparent agenda and I think I and I think you know from a ERS viewers perspective be a be wary of any sort of monocausal explanation

for anything in in electoral politics no one thing did anything right it's 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 have worked in the business world or you know chelini 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 neighbors 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 it's just very simple uh somebody's watching and 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 goingon to bring on some expert pundit who's going to tell you about how this thing that the vice president said during the you know 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 uh they realized that they were flush with cash U 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 they 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 IDE a of the harm index if you remember that I can I can kind of prompt you 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 to step back like they were trying to understand this new viral media environment so you know if you go back just eight 10 years in in politics campaign uh operatives would track communication by you

could get a record of all the tv ads that are bought um by by can you could see all of them there services that will that will record and um uh uh allow you to access them digitally um uh you can see all your opponents campaign Finance reports so you have a pretty good sense of where they're getting money and how they're spending it um but you can have a you and and you can read the Press coverage or or see what's on the news you had a pretty good idea where voters were getting their

information what the internet had changed is now like basically anybody had the ability to launch um a story and some of these get called disinformation because they're they're clear transparently but for 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 and and what the motives of the people behind it are right because it's not coming from our opponent like we know what our opponent's trying to accomplish that 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 game out like what they're saying stories are going viral it could have an impact and we don't know who or why it's it's but 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 consult like don't let it an attack go unanswered

right always be on offense um 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 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 can end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it and so the binding campaigns mentality was

let's shift from thinking about this as a supply side problem which is thinking 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 whacka all with like whatever the new thing that was trending that day and let's think of this more as a demand side problem the the 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 that meets existing anxieties that voters have about Biden or about Harris or about certain issues and so let's pre 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 or reacting to the wrong one hey let's take a quick break to talk about AI we all know AI big deal um you see demos all the time of people doing really cool things but as a business owner sometimes it's

hard to figure out how do I actually use this what do I actually do I've been trying to use it across all my businesses you know things like making little protype websites without needing to hire a coder or writing copy for our website or I give it a bunch of data and I ask it to analyze it for me it's been kind of amazing but the thing I always need is inspiration I know the tool can do a lot but it can almost do so much that I'm not really sure what I should actually be

doing with it and so that's why I think it's great that HubSpot has created a report where they surveyed 2,000 Global Marketing leaders and asked them what's separating the high growth and low growth businesses and what strategies they're using with AI in their business you can grab these strategies and apply them to your own business for free the link is in the description below so this was the harm index that was the the idea there yeah that's what this big survey over the course of the summer of 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 three 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 that's very simple right three three three questions and they're doing this in person this is online how do they get this 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 hun byop 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 bid Stu not that many people said that it would actually make them less likely to 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 pain and so they might have 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 new the campaign that they find had an age problem in 2020 um and the way that the communication staff on the campaign had dealt with this thus far was they would set up like photo ops of him him bicycling or like tell him to jog up the stairs to his plane right and and what came back from the focus groups was like this was all voters were not worried about uh his physical well-being they weren't concerned like 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 was like he won the he won the primaries he's never the main character of that race and there were a lot of Voters who said basically like 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's going to listen to and that manifest it it wasn't

it was about his political weakness but it manifest 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 Expos that type of content work so there have been this effort on the left for a while to to to boycott Fox news and Breitbart websites um the Biden campaign said no we're buying advertising there

because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing too they bought like Search terms so if you typed in you know Biden and scile 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 Strand and I have middle class values and that's why I want to you know 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 who were who could be turned off by the attack by claims that he was scile just wanted to hear that like he could articulate his basic his basic

world view right in in a firm Voice direct to camera not edited like you know and 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 and 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 some whoosh and and here's and here's some stock footage of farmers 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 innat suspicious of political communication right right and so this idea of they took the stories and they're like you have the Sleepy Joe's stories you got the creepy Joe's stories you got the hunter Biden stories test it on people figure out three questions have you heard about this do you think it's true and is just 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 counterprogramming message at first they thought hey show I'm on a bike that counters the Sleepy Joe message I think they had this score where on the x-axis 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 they could just have a board that showed all the issues it's like oh a lot of people are aware about this Hunter Biden thing but it's not not effective their vote low harm score a 25 harm score and then yeah I I ski

Mar Sean because like I think the first role of podcasting is describe charts people love [Music] that the x-axis was the reach so Haron de the x-axis was the reach right how many people had heard about it right and the Y AIS was what the influence impact 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 fortun 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 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 this TV personality comes from the business world not a politician at all runs his 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 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 when you look at that 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 an a 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 is much smaller than Hillary Clinton's was typically there's a lot sided 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 as 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 highlevel campaigns of any size that are that are at parody of those two and the reason Trump spent was

ready to spend money online starting uh in real way starting in the spring of 2016 was that Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that this what Trump is doesn't like spending money um and he's you know hates CLA also doesn't use a computer so this is kind of amazing like did you see this clip that's going viral right now of him sitting they're watching kamla's speech have you seen this clip it's a it's from some I think there's like a doumentary I guess there like a clip from it and so it's called The

Art of the surge I'm not sure if it's okay 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 Kus say something on TV and then he goes no way we're GNA let that happen exclamation point 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 cuz 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' had a he had a Twitter account for 5 years and and and he understood that to be a big part of his celebrity and ability to drive traditional news coverage but spending real money on on Facebook ads not just on you know self-made content and hoping it it spreads organically that came because because Jared kusher 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 Fun by through for for fundraising so typically TV ads you you pay the money to try to change people's opinion and you hope you get votes afterwards if you buy ads you 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 um and so Trump started spending real money on Facebook because he was seeing a return on it and that resonated to him it was it was the it was the you know it

was economic motive fundamentally more than it was was part of a political strategy and what he ended up doing um in by the combination of his organic ability to draw attention um online in ways that that traditional politicians couldn't and the fact that they were um amplifying and catalyzing it through through what ended up being eventually some 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 are 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 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 that's all all that all that represents is you no longer have to pay to advertise to them they have have 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 had chosen to to um sign on in some way he basically asked them to give money and occasionally to volunteer take some action um but it was very transactional it was very one-sided and what we realized in retrospect and that was true 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 a animalistic way was that you should 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 to the to the 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 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 because 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 magga 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 likeminded 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 is that is a gift that I have not seen we've seen politicians and 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 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 rake in more money and then that $1 becomes two that two becomes three and three becomes four that we can just continue to fund raise this way and then and 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 campaigns have always had a very clear divide both in terms of like the or chart within the headquarters in terms of the

budget be 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 of 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 bucks 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 already support you into volunteers by getting them and that campaigns did not typically think that 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 um okay so I like that and it seems like you know Trump is just kind of blend of uh celebr he's like an influencer brand right in the same way that you know Kylie Jen you know Kylie Jenner can sell you know makeup better than uh than an 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 met 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 Comm like I I could tell you Trump's Community which is the Maga movement and 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 kamla 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 kive um uh of like a little

cluster of of Comm 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 kivs and she has been at some disadvantage and there have been advantages to starting a campaign in July but a lot of disadvantages a lot of it is that you know audience online audience takes a long time to build and you know I 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 that the General tendency has been towards these two-year campaigns and she's going to have a four month uh campaign well she's done a couple things well right she raised a lot of money very quickly she she's outraised Trump she's also I've you know her Tik Tok when she started she you know picked a medium and it seems like they were picking alternative medium 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 Tik Tok right away and they had a bunch of songs and little earworms like you know JD Vance's you know I'm a never Trump Guy song that that that was great you know 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 Tik Tok 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 um you know I think one 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 for uh most of Trump's which is don't give him oxygen don't give him exposure you're only feeding the whatever and uh they would

scull journalists who are like why are you taking his speeches live and why are you guys sharing clips of everything he says and now go to the C kamla HQ account and it will be it's like those guys you know the Media Matters guys or whatever else who are just clipping like all these Wild Things that that that go on Fox News just the 7 seconds he said that you know you can electrocute yourself with a with a car on the moon or something and like look at this crazy old guy and that's a very

different mentality about how to go with Trump in particular than Democrats had and so you know I think that they they feel like they've the the digital team in 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 you know um obvious viously they have a a candidate who's more Dynamic and and closer to pop culture they have more celebrities who are eager to be Associated uh with the campaign they also you know I think that there

was a a sense that Biden um so emphasize like the Dignity of the office and Trump is beneath this that there was a sense of like let's not get down in the mud and and play Trump's game and and um I think that there's a real freedom to do kind of name calling and stuff that that the Biden people would have is are a pettier than their brand um you know and so so yeah I think that they've been far more willing to mix it up in online um I I 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 you know scrambling to I mean they were doing things in August that campaigns are usually doing the previous March like you know designing a logo right I mean like really like day one type type things you've studied un 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 as 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 re there's reasons in polling to suggest that there's real room for for him

to gain in a way that that few Republicans have there but the you know that's 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 suggest that you know the best way to do that is high quality face-to-face interactions uh from a volunteer between a volunteer from a voter's community and them to to have these sort of socially meaningful interactions to give them really practical advice like you know where's your polling place and and and and all of that stuff and the

campaign has made a decision to effectively Outsource a lot of that you know what people call Ground game or field organization but the real boots on the ground part of campaigning to America pack which is the Elon Musk uh funded super pack and typically the division of labor on campaigns has been that that sort of nuts and bolts labor intensive work that does not scale up easily right it you know that going from a 100 people in West Philadelphia knocking on doors to 200 people knocking on doors in West Philadelphia takes twice as much work

in 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 eaching them and typically the way it's broken down is the 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 blown up that model and they're now trusting this outside group that 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 Mr Beast he's giving away a million dollars a day I I don't even understand what that is can you explain that what is Elon doing so he's paying people to get their friends to sign petitions so you can like in a $47 Bounty or something if you can get

your friend to sign a I that says like I believe in the first and second amendment and give your information 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 magga 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 does I haven't seen any indication that that Elon Musk is trying to build a 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 wir had some good reporting uh Daily Beast I think on it's like it is in any industry hiring people off the street and and paying them by the hour or or um or prob contact UM leads to a lot of bad work and you have a lot of really poor incentives for people to either be inefficient or or give you bad data if you're if you're if

you're paying them uh uh per complete so I I I've sort of shifted my view on the competence of the the the Trump organization uh over the course of years because it seems like they've they've they haven't aligned their strategy with their their tactics and and organization and I think com Harris is running a far more traditional democratic campaign and there's a a kind of more sensible logic to it even if if she's made a few mistakes along the way it sounded like the thing you '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 I support Free Speech yeah who doesn't right like that sound sounds pretty reasonable but like seems like there must be some some 3D chess going on that I'm not I don't fully understand which is what what do you do after that what's the point of that yeah I mean if 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 three or four 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 to keep in mind when you

um learning from adjacent Fields is is great and important a lot of the breakthroughs I've written about have come from people in politics looking to to business or elsewhere but there's some really difference 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 your 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 kner 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 three other people the three women living with that TR 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 may 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 uh misidentifying your targets is maybe an insurance or or or credit cards where if if a company thinks that they can extend you a $110,000 credit limit and you're not good for it they made a big

mistake right if an if an insurer decides that you that you're you know should be a $500 premium and it turns out that you cost them a lot more they've really SC 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 well 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 dig advertising about Tesla or offered them all a free test drive and you know a cocktail in our at our at our cool um uh 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 disillusion 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 what is the ugliest part of this that that really has you know you you saw or turns you off I mean I think the the disinformation stuff is is you know I generally was

encouraged in the early years of writing about this cuz the people who were at The Cutting Edge of using this data and experiment 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 was improving because of technology and Innovation um uh if I use 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 are usually instead of giving you some

vague thing about you know morning in America if I if I think that you're likely to care a lot about about um you know cancer research and I give you a more targeted message about what I my campaign would do for cancer research like I think that that's generally good for the country what what has changed is I think you have so many people 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

and I think that that that is is is scary to me what's going on now because AI has now made it easy to do deep faked 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 um I could have if hey if uh 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 have thought if we'd had this conversation a year ago um you know I think the campaigns this is a place there were some campaigns that wanted to be first because they realized they' get a lot of attention and and um and wanted that but I think most campaigns are afraid of the backlash of of um being associated with with AI even for not necessarily even from for manipulation but just

like you know Auto non-live callers and and so I think that there's a hurdle that that campaigns have from a kind of brand image perspective about being associated with with new or potentially sort of invasive feeling Technologies um 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 of fundraising emails you know like most fundraising emails they need to come up with new ones every day to send to people right

they'll basically use the same types of of uh themes and and and messages is you're probably going to e test them anyway so instead of having a bunch of you know 23 year olds who just you know graduated from Lial arts colleges like typing out your first drafts and trying to see whether the 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

probably that the the most we're seeing um AI or automation being used in this campaign but I think obviously that'll change over the next few years right um why are why is comla doing like a 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 they're 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 seasonal Industries I guess like a July 4th fireworks store Bic right so like um Halloween store probably make some interesting pricing decisions on November 1 right um so one thing is that they like have a lot of money they have to get out the door and all of the TV is bought up in you know we're down to seven Battleground States

the TV markets are saturated there's a point at which you can no longer send out new direct mail um 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 uh the end of this you know right before election Daye 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 and I think

that that um you know that that's when you start to see like sound trucks and stuff like that because there's nowhere else to put it so some people called this election the the sort of the the 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 um Federal standard for presidents I just need to

know if my president's a good hang or not yeah and theovon might be the only guy who could save us there um you know Trump did Rogan JD Vance just did a three-hour thing with Rogan and famously kamla and you know Rogan said hey you can come out to Austin and let's do you know two three hours un unedited in my studio she said no um there's two reactions to that one was wow what a dropped ball you could have got 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 for Kamala anyways what do you think about the role of podcast 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 was that

week where she did call uh uh Daddy and and the view and it was like oh to co be Tim or something 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 a at an inopportune Point she had to pick a VP she had to get ready for you know a nomination speech debates all the stuff that she did not expect she was going to have

to do a few weeks earlier so um but also you know one of the advantages that Democrats had in 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 like work a full day and do a bunch of things that Biden isn't expect to do the other thing is she's more Dynamic and she's you know more in tune with pop culture and I think there was some sense that wow Democrats are going to go from somebody who does like three rallies

a week and his his staff is afraid to put in you know on like Face the Nation not even F Von like just somebody who can do five events a day and interviews Non-Stop and she's charismatic and and and intellic 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 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 and that would be could be sensible to me um the other or was it that the staff was fundamentally afraid that downside of going into an unstructured two hours with Joe Rogan offsets the the upside of of 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 what's the premise and then can you give me maybe one of the juicy findings or learnings

uh or stories that you had from it yeah so it's about this sort of New Era we've we've 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 is not their opponent it's not another candidate or party it it it could be you know the foreign intelligence service or somebody who's you know attacking you for shits and giggles or or who knows what and and how sort of what the the search for a playbook for for learning how to communicate in

that environment because it blows up so many of the expectations about about campaign strategies and I write a bit about that Biden uh uh example in there which I think was really a really important shift in starting to think about the recipients of disinformation more than the producers of disinformation which has been I think a big mistake that that not just campaigns with people in the media make and trying to understand what impact only will have I also read 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 and meme makers online um uh you know the guy who had like the most likes on imar 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 me you need 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 you know be kind of in the pop culture com ation do not feel like political communication do not feel like marketing um and you know I I I quote one of their um 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 oneway broadcast Dynamic that a lot of the modern um uh thinking about campaigning was shaped into the kind of you know two-way or or multi-linear sort of environment that of of social media it reminds me of like when you had TV and movies were like the dominant video like media 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 this harmless scene and then it finally like you get to the characters and the story if you ever watch a Tik Tok 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 got to watch this video like I hang out with Mr Beast and he's like he could recite to me the first 40 seconds of of script from a video he

did three 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 because 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 mean he's like dude TV would never survive uh on YouTube right you he's like people would click away it have terrible retention rates terrible clickthrough 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 candidates message and it's just those two it's a one V one um you know there's one Playbook and now you're saying you're just playing the field there's 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 One V one 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 Bas 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 onto social media platforms can we can we do something online that looks can we basically take our Direct Mail program out of the the 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 out foxed on online during the Trump era to started 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 going to you're a 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 um you know taking advantage of so less maybe not economic upside um but sort of political entrepreneurial upside

would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles and um uh you know I think there's a great example now like the best I think we're 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 have 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 in and inflation were in 2021 was because of the guy who was just there reminding people about some of the co Dynamics but like they pulled away from him at just the moment that they Pro they could have um continued to Define him and I think there are a lot of reasons for that

political money disappears out of cycle you only get the of interest in cycle but um there's sort people starting to talk about party-based branding right so like so much of our political our political communication paid Comm tv ads are almost entirely about candidates and yet like when we started this conversation was that basically 45% of of the country are Democrats and 45% are Republicans and they'll always vote for their party and yet no political advertising has spent branding the parties and I think they're advantages to do doing that in a counter cyclical 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 um and try to think about not just winning votes in an election but but sort of long-term audience building for 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 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 ad percent of of AD spend and you know digital advertising is more labor intensive for them but buying TV is you know they're 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 in their you know that that that's and it's been that way for decades and is is is is there one like dominant ad buyer that that like there 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 know probably in on the high end in the in hundred million Revenue range we're not

talking about you know huge companies but um but it it really does not require at this point a lot of Savvy or or right or or or labor ad buyers one give me one more is there any other cool business that uh that is maybe it's like a oneman shop that makes you know 10 million a year just doing a specific thing or is there any other interesting business Niche that that you just stumbled into there's still some interesting stuff to be done with d 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 they're have probably opportunities to figure out how to package and translate that for smallscale campaign that do not have professionals always working on them the person running for State R in your neighborhood her

brother might be like the effect facto campaign manager and whatever else and often the the Delta between what what a sort of engaged lay person 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 to price those and and create tools that are more accessible that that's where I I think that's a place that if people were looking to try get into the sort of tech end of the political business there's there

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 tell them what they need to know yeah my new book's called the LIE detectives and search of a playbook for winning elections in the disinformation age and I have a website Sasha Eisenberg so it's my first name and last name.com um you can find all my books there my my first one's about the global Sushi business which may be

of interest to to to to you too so um it's been really fun I I love talking about politics from an angle that's different than one people are saying on CNN on any given day so thank you all right thanks so much man that was great [Music]