Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns

art everybody election day in the united states it's 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 podcast that you like i'm just a guy who does business and i've made a little bit of money in 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 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 isaac studied this for a couple of decades now and he wrote a book that i thought was really good called the victory lab so 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 where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a year and it seems like there's this thing where this whole industry that gets paid to help politicians get elected i think it's something like six billion dollars 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 a politician had no charisma nothing we could do there right they they they need to deflect an 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 and sharing what's actually working not and did you have to kinda like read between the lines to try to figure out where 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 i was fortunate that i reported this book between election cycles if you go in right now and you ask the paris campaign or the trump campaign or the super pac 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 marry selectively will leak out stuff and they think they'll help them raise money usually so you'll read a story and wired one story and wired that's like inside kamala arr says 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 does to do a fundraising toward 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 impress 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 cease to exist so everybody is on to another job a lot of them are you know looking for walk or be or returns to their consulting firms or starting new firms develop some trick or tool during the campaigns isn't there like some conference where they all go to like some some beach resort area where they go and they all get drunk and start talking i mean said they're they're there's like a post election sort of conference circuit where democrats or republicans come together new to kinda trade notes but they they need to launch a business i mean it's basically like every two years there's a like a new sort of window for startups ups 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 talk to a reporter because if you were caught leaking even the most minor thing inside a campaign that is you know fireballs immediately fire offense because they don't wanna anybody but the spokesman the candidate talking to them and then two days later they were trying to figure out what they're gonna 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 twenty twelve you had this the obama analytics department which is really pioneering out that they like fifty two fifty four people and this analytics bro this time it's huge they called it the cave and these guys you know i i was reporting throughout the year for sla at that point and and was able to e 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 summon people on the analytics went into his office to say did you talk to sasha because you know there was some in quest to find that like it was pretty preset and then the day after you know a whole bunch of them basically we're getting eric schmidt to launch a phone for them and we're out giving 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 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 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 their political actors who wanna tell that story right like moderates in the democratic party of kamala harris will win will say because she took moderate positions on this and that but there people who from a sort of technical tactical perspective one is will wanna say it's because the tv ads are really persuasive or right 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 jazz just really the 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 a agenda and i i and i think you know from a reader viewers perspective be be wary of any sort of mono causal explanation for anything in in electoral politics no one thing did anything right right right it's no well i i don't think it's fascinating that you you know when you're talking about the behavioral change aspect one of the great things any entrepreneur could do is sort of learn from ad adjacency and so basically saying hey if we wanna 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 geraldine wrote the 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 and here's your neighbors and we'll be sending an update later that's alpha on the shelf right that's not that's hey the elf is watching and he's gonna tell santa if you're vin naughty or nice it's as simple as that i don't need to explain the virtue and why you should be out it's just very simple 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 gonna hear a talking head explaining they're gonna be talking about certain stories and they're gonna be they're gonna bring on some expert pun who's gonna 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 twenty twenty campaign and you talk in the in the article you wrote about the they realized that they were flushed with cash they were gonna have more funding than they they were gonna have more funding not less funding than what they needed and so i guess the campaign manager or somebody you know asked somebody on other team ago if you had an extra ten 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 monarchy factory and i thought this was pretty fascinating can you talk a little bit about the m factory and specifically this idea of the harm index if you remember that i get i can kinda prompt you it's what i've found fascinating there so you know i think that in in in twenty twenty there was the campaign called a disinformation information 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 ten years in in politics campaign track communication by you could get a record of all the tv ads that are bought by by chance you could see all of them their services that will that will record and allow you to access them digitally you could see all your opponents campaign finance reports you have a pretty good sense of where they're getting money and how they're spending it but you can have a you and and you could read the press coverage or or see what's on the news you had a pretty good idea of where voters were getting their information what the internet change is now like basically anybody had the ability to launch a story and some of these get called this information because they're they're they're transparent apparently false but for like for political operates a real thing was like stuff 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 what we know what our opponents trying to accomplish it they have the same brain we do but if this is like macedonian teenagers who are trying to gain like 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 last like we don't we can't game out right like what they're thinking stories are going viral it could have an impact and we don't know who or why the it's it's who's behind it yeah and so the initially impulse wise don't you know you you'd have all these sort of lessons from the old worlds kind of media consultants like don't let it an attack bill unanswered right always be on ole 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 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 you elevate it you can you can end up engagement algorithms can end up could end up helping spread by you trying to fact check it and so the biden campaigns 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 response to them and basically as they said playing whack them mole with like whatever the new thing that was trending that day and let's say there's more as a demand side problem the the most of the stuff we probably don't need to respond to it's not actually gonna 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 paris or about certain issues and so let's preemptively try to understand which viral narratives would be most damaging to the campaign we do the most harm so that when they pop up on a given and day we have a framework for not over reacting or or reacting to the wrong one so this was the harm index that was the the idea there yeah that's what we with this big survey over the course of the summer of of of twenty twenty and they and they took a lot of storylines some based in truth in and and a lot based statement in some version of lies that that victoria made the ticket so they you know and they would ask voters basically like three question why are you familiar with this to does it do you think it's true in three do you would it make you less likely to vote for joe biden it that's that's very simple right for three three three questions and they're doing this in person this is online how do they get this online it this was online panel testing i think that they get and they would just show them a headlight right they'd be like hundred by a top corruption right so yes so the hunter biden corruption stuff this would before the laptop i think but you know trump had already been impeached about trying to draw attention to as you ukraine ties a lot of people said that they were familiar with this hunter biden itself 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 indicate out that people people did not think the biden was fundamentally driven by his personal financial gain 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 buying none a core issue however the stuff related to his age and his mental fur that stuff obviously a lot of people knew about it and at the same time though a lot of persuade 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 was a news to campaign that they find the had an age problem in twenty twenty 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 bi or like tom to jog up the stairs to his plane like and 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 concern like that he wasn't gonna get his steps in in the white house he were des is 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 primary decree he's never the main character of that race and there are a lot of voters who said basically like i kinda like the guy but i don't really know what he cares about or what he wants to do or who he's gonna listen to and that manifests it it wasn't it was about his political weakness but it manifests itself in being susceptible to questions being raised about his physical 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 cut intent persuade voters who would be exposed to that type of content work so there'd been this effort on the left for a while to to to boycott fox news and b part websites the biden campaign i know we're buying advertising there because we wanna get next to the content that people are seeing too they bought like search terms so if you typed in you know biden and s and aisle or something you you would probably get cookie and shown like a youtube pre roll ad and they were things that if you were modeled is one of the suitable voters who was sensitive on this age thing you would get targeted but you would not any idea that it was about his age the most successful ad that they tested to these people was fifteen seconds of biden to camera just talking about like i grew up in scranton and i've have middle class values and that's why i wanna you know cut taxes on middle class people and raise them on the rich or something like really ban now because all the research suggested that these people just wanted to hear him and 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 by claims that he was seen now i just wanted to hear that like he could articulate is basic is basic world view right in in a firm voice direct to camera not edited like you know and they were suspicious of of states that looked too glossy or too slick 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 something like yeah worse and here's and hear some stock footage of farmers you know eating ice cream and like no it's like really signed it very clearly looked une edited because the because the people who are sort of open to this were were ones who are sort of a innate suspicious of political communication right right and so this idea of they took the stories and they're like you the sleepy joe stories you got the creepy joe stories you got the biden stories tested on people figure out three questions have you heard about this do you think it's true and is this gonna 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 she on a bike that counters the sleepy joe message i think they had the score were on the x axis and it's like number of people who are aware of it on the y axis it's like how much it's gonna impact their votes they just they could just have a board that showed all the issues as like oh a lot of people are aware about this hundred biden thing but not not affected about low harm score a twenty five harm score and then yeah i skipped keep up march on because like i think the first of little podcasting has described charts people love them yeah the x axis was the reach so harm index the x axis was the reach right how many people had heard about it right and why axis was what the influence info effect yeah you know impact and so you know and basically the the campaign thinking tactically on this was 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 or 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 trump so you wrote that book in twenty twelve i think twenty eleven twenty twelve at time yeah yep 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 gonna win initially and therefore we he talked about 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 when when do 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 twenty sixteen what he did the conventional sense was the big the big shift was he went from an 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 which is much smaller than hillary clinton's was typically there's a lopsided cited difference 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 he has like half the money there's a comparing which is like on 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 spent forty thousand dollars on facebook ads right you never see high level campaigns any size that are that are at parity of those two and the reason trump spent was ready to spend money online starting in real way starting in the spring of twenty sixteen was that jared kushner came to him and convince him that this what trump doesn't like spending money and he's you know hates claims also doesn't use a computer yeah so so this is kind of amazing like did you see this clip that's going viral right now of him sitting they're watching kamala speech have you seen this clip i haven't yeah so it's it's it's from some i think there's like a documentary i guess this like a a a clip from it and so it's called the art of the surge i i'm not sure if it's out okay yeah and so he's sitting next to this blonde woman i don't know who she is and he's literally like or rating his tweets so he sees kamala say something on tv and then he goes no way we're gonna let that happen exclamation point not on my watch send and then she's typing and she said and he just does like sixteen of those in like this like clip because people never knew like wait this guy doesn't use computers he's he even behind his social and it they generated him doing that which is hilarious so from that point he'd had up he had a twitter account for five 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 kushner came to and convinced him the 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 by fun bite through for for fundraising she typically tv ads you you pay the money to try and 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 wanna give you money you can obviously this is why charities do online fundraising raising and stuff and so trump started spending real money on facebook because he was seeing a return on and that resonated to him it was it was the it was the you know it was economic mode of fundamentally more than it was part of a political strategy and what he ended up doing in by the combination of his organic ability to draw attention online in ways that that traditional politicians couldn't and the fact that they work amplifying and cat it through through we ends 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 were part of it and you know i think that we thought at the time you know the idea was at 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 twenty sixteen the measure of a successful online politician was how many sign ups 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 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 would had chosen to to sign on in some way well he basically asked them to give money and occasionally to volunteer or take some action but it was very transactional it was very one cited and what we realized in retrospect and that was true basically every politician in the united states till trump came along what trump did mostly by instinct not by any strategy or i think great abstract conception of like how to communicate digitally because just gets it in a in a animal way was that you should engage like a poster does right and that means allow whenever never like re amplify is re retweeted or shared his his supporters content why because if you're the obama campaign in two thousand twelve you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on opinion research pulling focus groups other qualitative research testing your ads and your mail you have come down at that point you have come to the to the syllable on what you wanna say on which issues when to whom how and the whole campaign is this command control exercise to make sure that you're 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 it with their followers is so anti empathetic to the weight that political professionals think about the best way to community and trump does it because he doesn't impulsive that's funny let's share it right and what he did was he created a community of people who are in invest did who felt like they were part of a campaign and they ended up you know the whole mean culture around him the online mega community is is is i think a far more satisfying satisfying place for its members to reside online because they get all this reinforcement from like biden did people that obama hillary clinton or joe biden never gave even if they collected a lot of names and people who ended up giving them money on one right and that 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 whenever else but there's you know still the idea you have to re 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 one dollar becomes two that two becomes three and three becomes four that we can just continue to fund raise this way and then and ultimately if somebody's giving you their money they're probably also gonna 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 beach and in terms of what you say and where and someone 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 now was if you're spending a lot of money prospecting on facebook telling people why you're great some of that will go to people who will end up shipping in ten 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 do not typically think that that they thought of it as we're having we have our fundraising targets we have our almost by definition or not your persuasion targets because your persuasion targets are people whose minds aren't made up your fundraising targets are people 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 he's like an influencer brand right in the same with it you know kylie gen kinda kylie jenner can sell you know makeup better than than than a 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 my 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 i i could tell you trump's community which is the mag movement and to kinda 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 what it would only be people who ate trump i think is the only answer even there was a little bit of they clone themselves the k hive 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 the tour are particularly broad based enthusiasm for her never met a lot of k h yeah she has been at some disadvantaged and there 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 right you know i i think that she i think it'll be an interesting conversation had after the selection as to whether she will have had the shortest presidential campaign and modern american history by far right i mean that the general tendency has been towards these two year campaigns and she's gonna have a four months right campaign well she's done a couple things well right she raised a lot of money very quickly she's she's out outraged trump she's also i've you know her tiktok when she started you know picked a medium and it seems like they were picking alternate medium so you know trump has done a lot of podcast she's done a couple the 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 ear worms like you know jd vance you know i'm a never trump guy song that that that was great now they've done a bunch of things like that you know when he said the thing about eating the dogs that the cats you know within minutes it's viral on tiktok as a song that somebody remix and so i think they've done a lot of interesting things there does any of that stand out to you do have opinions on any of that i'm curious how you look at that 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 a school of thought among democrats it's pretty prevailing i think for for most of the trump's which don't give them oxygen don't give him exposure you're only feeding the whatever and they would sold journalists or like why are you taking speech is live and why are you guys sharing have clips of everything he says and now go to the cam kamala 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 these seven seconds he said that you know you can electro 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 that the digital team in in the campaign which is basically inherited entirely from that biden campaign they feel a little un shack they have much more to work with i think that there was you know obviously they have a candidate who's more dynamic and him closer to pop culture and more celebrities who are eager to be associated with the campaign they also you know i think that there was a a a sense that biden in so emphasized like the dignity of the office and trump has beneath this that there was a a sense of like let's not get down in the mud and and play trump's game and and i think that there's a real freedom to do kinda name calling and stuff that that the biden people would have thought is sort a competitor than their brand right you know and so so yeah i think that they've been far more willing to mix it up in online i i i do think though this is an area where she'd 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 mean and they we're doing things in august the campaigns are usually doing the previous march like you know dining a logo right i mean like really like day one type type things you've studied covered elections for like more than fifteen years i think who do you think is running the better campaign right now not who's gonna win but who's running a better campaign i thought trump for most of the year was running as good a campaign is he could run now i start to see a real mismatch which you 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 man especially young men of color 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 fewer 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 in about suggested that you know the best way to do that is high quality face to face interactions from a volunteer be you should a volunteer from a voters community in them to to have these sort of socially meaningful interactions to give them really practical advice like you know where's their 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 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 funded super pac 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 going from a hundred people in west philadelphia knocking on doors to two hundred people knocking on doors in west philadelphia he takes twice as much working in capital going from a hundred ads on tv and 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 fifteen years about how do you divide responsibilities to campaigns in the super packs outside different sets of rules different advantages for reaching them and typically the way it's broken down is the campaigns and the party committees will do that labor intensive support that doesn't scale up and the app 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 trunk people will blown up that model and they're now trusting this outside group that it musk runs to do this door knocking saying what is he doing because i actually haven't followed it fully i i he's going mister beast he's given away a million dollars a day i i i don't even understand what that is can you explain that what what is elon doing so he's paying people to get their friends to sign petitions you get like in a forty seven dollar bounty or something if you can get your friend to sign a petition that says like i believe in the first and second amendment and give your information 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 round way to get information that's already available like there's already a database in every motor in the state and if i wanted to know people in pennsylvania who care about you know who are conservative or you know or mega or an and own a gun like that's a company they should publicly available or viable information i shouldn't have to pay people to go collect it from their neighbors 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 yeah that elon musk is trying to build a a generational movement here 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 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 had some good reporting daily beast i think on it's like as in any industry hiring people off the street and and paying them by the hour or or or pull a contacts leads to a lot of bad work and you have a lot of really poor incentives for people either be inefficient or or give you bad data if you're if you're if you're paying them per complete so i i i have sort of shifted my view on the confidence of the the the trump organization over the course of year because it seems like they've they've they haven't aligned their strategy with their their tactics and and an organization and i think kamala harris is like a far more traditional democratic campaign and there's a a kind of more sensible logic to even if if she's made a few mistakes along the way it sounded like the thing elon doing you know he's trying to sign it you can't pay people to vote that's illegal so it's kinda 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 it seems like there must be some some three d chest going on that i'm not i i don't fully understand which is what 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 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 voter and you signed a petition dev voting yourself to the cause now do this and this like there's actually a reason that think that works that's just then one step that's just the first step in a three or four step process and need to be really good and targeted at the next few steps because you know one real difference it's important i think for for your audience he mind when you learning from adjacent field is is great and important and a lot of the breakthroughs i've written about comfort people and politics looking into into business or elsewhere but there's some really different really important differences between business marketing and political marketing and one of them is that the cost of gonna of mis targeting out of a false positive and 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 or like whatever okay you wasted ten cents for that person big deal if you are the trunk campaign and you send a door knock 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 or there's one trump supporter in that house but you remind three other people the three women living with that triple un trump supporter that it's election day on tuesday two and it makes them more likely to vote or your person 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 remind you 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 mis identifying your targets is maybe an insurance or or or credit cards where if if a company thinks that they can extend you a ten thousand dollar or 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 five hundred dollar premium and it turns out that you cost them a lot more they 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 and make is they move from business of 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 digital advertising about tesla offer them all a free test drive into you know a cocktail in our at our or at our cool 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 hurt you've talked to the teams behind this and then the different subs sections of this industry what's like you i don't wanna i clean my house and i moved the couch and i'm like oh my god there's ten years of my kids snacks under here like what's the thing or you 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 they the disinformation stuff is 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 we're 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 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 a morning in america i if i think that you're likely to care a lot about about you know cancer research and i give you a 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 changes i think you have so many people have the ability to reach large numbers and voters now who 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 oh what's going on now because ai has now made it easy to do deep fake audio i can make i can make it i can make donald trump say anything yeah for like you know thirty 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 have thought if we had this conversation a year ago you know i think the campaigns this is a place there were some campaigns that wanted to be first because i realized i'd get a lot of attention and and and wanted that but i think most campaigns are afraid of the backlash of of of being associated with with ai even for not necessarily even from for manipulation but just like you know on non live callers and and so i think if 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 and so there's been less of that but where people are using ai the most in this campaign is like sort of the same way we all might use it which 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 themes and and and messages you're probably gonna e test them anyway so instead of having a bunch of you know twenty three year olds who just you know graduated from liberal arts colleges like type out your first drafts and trying to see whether the the one that scares people in the thinking you're losing was gonna do better than the one that has like jl lo signature under it why not have the machine come up with ten different jl ones and test those and that's i think like probably the that 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 why is comb 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 markers which is like one you have one day by which all your sales have to be completed i don't think there's another in mean they're seasonal industries i guess like july fourth fireworks store basically that right so like halloween store why i make some interesting pricing decisions on november first right so one thing is that they like have a lot of money they have to get out the door and all of the tv has bought up in you know we're down to seven battleground states the tv markets are saturated there's a point in 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 seek the end of this you know right before le election 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 parks money and and i think that that you know that that's when you start to see like sound trucks and stuff like that because there's just nowhere else to put it so some people have called this election the the sort of the the the podcast election because you have podcasts have become this huge medium you have una edited unfiltered conversations it's kinda 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 podcast should be a new federal standard for presidents i just need to know if my president is a good hang or not yeah and theo vaughn might be the only guy who could save us there you know trump did rogan jd vance just did a three hour thing with ro and famously kamala and you know rogan said hey you can come out to austin and let's do you know two three hours une une edited in my studio she said no there's two reactions to that one was wow what a dropped ball you could have got in front of thirty 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 for the election how do you have demands you should be you know crawling to her to do this and other people would say you're not gonna convince anybody who listens to rogue and vote for your comp for 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 was slow to put her out in a lot of different venues you know there's was that week where she did call caller and and the the view and it was like oh and the misha she colbert or kim or something i 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 ina 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 gonna to do a few weeks earlier so 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 and expect to do the other only thing that she's more dynamic and she's you know more in tune with pop culture and i think there was some sense that wow will go from somebody who does like three rallies a week and his his staff is afraid to put in you know i'm like face the nation not even feels on like to somebody who can do five events a day and interview nonstop and she's charismatic and and are intel 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 the other or was it that the staff is fundamentally afraid that the downside of going into an unstructured two hours with joe rogan offsets the the upside of of of getting in front of that audience could 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 could 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 we've we've bouncing it out of this but the new as that's created when in this digital environment where campaign realized 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 goals or or or or who knows want 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 alright a bit about that biden 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 people in the media make and trying to understand what impacts will have but i also worried about really interesting group called we defend truth that this this it's a progressive group that has been trying to fight basically conspiracy theories around the twenty twenty election around around covid vaccines they basically have gone out and hired some of the more successful like gif and makers online you know like a guy who had like the most likes on him and stuff and then our 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 yeah have to fight music to be you unique and you need to be communicating in the way that that online audiences expect to be communicating which means be course and be and be funny and you know be kind of in the pop culture conversation do not feel like political communication do not feel like marketing and you know i i i quote one of their the sort of head guy there he says like each 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 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 what he's doing and then there's like this harmless scene and then it finally like you get to the characters in the story if you're watching a tiktok or a youtube video like in the first five seconds they're doing something to tell you do not click away stay on this video you gotta watch you video like i hang out with mister beast and he's like he could recite to me the first forty 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 i mean he's like do tv would never survive on youtube and right you you 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 candidates message and it's just those two it's a one v one you know there's one playbook and now you're saying you're just playing the field there's the field of the internet right 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 gonna respond to not a one view 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 i think it we're only now starting to get you know people had had campaigns having a more instinct understanding it used to be so much of online campaigning you know in the two thousand twenty ten was basically let's say things we're already doing offline and figure out how to move them online right okay so we know how it make thirty second videos and put them on tv let's just turn them into you know maybe we have to go from vertical horizontal or vertical or whatever but let's just figure out how to get them on 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 on into email and now i think we're starting to get people in politics some of it's a generational shift some of its democrats realizing how poorly they've been out fox on online during the trump barr 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 wanna i wanna leave with one last question which is what do you think is the most mis priced or misunderstood opportunity in elections meaning if somebody hired you and they're like are you're gonna you're our consultant and you got to give them input to do something 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 you know taking advantage of so let's maybe not economic upside but sort of political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles and you know i think there's great example now like the best i think we're gonna if trump weighs this election we're gonna look back and say arguably his best period was a period in twenty twenty one twenty twenty when he was largely out of the news republicans are 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 twenty twenty was like when he was president but have distance helped him and if democrats kept like a foot on his neck through advertising reminding people yes the reason you know wherever unemployment was in in in inflation weren't in twenty twenty one was because of the guy who was just there reminding people about some of the covid dynamics plot like they pulled away from him at just the moment that they prop they could have 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 surge of interest in cycle but there's sure people starting to talk about party based branding right so like so much of our political our political communication pay tv are almost entirely about candidates and yet like when we started this conversation was that basically forty five percent of of the country or democrats of forty five percent of republicans and they'll always vote for their party and no political advertising has spent branding the parties and i think their advantages to do doing that in a counter 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 democrat screwed up last time or vice versa 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 maybe you could also be one of these these political consultant shops that are making bank what what is the what is the business that's stunned you of how much it makes in the 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 media buyers who get paid a commission off of off the ads they place where percent of ad members spend of of ad spend and you know digital advertising is more labor intensive for them but buying tv is you know there only so many stations in in wisconsin that you can put ads on and you know it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a a commission off of in they're you know that that that's in it's been that way for decades and it's is is it back is there one like dominant ad buyer that that like there's on in each party but 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 hundred million dollar revenue range we're not talking about you know huge companies but 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 that maybe it's like a one man shop that makes you know ten million a year just doing a specific thing or is there any other interesting business niche that that you did stumbled into there's still some interesting stuff to be done with data and modeling 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 twelve years ago now somebody running for county executive can use and i'm not sure that there are this is more an opportunity that people is master but i think that they're have 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 personal ranked for state rep in your neighborhood her brother might be like the effect to factor campaign manager and whatever else and often the the delta between what what sort of engaged lay person trying to run a campaign can do and the sophistication of the tools and data available just too much to bridge and they go do it but there probably is a way to to price those and and create tools or they're more accessible well and that that's where i 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 there's price some opportunity very cool sasha i appreciate you coming on and give us a 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 books called the lie detectives and searchable a playbook for winning elections in the disinformation age and i a website sasha is that's my first name and last name dot com you could find all my books there my my first one is about the global sushi business which maybe of interest to to to to you too so yep it's been really fine i i love talking about politics from an angle that's different than one people are just staying on cnn on any given day so thank you alright thanks so much ma'am that was great you i feel like i could rule world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal travel and never looking back