Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns

All right, everybody, election day in the United States is just a few days away, and I'm here to officially endorse. Nobody because you should not be trying to get political advice from a podcaster that you like. I'm just a guy. Who does business and I've made a little bit of money on the internet. That does not make me an expert. 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 dolly 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 episode. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to 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 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 love 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 s 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 and not?

And Did you have to kinda 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 Uh Harris campaign or the Trump campaign or the super PECs working for them.

You know, show me exactly how you're you're testing your ads on on online platforms. They are Maybe they will tell you some stuff. They very selectly will leak out stuff that they think it'll help them raise money usually. So you'll read a story in Wired.

One story and wire that's like inside Kamala Harris's ad testing machine. And details are very carefully selected over the course of you know, during the campaign to give out to one piece that then they can send out when they go out when she goes to do a fundraising tour and, 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 the Anything to the competition. Right.

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 are returned to their consulting firms or starting new firms. Develop 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 a 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 talk to a reporter because if you are caught leaking even the most minor thing inside it. campaign that is, you know Fireable e immediately fireable expense offense'cause they don't want anybody but the spokesman or the candidate talking to them. And then two days later, they are 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 remember in twenty twelve. You had this um the Obama analytics department, which is really pioneering out that they had like fifty-two, fifty-four people in this analytics branch, which time was huge. They called it the cave. And these guys you know, I I was recording throughout the year for Slade 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 corner into his office to say, Did you talk to Sasha? Because Yeah, there were some inquests to find that 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 phone. for them and were 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 the issue with that campaign is it has a binary outcome, right? One candidate wins and the other one loses. And No one thing.

ever shapes that outcome. Not traditional things like You know what? Whatever happens on Tuesday. It did not happen because one of the candidates chose the right vice presidential nominee or not. It did not happen just because of the Just because

You know, Harris had a better debate performance than Trump. It did not happen just because turnout was up in Pennsylvania and down in Nevada. It was a confluence of Dozens, hundreds of big and small things. And it's It's a storytelling exercise. To see who can basically tell the most convincing story about why the election turned out the way it did. And there are political actors who want to tell that story, right? Like

Moderates in the Democratic Party of Kamala Harris will win Wheeling because she took moderate positions on this and that. But there are people who from a sort of technical, tactical perspective, wanna will wanna say It's because the TV ads were really persuasive, or it's because our social media strategy was so good. And You need a good bullshit meter and you know, and then the best way to do that is just really be alert to everybody's incentives for telling certain types of stories and be skeptical of Uh

of the times where people have a a real Obviously transparent agenda. And I think I and I think You know, from a reader's viewers perspective. Be uh

Be wary of any sort of monocausal explanation for anything in in electoral politics. No one thing did anything. Right. Well, I 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. Instead of 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, Sheldini wrote that book, you know, about persuasion, not for politics at all, but you could use things like that. I mean it's like W the way you describe that kind of like hey

Your 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 how that's hey, the elf is watching and he's gonna tell Santa if you're Vinati or nice. It's as simple as that. I don't need to explain the virtues and why you should be Vinaughty 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 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 pundit 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's twenty twenty campaign. And you talk uh in the in the article you wrote about the uh they realized that they were flush with cash. Uh they were gonna have more funding than they uh they were gonna 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 idea of the harm index, if you remember that. I can I can kind of prompt you. It's what I found fascinating there.

So you know, I think that in in in twenty twenty 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 it, you know, if you go back just Eight, ten years in in politics. Campaign.

Uh operatives retract communication by you could get A record of all the TV ads that are bought. um by by cans, you can see all of them. There's 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, 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 could 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 they're transparently false. But for a 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?

'Cause it's not coming from our opponent. Like we know what our opponent's trying to accomplish. They have the same brain we do. But if this is like Macedonian teenagers who are trying to gain like Uh online clicks for for ad revenue, or this is a foreign intelligence service, or this is somebody like in their basement doing it for for the laughs. Like we don't

We can't game out like what they're thinking. Stories are going viral. It could have an impact and we don't know who or why the w 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 consultants like don't let it uh an attack go unanswered, right?

Always be on all fence. 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 Could end up Till being spreaded by you. Trying to fact check it.

And so the Biden campaign's mentality was let's shift from thinking about this as a supply side problem. Which is Thinking about individual bits of content that are coming out every day and deciding how and when to respond to them and basically, as they said, playing whack a mole with like whatever the new thing that was trending that day. And let's think of this more as a demand side problem. That

Most of the stuff we probably don't need to respond to. It's not actually gonna change voters' opinions. But the stuff that we do need to respond to the campaign said is the stuff The the 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, 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. So this was the harm index. That was the the idea there? Yeah, that's what we end up with this big survey over the course of the summer of of um of twenty twenty 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 the Tory made 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 in three do you um Would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden? That's that's very simple, right? Three s three three questions. And they're doing this in person. This is online. How do they get this out? This was online. This was online panel testing, I think that they did. And they would just show them a headline, right? They'd be like

Hunter by his laptop level. Right. So yes. So The Hunter Biden corruption stuff. This would be for the laptop, I think, but You know.

Trump had already been impeached about trying to draw attention to his Ukraine ties. A lot of people said that they were familiar with this Hunter Biden stuff. Not that many people said that it would actually make them less likely to to vote for Joe Biden. And then they did focus groups and it came out that people People did not think that Bain was fundamentally driven by his personal financial gain. And so They might be a little bit more.

They might have been familiar with it. They might have even thought that there was some truth to it, but it didn't really change the way that they thought about Biden on a core issue. However, the stuff related to his age and his mental infirmity That stuff, obviously a lot of people knew about it. Um And at the same time, though, a lot of persuadable voters said it would make them less likely to vote for Biden. And the focus groups revealed that it wasn't that they were actually

This wasn't news to the campaign that they find then an age problem. in twenty twenty. Um and the way that the communication staff on the campaign had dealt with this thus far was They would send up like photo ops of him him bicycling or like tell him to jog up the stairs to his plane. Um like and

And What came back from the focus groups was like this was all wrong. Voters were not worried about Uh his physical Well being, they weren't concerned like that he wasn't gonna 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 equation. 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. Yeah,

That manifest its it wasn't it was about his political weakness, but it manifests itself in being susceptible to questions being raised about his physical condition and mental condition. And so what the the way the campaign responded to those was first they went out and they

started buying ads in places where people who would be exposed to that type of content Persuadable voters who would be Explosive that type of content won't. So There've been this effort on the left for a while to to To boycott Fox News and Bright Bart 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. Two they bought like search. term so if you typed in, you know, Biden and Seen Isle 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 the stage 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 fifteen 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 wanna, you know, cut taxes on middle class people and raise them on the rich or something like really banal.

Because All the research suggested 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 Yeah.

who could be turned off by the attack by claims that he was senile just wanted to hear that like he could articulate his basic his basic world view Right. Like you know, and 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 of political advertising, right? Like a lot of like Here's a headline and here's a thing and here's a cut and here's some stock footage of farmers, you know, eating ice cream and like no, it's like really something that very mo clearly looked unedited. Um,'cause the'cause the people who are sort of

open to this were were ones who were sort of innately suspicious of political communication. Right, right. And so the this idea of They took the stories and they're like you had the sleepy Joe stories, you got the creepy Joe 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 this gonna like, you know? sh would make you less likely to vote for for for Biden. Super simple. And then basically counter figuring out what is the counter programming message. At first they thought, hey, show them on a bike.

That counters the oh sleepy job message. I think they had the score where on the X axis it was like number of people who are aware of it on the Y axis, it's like how much it's gonna impact their vote. So they just they could just have a board that showed all the issues as like, oh, a lot of people are aware about this Hunter Biden thing, but It's not not affected a vote, low harm score, a twenty five harm score.

And then Yeah, I skipped that part, Sean,'cause like I think the first little podcasting is describe charts. People love that in podcasts. The x axis was the reach. So Carmen Dex. The X axis was the reach, right? How many people had heard about it? Right. And the y axis was What the info. Yeah. 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 4 chan to

Two 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 Yeah. 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. That book in twenty twelve, I think, twenty eleven, twenty twelve time. Yep.

So then. This guy who is You know. personal the T V 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 he's talking about like I didn't really have a plan'cause 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, what do you see? Do you see this kind of like master marketer? Do you just see this anomaly? Do you see 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 in the conventional sense was the big the big shift was he went from An uh T V dominated cam uh paying for paid advertising. He obviously dominated T V almost every day of the year in terms of free media coverage. But his budget

Um, which is much smaller than Hillary Clinton's Wise Typically there's a lopsided indifference between TV spending And digital spending and and and also by direct mail and some of the the non digital tools. And I think he had he had like half the money. Which is like unheard of. The only place where you might see that.

These days 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 forty thousand dollars on Facebook ads, right? You never see high-level campaigns of any size that are that are at parity in those two. And the reason Trump Spent mm. Was ready to spend money online starting uh in real way, starting in the spring of twenty sixteen, was the Jared Cushner.

This w Trump is doesn't like spending money. Um and he's You know. T

Close to the closed. So this is kind of amazing. Like uh did you see this clip that's going viral right now? Of Him sitting there watching Kamala's speech. Have you seen this clip? I don't know. I haven't. So it's it's uh it's from some I think there's like a documentary, I guess. There's like a a a clip from it.

And so uh it's called the Art of the Surge. I'm not sure if it's that yeah. And so He's sitting next to this blonde woman, I don't know who she is. And he's literally like orating his tweets. So he sees Kamala say something on TV. And then he goes.

Um No way we're gonna let that happen. Exclamation point. Um not on my watch. Send. And then she's typing and she says, and he just does like 16 of those in like this like clip. Because people never knew, like, wait, this guy doesn't use computers, he even behind his social and it and they showed him doing that, which is hilarious. At that point, he'd had a he'd 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 Cusher 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. You could make this a revenue center by fund by through for for fundraising. So you

Typically T V ad you you Pay the money to try and change people's opinion and you hope you get votes afterwards. If you buy ads, you can 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 an economic motive fundamentally more than it was uh 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 work. um amplifying and catalyzing it through through what 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 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 twenty sixteen, 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. 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. Yeah um. But what did Obama do with that?

This Tens of millions of supporters who had had chosen to to um sign on in some way. Well he basically asked them to give money. and occasionally to volunteer or take some action.

Um But it was very transactional. It was very one sided. Uh and What we realize in retrospect, and that was true of basically every politician in the United States till Trump came along. What Trump did.

Mostly by instinct, not by any strategy or I think great Abstract conception of like how to Communicate digitally. 'Cause it gets it in a in a animalistic way.

was that You Should engage like a poster does, right? And That means No mom never like re

Yeah. Amplified his 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 that to that. syllable on what you want to say, on which issues, when, to whom, how. And the whole campaign is this command and control exercise to make sure that you'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 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. Ha ha that's funny, let's share it, right? And what he did was he created

A community of people who were invested who felt like they were part of the campaign and they ended up You know. the whole meme culture around him, the online MAGA community. Is is is a I think a far more satisfying satisfying place for its members to reside online.

'Cause they get all this reinforcement from like minded people. That Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden never gave, even if they collected a lot of names of people who ended up giving them money on line. 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, whatever else, but there's You know. Still s pol 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.

the story there of Cushner coming in and basically like Changing the frame from we spend money to try to buy votes versus we spend money to to rake in more money and then that one dollar becomes two, that two becomes three, and three becomes four, that we can just continue to fundraise 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. Japanes 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 some of it's because of regulations around around political spending, but like Fundraising communication is a very different beast inside a campaign than persuasion or

Or get out the boat. Communication. Right. 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 Uh Some of that will go to people who will end up chipping 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 They 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 uh it seems like, you know, Trump is this kind of blend of uh celebrity's like an influencer brand, right? In the same way that you know

Kylie Jenner, you know, Kylie Jenner can sell, you know, makeup better than uh 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 m 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 commal. I I could tell you Trump's community which is the MAGA movement. And I 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 w it would only be people who hate Trump, I think is the only answer. They call themselves the Khive um uh of like a little cluster of of Kamala supporters, but that campaign did not last long for a reason, which is I don't think that there was a particularly

Broadbase. um enthusiasm for her. And she has been at some disadvantage in There have been advantages to starting a campaign. In July, but a lot of disadvantages and a lot of it is that You know.

Audience online audience takes a long time to build and You know, I I think that she I think it'll be an interesting conversation to have 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 month Uh. Well, she's done a couple of things well, right? She raised a lot of money very quickly. She's she's outraised Trump. She's also

I've seen you know, her TikTok when she started, she, you know, picked a medium and it seems like they were picking alternate mediums. So, you know, Trump has done a lot of podcasts. She's done a couple, but podcast seems to be a bigger part of the equation this this time. She went super viral on TikTok right away and they had A bunch of songs and little earworms like the 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 TikTok as a song that somebody remixed. And so I think they've done a lot of interesting things there. Does any of that stand out to you? Do you have opinions on any of that? I'm curious how you look at that. Um, you know, I think when 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.

Mm, 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 scold journalists who are like, Why are you taking us speeches live? And why are you guys sharing ever 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 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 th 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 Obviously they have a A candidate who's more dynamic and him 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 a sense that Buy in Um

So emphasized like the dignity of the office and Trump is 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 Um, I think that there's a real freedom to do kind of name calling and stuff that that the Biden people would have thought as sort of 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'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 sc you know scrambling to

I mean they were doing things in August that campaigns are usually doing The previous March you know. Designing a logo, right? I mean like really Like day one type. Type things.

You've studied Uncovered 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 as He could run. Now I start to see a real mismatch between what they claim is their strategy and And the organization that they have been building for it, which is

You know, in short. So much of the Trump plan seems to be based on Mobilizing young men, especially young men of color. Um Uh, and there 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 suggests that you know the best way to do that is high quality face to face interactions uh from a volunteer between between a volunteer from a voters 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 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.

Yeah. Going from a hundred people in West Philadelphia knocking on doors to two hundred people knocking on doors in West Philadelphia takes twice as much. Work and capital. Going from a hundred ads on TV in Pennsylvania to the same ads running twice as often takes basically no More effort. And so the way that

There's been this big question for about 15 years about how do you divide responsibilities between campaigns and the super PACs outside. Different sets of rules, different advantages for each of them. And typically the way it's broken down is 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 T V, some digital to amplify The message'cause 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. And what is he doing?'Cause 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 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. So you can 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. Um And w 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 or Maga or and own a gun, like that's

combination of publicly available or viable information. I shouldn't have to pay people to go collect it from their neighbors. Um Ah, 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 that Elon Musk is trying to build a a generational movement here. Um 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, Wire's had some good reporting, uh, Daily Beast, I think, on It's Lincoln is in any industry. hiring people off the street and and paying them by the hour or or um Or per contacts. 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 the year because it seems like they've they've They haven't aligned their strategy with their their tactics and and and organization. And I think Camell 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 Elon's doing that um You know, he's trying to sign 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 seems like there must be some s some 3D chess going on that I've not uh 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 Yeah, one real difference that's important I think for for your audience 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 business or elsewhere, but there are some really different really important differences between business marketing and political marketing. And one of them is that the cost of a

of mistargeting and 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 Ten cents. For that person. Big deal.

If you are the Trump campaign and you send a door knocker To do a get out the vote reminder to somebody who is Your data tells you is should be a Trump supporter, but they're not. Um or There's one Trump supporter in that house, but you remind 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 they end up going to the To the Harris supporter and reminding them? You've not only you haven't just wasted that interaction.

You've created a vote for your opponent. There is nothing the only thing like that in the marketing world Where there's that cost to uh misidentifying your targets is maybe an insurance or or Yeah.

credit cards. Where if if a company thinks they can extend you a ten thousand dollar credit limit and you're not good for it, they made a big mistake, right? If an in if an insurer decides that you That you're a uh you know, should be a five hundred dollar premium. And it turns out that you cost them a lot more, they really scroll 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 all that's the big mistake that a lot of people And perhaps Elon or the people around him make as they move from business to politics, they say, Let's just throw resources at it when I need it 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 and uh you know, a cocktail in our at our at our call 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 disillusioned do you get? And really, I guess the question is. You've now studied multiple election cycles. You've heard you've talked to the teams behind this and then the different subsections of this industry. What's

Like you know, when I clean my house and I move the couch and I'm like, Oh my God, there's 10 years of my kids' snacks under here. Like, what's the thing where you're like, I wish I didn't see that. I wish I didn't know that. What what is the ugliest part of this that that really has uh, 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 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 Kim. 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, Amer 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 turn mid 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.

W what's going on now? Cause AI has now made it easy to do deep fake audio. I can make I can make it so I can make Donald Trump say anything 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. 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 well, maybe less the cycle than I would have thought if we'd had this conversation a year ago. Um You know, I think that campaigns this is a place there were some campaigns that wanted to be first because they realized they'd get a lot of attention and and Um and wanted that, but I think most campaigns

Or 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, on 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

The same way we all might use it, which is like brainstorming first drafts of uh fundraising emails, you know, like most fundraising emails they need to come up with new ones every day to send to people. They'll basically use the same types of of uh Themes and and and messages. you're probably gonna E B test them anyway. So instead of having A bunch of, you know, twenty three year olds who just you know, graduate from local 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 gonna do better than the one that has like J Lo'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 the 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

Combla doing like a a fortnight 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 person having more money than they know what to do with and there 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 industry. I mean there's seasonal industries, I guess, but July fourth fireworks store. Yeah, exactly. Right. So like Um Halloween store probably make some interesting pricing decisions on November first, 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 You know, right before election day, you start to see campaigns making decisions that are driven less by efficient like overall efficiency and more by

Basically, where can we very quickly park some money? And 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. S 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 unedited, unfiltered conversation. It's 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 Vaughn'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 uh Theo Vaughn 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 famous Kamala. And You know, Rogan said, Hey, you can come out to Austin and let's do you know two, three hours unedited in my studio. She said no. Um There's two reactions to that. One was, wow, what a dropped ball. You could have 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 before the election. How dare you have demands you should be, you know. Calling to her to do this. Um and other people would say, You're not gonna convince anybody who listens to Rogan to vote for you com 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 Um Well

Slow to put her out. And A lot of different venues. You know, there's that week where she did call uh Uh And and the the view and it was like oh and then maybe she'd Colbert or Jimmel or something was like oh she's doing media now and

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 this stuff that she did not expect she was gonna 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, just I have more energy. In theory, she can like work a full day and do a bunch of things that Biden isn't expected to do. The only 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 gonna 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 Just somebody who can Do five events a day and

Interviews nonstop and she's charismatic and and and intelligent 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.

That would be could be sensible to me. Um 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. 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

bounce 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 Yeah, the Foreign Intelligence Service or somebody who's

You know, attacking you for shits and giggles or 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 they Not just campaigns of people in the media make and trying to understand what impact something will have. But also we're by 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 twenty twenty election, around around covet vaccines. They basically have gone out and hired some of the more successful like JIF and meme makers online. Um Uh you know, the guy who had like the most likes on him 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 meme 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 conversation, do not feel like political communication, do not feel like marketing.

On 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 r really interesting way of starting to think about how traditional political communication has to fundamentally rethink itself from the one way broadcast dynamic that a lot of the modern Um

uh thinking about campaigning was shaped into the kind of, you know, two way or or multi linear sort of environment that of of social media. It reminds me of like When You had T V and movies were like the dominant video Like medium. And

If you were making a TV show, you could afford to spend the first few minutes if you watch the first couple minutes of a TV show, it'll be like The scene starts in New York. A guy's walkie. We don't know who he is or what he's doing. And then there's like this harmless scene. And then it finally like you get to the characters and the story. If you ever watch 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 this video. Like I hang out with Mr. 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 grab. 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 Dude, T V would never survive.

Uh on YouTube. You could he's like people would click away and have terrible retention rates, terrible click through rates. They couldn't survive in our world. And so similarly, what you're talking about is In the old world where it's my message versus the other candidate's message, and it's just those two, it's a one V one, um, you know, there's one playbook, and now you're saying. You're just playing the field. There's the field of the internet. Where there's stories and information coming from all kinds of different people. With all levels of accuracy and different levels of impact.

How are you gonna 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 it we're only now starting to get You know. People have uh campaigns having a more instinctual understanding. It used to be so much of online campaigning

You know. In the two thousands, 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 to make thirty second videos and put them on TV. Let's m 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 on 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 Fox on online during the Trump era, just started like we need to really step back and rethink. Some of these foundational questions of how and why do you communicate to certain people. I wanna I wanna leave with one last question, which is What do you think is the most mispriced or misunderstood opportunity?

in uh elections. Meaning if somebody hired you and they're like, all right, you're gonna you're our consultant. Um And you got to give them input to do something that maybe they're not already doing or maybe they're doing, but not enough of. Where would you place a bet that you think has sort of

more upside than people are currently um You know, taking advantage of. So less Maybe not Economic Upside. Um

But sort of political entrepreneurial website 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 gonna if Trump wins this election, we're gonna look back and say arguably his best period was a period in twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, 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 Trunk years. A lot of it like Not based in a real understanding of what twenty twenty was like when he was president. But

Having 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 in in and inflation were in twenty twenty one was'cause of the guy who was just there. Reminding people about Some of the covet dynamics but like they pulled away from him at just the moment that

They prop they Could have Um continue to define him. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Political money disappears. out of cycle. You only get the surge of interest in cycle.

But Um There's sort of people starting to talk about party based branding, right? So like so much of our political our political communication, paid community TVS are almost entirely about candidates. And yet Like when we started this conversation was that basically forty-five percent of of the country are Democrats and 45% are Republicans, and they'll always vote for their party. And yet no political advertising is spent branding the parties.

And I think there are advantages to doing doing that in a counter cyclical way when people are not being bombarded by Tons of T V 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 На час 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 if 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 h multi hundred million dollar companies out there that 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 percent of of ad spend and you know digital advertising is more labor intensive for them, but Buying TV is

You know. There are only so many stations in in Wisconsin that you can put ads on and You know, it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a a a commission off off of then they're, you know, that that that's and it's been that way for decades and it's is it that is there one like dominant Ad buyer that that like is no more. There are a handful on uh 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 finding 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 um But it it really does not require at this point a lot of savvy or or Right. Ad buyers one give me one more. Is there any other cool business that uh That is it 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 inter interesting business niche that that you just stumbled into? There's still some interesting stuff to be done with data and modeling. Um, especially, you know, there are a lot of sort of boutique firms that will do campaign specific modeling, but what's happening now is 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 than people have mastered, but I think that there probably opportunities to figure out how to package and translate that for Small scale campaigns that do not have professionals always working on them. The person running for state rap in your neighborhood. Her brother might be like the effect de facto empty manager and whatever else. And often

That 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 that are more accessible. 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 probably some opportunity.

Very cool. Sasha, I appreciate you coming on and giving us uh 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. Dot com Um, you can find all my books there. My my first one's about the global sushi business, which Maybe of interest to to to to you two. So um it's been really fun. I I love talking about

politics from an angle that's Different than one people. Or staying on CNN on any given day. So thank you. All right. Thanks so much, man. That was great. See you. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to

I put my law in it like my days off On the roadless travel never looking back

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