My First Million - Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns

Episode Date: November 2, 2024

Episode 644: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to author and political campaign expert Sasha Issenberg ( https://x.com/sissenberg ) about the marketing machine behind presidential elections.��  — Show Notes:  (0:00) The malarky factory and The Harm Index (18:55) Trump's 2016 playbook (28:18)Kamala's viral clip factory (32:35) Who’s running a better 2024 campaign? (35:04) What is Elon's role in Trump's campaign (38:31) The lopsided downside of doorknocks (42:25) Deepfakes and new tools in campaigning (45:58) "The podcast election" (50:00) The new playbook for winning in the age of meme wars (54:15) Most mis-priced opportunity in elections — Links: • Sasha Issenberg - https://www.sashaissenberg.com/ • The Victory Lap - https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Lab-Science-Winning-Campaigns/dp/0307954803  • The Lie Detectives - https://www.amazon.com/Lie-Detectives-Playbook-Elections-Disinformation/dp/B0CFN6WM3Y  — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

All right, 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 podcaster 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.

trying to persuade people to do a thing. That's how business works too. There's a marketing machine trying to convince people to push a button at the end of the day. And I wanted to understand the science, the tactics, and the persuasion techniques that the different campaigns have used over the years, the best stories about what's actually going on under the hood. And so I invited on a guy named Sasha Eisenberg. He studied this for a couple of decades now.

And he wrote a book that I thought was really good called The Victory Lab. So I invited them 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 could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. 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 $6 billion a year goes to this group of people who's just, 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, a politician had no charisma, nothing we could do there, right? They need to deflect in order to survive. When you were writing your book, which is called the Victory Lab, did you, I guess, like, how did you get around that bias? Like, how could you figure out, how open were these people?

and sharing what's actually working not. And did you have to kind of like read between the lines to try to figure out where are they just sort of grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened? Yeah, it's one of the most difficult things reporting in this area. So, you know, I was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles. If you go in right now and you ask that Harris campaign

or the Trump campaign or the Super PACs working for them, you know, show me exactly how you're testing your ads on online platforms. They are that maybe they will tell you some stuff. They very selectly will leak out stuff and they think it'll help them raise money usually. So you'll read a story in Wired, one story in Wired that's like inside Kamala Eris's ad testing machine

and details are very carefully selected over the course of, you know, during the campaign to give out to one piece that then they can send out when they go out when she goes to do a fundraising tour in Palo Alto that can convince, you know, a bunch of tech executives that she's running a smart campaign. So during a campaign, though, it's very difficult to get real details on what they're doing. They don't want to, the value of impressing their donors is up against not wanting to, you know, give away anything to the competition.

Right. But after election day, the campaign basically ceases to exist. So everybody is onto another job. A lot of them are, you know, looking for work or return to the campaign. 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 beach resort area where they go and they all get drunk and start talking?

Yeah, I mean, so there's like a post-election sort of conference circuit where Democrats or Republicans come together to kind of trade notes. But they need to launch a business. I mean, it's basically like every two years, there's like a new sort of window for startups and 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 a campaign that is, you know, fireable, immediately fireable expense because they don't want anybody but the spokesman or the candidate talking for them. And then two days later, they are trying to figure out what they're going to do with the rest of everybody in the campaign is. And so they're starting to take credit for everything they did.

So, you know, I remember in 2012, you had this, the Obama Analytics Department, which is really pioneering out the day, like 52, 54 people and this analytics problem, which this time was huge. They called it the cave. And these guys, you know, I was reporting throughout the year for Slade at that point and was able to eke out bits of news over the course of the campaign through really judicious reporting. And I would hear stories about the campaign manager summoning people on the analytics department. into his office to say, did you talk to Sasha because, you know, there was some inquest to find it. It was pretty sad. And then the day after, you know, a whole bunch of them basically were getting Eric Schmidt to launch a firm 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 the issue with that campaign is it has a binary outcome, right? One candidate wins and the other one loses. And no one's saying, 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 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 will say, because she took moderate positions on this and that. But there are people who, from a sort of technical, tactical perspective, want to say, it's because the TV ads are really persuasive or it's because our social media strategy was so good. And you need a good bullshit meter.

And, you know, and the best way to do that is just really be alert to everybody's incentives for telling certain types of stories and be skeptical of of of the times where people have a real obviously transparent agenda and i think i and i think you know from a readers viewers perspective be be wary of any sort of mona causal explanation for anything in in electoral politics no one thing did anything right right well i do think it's fascinating that you you know when you're talking about the behavioral change aspect um one of the great things any entrepreneur could do is sort of learn from adjacencies. And so basically saying, hey, if we want to win in politics, we could do things that have worked in politics, but maybe there's things that have worked in the business world.

Or, you know, Chaldeenie wrote that book, you know, about persuasion, not for politics at all, but you could use things like that. I mean, it's like, the way you describe that kind of like, hey, voter history is public, here's yours, and here's your neighbors, and we'll be sending an update later. That's elf on the shelf, right? Hey, the elf is watching and he's going to tell Santa if you've been naughty or nice. It's as simple as that. I don't need to explain the virtues and why you should be on naughty or not. It's just very simple. Somebody's watching. And I think that that's a very powerful thing. I also found it interesting because what we traditionally hear, if you just go turn on the news, you turn on CNN, you're going to hear a talking head explaining, they're going

to be talking about certain stories. And they're going to be, they're going to bring on some expert pundit who's going to tell you about how this thing that the vice president said during the, you know, convention and how that has this huge ripple effect. But it's actually just the most recent thing that happened. Yeah. And one thing I found fascinating was the story that you wrote about Biden's 2020 campaign. And in the article, you wrote about, they realized that they were flush with cash. They were going to have more funding than they, they were going to have more funding,

not less funding than what they needed. And so I guess the campaign manager or somebody was, you know, asked somebody on their team, 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 as Biden called it, the malarkey factory. And 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 kind of prompt you. It's what I found fascinating there. So, you know, I think that in 2020, there was the campaign called it disinformation. But I think really to step back, like they were trying to understand this

new viral media environment. So, you know, if you go. back just eight, 10 years in politics. Campaign operatives would track communication by, you can get a record of all the TV ads that are bought by cans. You can see all of them. There are services that will record and allow you to access them digitally. 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.

But you can have a, and you can read the press coverage. or see what's on the news, you had a pretty good idea of where voters were getting their information. What the internet had changed is now, like basically anybody had the ability to launch a story. And some of these get called disinformation because they're transparently false. But for political operatives,

the real thing was like stuff's moving that we don't know where it came from or where it's going and what the motives of the people behind it are, right? Because it's not coming from our opponent. 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 get, 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 laughs like we don't we can't game out like what they're things stories are going viral it could have an impact and we don't know who or why it's it's but who's behind it yeah and so the initially impulse was don't you know you'd have all these sort of lessons from the old world kind of media consultants. Like, don't let an attack go unanswered, right? Always be on offense.

And like, yeah, that makes sense if your opponent is attacking you on what you know is one of their big themes. But if, like, somebody in Saskatchewan is making something up about you to impress their friends, maybe you shouldn't respond. And maybe you can make the problem a whole lot of worse by responding, right? You elevate it. You can end up engagement algorithms can end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it. And so the Biden campaign's mentality was let's shift from thinking about this as a supply side problem, which is thinking about individual bits of content that are coming out every day and deciding how and when to respond to them.

And basically, as they said, plain whack them all 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 going to change voters' opinions. But the stuff that we do need to respond to, the campaign said, is the stuff that meets existing anxieties that voters have about Biden or about 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 reacting to the wrong one. So this was the harm index? That was the idea there? Yeah, that's what we entered with this big survey over the course of the summer of 2020. And they took a lot of storylines, some based in truth and a lot based in some version of lies that the Tory gave the ticket.

So they, you know, and they would ask voters basically like three questions. One, are you familiar with this? Two, does it, do you think it's true? and three, do you, would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden? That's very simple, right? Three, three questions. And they're doing this in person. This is online.

How did they get this? That's what online. This was online panel testing, I think, that they did. And they would just show them a headline, right? They'd be like, Hunter Biden's laptop, blah, blah, blah. Corruption, right? So, yes. So the Hunter Biden corruption stuff.

This would before the laptop, I think, but, you know, Trump had already been impeached about trying to draw attention to his Ukraine ties. A lot of people said that they were familiar with this Hunter Biden. and stuff. Not that many people said that it would actually make them less likely to vote for Joe Biden. And then they did focus groups and it came out that people, people did not think that Biden was fundamentally driven by his personal financial pain. And so they might have thought it was, they might have been familiar with it. They might have even thought that there was some truth to it, but it didn't really change

the way that they thought about Biden on a core issue. However, the stuff related to his age and his mental infirmity, that stuff, obviously a lot of people knew about it. And at the same time, though, a lot of persuadable voters said it would make them less likely to vote for Biden. And the focus groups revealed that it wasn't that they were actually – this wasn't news to the campaign that Biden had an age problem in 2020. And the way that the communication staff on the campaign had dealt with this thus far was they would set up like photo ops of him, him bicycling or like to jog up the stairs to his plane. Right. And what came back from the focus groups was like, this was all wrong. Voters were not worried about his physical well-being.

They weren't concerned like that he wasn't going to get his steps in in the White House. They were, they saw him as a fundamentally weak political figure. I think a lot of this had to do with being defined as vice president. He was like, he won the, he won the primaries of trade. He's never the main character of that race. And there are a lot of voters who said, basically, like, I kind of like the guy, but I don't really know what he cares about or what he wants to do or who he's going to listen to. and that manifested.

It was about his political weakness, but it manifests itself in being susceptible to questions being raised about his physical condition and mental condition. And so the way the campaign responded to those was, first they went out and they started buying ads in places where people who would be exposed to that type of content, persuadable voters who would be exposed to that type of content work. So there have been this effort on the left for a while to boycott,

Fox News and Brightmart websites. The Biden campaign said, no, we're buying advertising there because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing. They bought like search terms. So if you typed in, you know, Biden and seen aisle or something, you would probably get cookieed and shown like a YouTube pre-roll ad.

And they were things that if you were modeled as one of the persuadable voters who was sensitive on this age thing, you would get targeted, but you would not have any idea that it was about his age. The most successful add that they tested to these people was 15 seconds of Biden to camera just talking about,

like, I grew up in Scrant and I have middle class values and that's why I want to, you know, cut taxes on middle class people and raise them on the rich or something, like really banal because all the research suggested that these people just wanted to hear him and his own voice saying what he cared about and what he would do. That's the people who were who could be turned off by the attack, by claims that he was Senile just wanted to hear that, like, he could articulate his basic, his basic worldview. Right. In a firm voice, direct to camera, not edited.

Like, you know, and they were suspicious of, of things that looked too glossy or too slick. And so there was a sort of push away from kind of the traditional aesthetics and political advertising, right? Like a lot of, like, here's a headline and here's a thing and here's a cut and here's some, like, yeah, it's a push. And here's some stock footage. farmers, you know, eating ice cream and like, no, it's like really something very clearly

looked unedited because the people who are sort of open to this were ones who were sort of innately suspicious of political communication. Right, right. And so this idea of they took the stories and they're like, you have the Sleepy Joe stories, you got the creepy Joe stories, you got the Hunter Biden stories, tested on people, figure out three questions. Have you heard about this? do you think it's true?

And is this going to make you less likely to vote for for Biden? Super simple. And then basically figuring out what is the counter programming message? At first they thought, hey, show them on a bike. That counters. Oh, Sleepy Joe message. I think they had this score where on the X axis it was like number of people who are aware of it. On the Y axis, it's like how much it's going to impact their vote.

So they could just have a board that showed all the issues. It's like, oh, a lot of people are aware about this Hunter Biden thing. but it's not affected the vote. Low harm score, a 25 harm score. And then... Yeah, I skip that part, Sean, because I think the first rule of podcasting is described charts.

People love that. Yeah, yeah. The X axis was the reach. So it's harm index. The X axis was the reach, right? How many people had heard about it. Right. And the Y axis was the influence.

Effect. Yeah. You know, impact. And so, you know, and basically the campaign's 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 of 4chan to, you know, mass media or, you know, getting to normal people on Facebook, then we will have a problem. So let's be prepared. And then the stuff in the upper right hand corner, it's reaching the voters we care about and it'll change their opinions. Like, that's where we need to act. Right, right.

what about um trump so you wrote that book in 2012 i think 2011 2012 at time yeah yeah so then this guy who is you know this person at this tv personality comes from the business world not a politician at all runs this campaign i think he even has admitted that like it wasn't like he didn't think he was going to win initially and therefore he talked about like yeah i didn't really have a plan because like you know nobody thought we would win we just thought we were doing our best. And then when we got, when we won, I had to figure out the plan on day one. What do you, when you look at that, what do you see? Do you see this kind of like master marketer? Do you just see this anomaly? Did he use the normal playbook? Did he throw out the

normal playbook? What did, what did Trump do? So Trump in 2016, what he did in a conventional sense was the big, the big shift was he went from a TV dominated campaign for paid advertising. He obviously dominated TV almost every day of the year in terms of free media coverage. But his budget, which is much smaller than Hillary Clinton's, was typically there's a lopsided indifference between TV spending and digital spending and also by direct mail and some of the non-digital tools. And I think he had like half the money. It was like unheard of.

The only place where you might see that these days is like a city council candidate in a place where it's too expensive to buy television. And all they can do is, you know, spend $40,000 on Facebook ads, right? You never see high-level campaigns of any size 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 2016, was that Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that this, Trump doesn't like spending money.

And he's, you know, hates claims. He also doesn't use a computer. Yes. 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's speech. Have you seen this clip? No, no, I haven't.

It's from some, I think there's like a documentary, I guess. It's like a clip from it. And so it's called The Art of the Surge. I'm not sure if it's happening. Okay, yeah. And so he's sitting next to this blonde woman. I don't know who she is. And he's literally like orating his tweets.

So he sees Kamala say something on TV. And then he goes, no way we're going to let that happen. Exclamation point. Not on my watch. send and then she's typing and she says and he just does like 16 of those in like this like clip because people never knew like wait this guy doesn't use a computer is he even behind his social and they showed him doing that which is hilarious. At that point he'd had a he'd had a Twitter account for

five years 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 him and convinced him that instead of all the other things in the campaign where consultants are begging you to spend money and it goes out the door, that you can make this a revenue center for fundraising. Typically, TV ads, you pay the money to try and change people's opinion and you hope you get votes afterwards.

If you buy ads, you can target them well and you have people who want to give you money, you can obviously, this is why charities do online fundraising and stuff. And so Trump started spending real money on Facebook because he was. seeing a return on it. And that resonated to him. It was the, it was the, you know, it was the economic motive fundamentally more than it was part of a political strategy. And what he ended up doing, by the combination of his organic ability to draw attention online in ways that traditional politicians couldn't, and the fact that they were amplifying and catalyzing it through, through what ends up being eventually some real paid spending,

mostly on Facebook advertising, but also a little bit on other platforms. He was able to create a community online that was, you know, really deep and meaningful and to the people who were part of it. And, you know, I think that we thought at the time, you know, the idea was that Obama was the great digital era politician because he had developed the best, you know,

the best and biggest lists. That was the measure. In 2016, the measure of a successful online politician was how many signups, how many email addresses do you have, how many people have given you their cell phone number and opted into letting you text them, how many people followed you on platforms? And that basically was supporters that you can now communicate with for free, right? That's all that all that represents is you no longer have to pay to advertise to them. They have given you the information and authorization to talk to them.

But what did Obama do with that? These tens of millions of supporters who had chosen to sign on in some way, he basically asked them to give money and occasionally to volunteer or take some action. But it was very transactional. It was very one-sided. And what we realized in retrospect, and that was for basically every politician in the United States until Trump came along. And what Trump did, mostly by instance,

not by any strategy or I think great abstract conception of like how to communicate digitally because just because it gets it in a animalistic way was that you should engage like a poster does, right? And that means Obama never like reamplified his retweeted or shared his supporters content. Why? Because if you're the Obama campaign in 2012, you spent hundreds of. of millions of dollars on opinion research, polling, focus groups, other qualitative research, testing your ads and your mail, you have come down at that point, you have come to the syllable

on what you want to say, on which issues, when, to whom, how. And the whole campaign is this command and control exercise to make sure that you're saying the exact right thing at the exact same time at the right time 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 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 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 mean culture around. him, the online MAGA community is, is, I think, a far more satisfying, satisfying place for its members to reside online because they get all this reinforcement from like-minded people that Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden never gave, even if they collected a lot of names of people who ended up giving

them money online. Right. And that 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 still, the idea you have to relinquish a certain amount of control over your communications. And there are very few politicians who are willing to do that. That is fascinating to me. I did not know the story there of Kushner coming in and basically like changing the frame from we spend money to try to buy votes versus we spend money to rake in more money. And then that $1 becomes two, that two becomes three and three becomes four, that we can just continue to fundraise this way. and then, and ultimately, if somebody's giving you their money,

they're probably also going to give you their vote, right? So it's not like you're only doing one versus the other. Japan's have always had a very clear divide, both in terms of like the org chart within the headquarters, in terms of the budget, and in terms of what you say and where. And some of it's because of regulations around political spending, but like fundraising communication is a very different beast inside a campaign

than persuasion 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 $10 and signing up for a recurring payment, right? Some of it will also will go in front of people whose opinions you are helping to shape. Some of it will go help turn people already support you into volunteers by getting them. And that campaigns did not typically think that they thought of it as we're having, we have our fundraising targets.

We have our, who almost by definition are not your persuasion targets, because your persuasion targets are people whose minds aren't made up. Your fundraising targets are people who already support you and you're trying to get them to give more. Yes, yes. Okay, so I like that. And it seems like, you know, Trump is this kind of blend of celebrity. He's like an influencer brand, right?

And the same way that, you know, Kylie Jenner can sell, you know, makeup better than a makeup brand that doesn't have an influencer or that, you know, George Clooney can sell alcohol or, you know, Ryan Reynolds can go sell cell phone service through 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 common. Like I could tell you Trump's community, which is the MAGA movement.

And it kind of know who they are, what they look like, what they, what they stand for and what they're all about. I don't even know what the name of the community would be for Kamala. It would only be people who hate Trump, I think, is the only answer. There was a little bit of, they call themselves the K-hive of like a little cluster of Kamala supporters. But that campaign did not last long for a reason, which is I don't think that there is a particularly broad-based enthusiasm for her.

Never met a lot of k-hiver's. She has been at some disadvantage. 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 think that she, I think there'll be an interesting conversation to have after the selection as to whether she will have had the shortest presidential campaign in modern American history by far, right? I mean, the general tendency has been towards these two-year campaigns, and she's going to have a

four-month campaign. Well, she's done a couple of, couple of things well, right? She raised a lot of money. Very quickly. She's outraised Trump. She's also, you know, her TikTok when she started, she, you know, picked a medium. And it seems like they were picking alternative medium. So, you know, Trump has done a lot of podcasts. She's done a couple. But podcast seems to be a bigger part of the equation this, this time. She went super viral on TikTok right away. And they had a bunch of songs and little earworms like, you know, J.D. Vance is, you know, I'm an ever Trump guy song. That was great. You know, they've done a bunch of things like that.

You know, when he said the thing about eating the dogs, eating the cats, you know, within minutes, it's viral on TikTok as a song that somebody remixed. And so I think they've done a lot of interesting things there. Does any of that stand out to you? Do you have opinions on any of that? I'm curious how you look at that. You know, I think one other thing that they did, which is pretty novel, is that they have gotten into the, like, clipping and amplifying little bits of every crazy little thing

that Trump says. I mean, there was this school of thought among Democrats. It was pretty prevailing, I think, for most of the Trumps. Which is don't give him oxygen. Don't give him exposure. You're only feeding the whatever. And they would scold journalists. Why are you taking a speech is live?

And why are you guys sharing clips of everything he says? And now go to the Kamala HQ account. And it will be, it's like those guys, you know, the Media Matters guys or whatever else who are just clipping like all these wild things that go on Fox News. Just these seven seconds. He said that, you know, you can electrocute yourself with a with a car on Moon or something and like look at this crazy old guy. And that's a very different mentality about how to go at Trump in particular than Democrats had. And so, you know, I think that they, they feel like

the digital team in in the campaign, which is basically inherited entirely from the Biden campaign, they feel a little unshackle. 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. They have more celebrities who are eager to be associated with the campaign. They also, you know, I think that there was a sense that Biden so emphasized, like, the dignity of the office and Trump is beneath this, that there was a sense of like, let's not get down in the mud and play Trump's game. And I think that there's a real freedom to do kind of name calling and stuff that the

Biden people would have thought is sort of pedier than their brand, you know. And so, so, yeah, I could think. that they've been far more willing to mix it up in online. 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, I mean, they were doing things in August that campaigns are usually doing

the previous March, like, you know, designing a logo, right? I mean, like really, like day one type things. You've studied and covered elections for like more than 15 years, I think. Who do you think is running the better campaign right now? Not who's going to win, but who's running a better campaign? I thought Trump for most of the year was running as good a campaign as he could run. Now I start to see a real mismatch between what they claim is their strategy and 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. And there's reasons in polling to suggest that there's real room for him to gain in a way that few Republicans have there. But, you know, 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 suggested, you know, the best way to do that is high quality face-to-face interactions from a volunteer, you should have a volunteer from a voter's community in them to have these sort of socially meaningful interactions to give them really practical advice like, you know, where's your polling place 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 PAC, 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? You know, going from 100 people in West Philadelphia knocking on doors to 200 people knocking on doors in West Philadelphia takes twice as much work in capital, going from 100 ads on TV, TV in Pennsylvania to the same ads running twice as often takes basically no more effort. And so the way that there's been this big question for about 15 years about how do you divide

responsibilities between campaigns and the super PACs outside, different sets of rules, different advantages for each of them. And typically the way it's broken down is that campaigns and the party committees will do that labor intensive work that doesn't scale up. And the money on the outside will basically buy ads, mostly TV, some digital, that amplify the message because they can. can't coordinate with one another directly. The Trump people blown up that model.

And they're now trusting this outside group that Musk runs to do this door knocking thing. What is he doing? Because I actually haven't followed it fully. He's going Mr. Beast. He's giving away a million dollars a day. I don't even understand what that is. Can you explain that? What is Elon doing?

So he's paying people to get their friends to sign petitions. You can get a $47 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 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, you know, who are conservative or, you know, or MAGA or an own a gun. Like that's a combination of publicly available or viable information. I shouldn't have to pay people to go collect it from their neighbors. And so it seems like a tactic you would use that's far better if you're trying to have

a long-term movement organization building thing, which doesn't, I haven't seen any indication that Elon Musk is trying to build a generational movement here. It does not seem like a particularly effective way to get people to vote for the first time or the second time in their lives. So that's one big part of what they're doing. Then they're doing just a lot of basically hiring day laborers to go knock on doors. And there's been a bunch of reporting, Wired's had some good reporting, Daily Beast, I think, on it's like it is in any industry, hiring people off the street and paying them by the hour or or pro-cony. contacts 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 if you're paying them per complete. So I've sort of shifted my view on the competence of that the Trump organization over the course of the year. Because it seems like they they haven't aligned their strategy with their their tactics and an organization. And I think Kamala Harris is a far more traditional democratic campaign. And there's a kind of. or sensible logic to it, even if she's made a few mistakes along the way.

It sounded like the thing Elon's doing, you know, he's trying to sign, you can't pay people to vote. That's illegal. So it's kind of like, I'll pay you to sign the petition. And the petition says something that sounds very like agreeable. Like I support free speech. Yeah, who doesn't, right? Like that sounds pretty reasonable.

But like it seems like there must be some 3D chess going on that I'm not, I don't fully understand, which is what do you do after that? What's the point of that? Yeah. I mean, if you use that information, and then you have a really good operation to call those people, maybe target them with digital advertising, call them and knock on their door and say, I know you're a first and second amendment voter. And you signed a petition devoting yourself to the cause. Now do this and this.

Like there's actually a reason to think that works. But that's just then one step. That's just the first step in a three or four step process. And you need to be really good and targeted at the next few steps because, you know, one real difference that's important, I think for your audience, keep in mind when you, learning from adjacent fields is great and important. A lot of the breakthroughs I've written about have come from people in politics looking to business or elsewhere. But there's some really important differences between business marketing and political marketing.

And one of them is that the cost of mistargeting and of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics, right? So if you have a consumer product and you're Coke and you put a Coke ad in front of somebody who's on a diet or doesn't like sugar, has diabetes or like whatever, okay, you wasted 10 cents for that person. Big deal. If you are the Trump campaign

and you send a door knocker to do a get out the vote reminder to somebody who is, your data tells you is, should be a Trump supporter, but they're not. Or there's one Trump supporter in that house, but you remind three other people,

the three women living with that truck, 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 Harris supporter and reminding them. You've not only, you haven't just wasted that interaction. You've created a vote for your opponent. There is nothing. The only thing like that in the marketing world where there's that cost to misidentifying

your targets is maybe an insurance or or, or, or, credit cards, where if a company thinks that they can extend you a $10,000 credit limit and you're not good for it, they made a big mistake, right? If an insurer decides that you should be a $500 premium and it turns out that you cost them a lot more, they've really screwed up. But most consumer marketing, like, there's not a huge downside to getting your message in front of the wrong people, but politics there is. And I think that's the big mistake that a lot of people and perhaps Elon or the people around him make as they move from business of politics,

they say, let's just throw resources at it when I needed to build, create interest in Tesla, I just bombarded all these people with digital advertising about Tesla, offered them all a free test drive and a cocktail at our cool showrooms. Like, that probably works to start building interest in Tesla.

It's a terrible way to try to turn out voters for your candidate. And when you've been looking into a space like this, like, how disillusion do you get? And really, I guess the question is, you've now studied multiple election cycles. You've 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 kid's snacks under here. Like, what's the thing where you're like, I wish I didn't see that.

I wish I didn't know that. What is the ugliest part of this that really has, you know, you saw or turns you off? I mean, I think the disinformation stuff is, is, you know, I generally was encouraged in the early years of writing about this because the people who were at the cutting edge of using this data and experiments were generally in the business of trying to get more people to vote or giving voters information that was more relevant to them. And that struck me as like democracy was improving because of technology and innovation. If I 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 they're usually, instead of giving you some vague thing about, you know, Morning in America, if I think that you're likely to care a lot about, you know, cancer research. And I give you a now tournament message about what my campaign would do for cancer research. Like, I think that that's generally good for the country. What has changes? I think you have so many people who have the ability to reach large. numbers and voters now were just not constrained by a lot of the expectations about honesty and can't be

held accountable for what they say. And I think that that is scary to me. What's going on now? Because AI has now made it easy to do, deep fake audio. I can make it. I can make Donald Trump say anything for like 30 cents on my computer right now. I can make a video that shows, you know, something that I want happening. I could have a... Hey, if phone banking works, why can't I just spin up an army of AI phone agents to just call everybody? What have you seen as the new tools? And has that happened this cycle or you think it's next cycle? Relatively, maybe less the cycle than I would have thought if we'd have this conversation a year ago.

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 wanted that. But I think most campaigns are afraid of the backlash. of being associated with AI, even for, not necessarily even for manipulation, but just like, you know, on non-live callers. And so I think that there's a hurdle that campaigns have from a kind of brand image perspective

about being associated with new or potentially sort of invasive-feeling technologies. And so there's been less of that. Where people are using AI the most in this campaign is like, sort of the same way we all might use it, which is like brainstorming first drafts of fundraising emails, you know,

like most fundraising emails, they need to come up with new ones every day to send to people. They'll basically use the same types of themes and messages. You're probably going to eB test them anyway. So instead of having a bunch of, you know,

23-year-olds who just, you know, graduated from liberal arts colleges, like typing out your first drafts and trying to see whether the one that's, scares people into thinking you're losing was going to do better than the one that has like J-Lo's signature under it. Why not have the machine come up with 10 different J-Lo ones and test those? And that's, I think, like, probably 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 are, why is Kambla doing like a Fortnite map? They just released like a, they're basically like advertising in video games, which I think others have done in the past. But, I mean, those people aren't even old enough to vote. I think the average fortnight player, what's the psychology around that? So it starts from the position of having more money than they know what to do with.

And there being an unusual scarcity issue for political 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, they're seasonal industries, I guess. Like a July 4th Firework Store. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, like, Halloween store probably makes some interesting pricing decisions on November 1st. 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 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. If you wanted to get more volunteers knocking on doors, you probably had to start building offices and having staff to train them months ago. And so at the end of the campaign, you start to see the end of the, you know, right before election day, you start to see. campaigns making decisions that are driven less by efficient, like overall efficiency and more by basically where can we very quickly parks money. 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. Some people have called this election, the sort of the podcast election because you have podcasts have become this huge medium. You have unedited, unfiltered 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 federal standard for presidents. I just need to know if my president's a good hang or not. Yeah. And Theo Vaughn might be the only guy who could save us there. You know, Trump did Rogan. J.D. Vance just did a three hour thing with Rogan and famously 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. there was two reactions to that. One was, wow, what a dropped ball. You could have got in front of 30 million people in a super meaningful way. Another was, how dare you, Joe. She's the vice president, and there's a few days left before the election.

How dare you have demands? You should be, you know, crawling to her to do this. And other people would say, you're not going to convince anybody who listens to Rogan to vote 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. There's that week where she did Coltoy and the view and it was like, oh, and maybe she did Colbert or Kimmel or something. It 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 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 going to have to do a few weeks earlier. So, but also, you know, one of the advantages that Democrats had in dumping Biden from the ticket and getting her was you had somebody who, first of all, have to send 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 other thing is she's more dynamic and she's, you know, more in tune with pop culture. And I think there was some sense that, wow, Democrats are going to go from somebody who does like three rallies a week and his 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 interviews nonstop. And she's charismatic and intelligent and all these things. And that never really came to fruition. And I don't know. know how much, this I think might be one of the things we start to learn after the election when some journalists or book authors get a little access into what they were thinking. I think one of the questions is how much of that was just that they didn't have the time to do as much of it. And that could be sensible to me.

The other, or was it that the staff was fundamentally afraid that the downside of going an unstructured two hours with Joe Rogan offsets the upside of getting in front of that audience. Can you give me a couple minutes on your new book? So you got this new book out. What's the premise? And then can you give me maybe one of the juicy findings or learnings or stories that you had from it?

Yeah. So it's about this sort of new era. We've bouncing out of this. But the new asymmetry that's created when in this digital environment where campaigns realized that their opposition is not their opponent, it's not another candidate or party. It could be, you know, the foreign intelligence service or somebody who's, you know, attacking you for shits and giggles or who knows what, and how sort of what the search for a playbook

for learning how to communicate in that environment because it blows up so many of the expectations about campaign strategies. And I write a bit about that Biden example in there, which I think was really a really important shift in starting to think about the recipients of disinformation more than the producers of disinformation, which has been, I think, a big mistake that,

not just campaigns with people in the media, make and trying to understand what impacts on we will have. But I also worry about a really interesting group called We Defend Truth that this, it's a progressive group that has been trying to fight basically conspiracy theories around the 2020 election, around COVID vaccines. They basically have gone out and hired some of the more successful, like Jif and meme makers online, you know,

a guy who had like the most likes on him gear and stuff. And their theory of the case is that you need to be engaging in the in the in the in the in the vernacular of the internet. Meme warfare. You have to fight memes with memes. You have to fight memes with me. And you need to be communicating in the way that that online audiences expect to be communicated to, 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 quote one of. the sort of head guy there, he says, like, you need to earn the right to communicate with people. And to do that, you have to usually entertain or inform them first. And I think it's a really interesting way of starting to think about how traditional political communication has to fundamentally rethink itself from the one-way broadcast dynamic that a lot of the modern thinking about campaigning was shaped into the kind of two-way or multilinear sort of environment 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 and the story. Have you ever watched 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 got to watch this video. I hang out with Mr. Beast and he's like, he could recite to me the first 40 seconds 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. And what he talks about,

because I asked him, I said, do you ever look at TV and what you could learn from them? And he goes, yeah, but what they could learn from us, I mean, he's like, dude, TV would never survive on YouTube. He's like, people would click away and have terrible retention rates, terrible click through rates. They couldn't survive in our world.

And so similarly, what you're talking about is in the old world where it's my message versus the other candidate's message. And it's just those two. It's a one v1. You know, there's one playbook. And now you're saying you're just playing the field. There's the field of the internet where there's stories and information coming from all kinds of different people.

with all levels of accuracy and different levels of impact, how are you going to respond to not a one-v-one, but sort of you versus the entire field of content that's out there right now and what's your playbook to win there? Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're only now starting to get, you know,

campaigns having a more instinctual understanding. It used to be so much of online campaigning, you know, in the 2000s, 2010, 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 30-second videos and put them on TV. Let's just turn them into, you know, maybe we have to go from vertical, horizontal, or whatever, but let's just figure out how to get them onto social media platforms.

Can we, can we do something online that looks, can we basically take our direct mail program out of the USPS and put it into email? And now I think we're starting to get people in politics. Some of it's a generational shift. Some of it's Democrats realizing how poorly they've been outfoxed on online during the Trump era. to start like we need to really step back and rethink some of these foundational questions of how and why you communicate to certain people. I want to leave with one last question, which is, what do you think is the most mispriced

or misunderstood opportunity in elections? Meaning if somebody hired you and they're like, all right, you're going to, you're our consultant and you got to give them input to do something that maybe they're not already doing or maybe they're doing but not enough of. where would you place a bet that you think has sort of more upside than people are currently taking advantage of?

So less, maybe not economic upside, but sort of political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles. And, you know, I think there's a great example now. Like the best, I think we're going to, if Trump,

wage this election, we're going to look back and say arguably his best period was a period in 2021, 2021, 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 2020 was like when he was president, but distance helped him. And if Democrats had kept like a foot on his neck through advertising, reminding people, yes, the reason, you know, wherever unemployment was in inflation,

we're in 2021 was because of the guy who was just there, reminding people about some of the COVID dynamics. But like, they pulled away from him at just the moment that they 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 they're short people starting to talk about party-based branding, right?

So, like, so much of our political communication, paid TVS, are almost entirely about candidates. And yet, like, when we started this conversation was that basically 45% of the country are Democrats and 45% of Republicans and they'll always vote for their party. And yet no political advertising has spent branding the parties. And I think they're advantages to doing that in a counter cyclical way when people are not being bombarded by tons of people. TV ads, but be reminding people, the Republican Party stands for this and this. Here's how the Democrats screwed up last time or vice versa. And try to think about not just winning votes in an election, but sort of long-term audience building for a party.

I like it. Maybe you could also be one of these political consultant shops that are making bank. What is the business that stunned you with how much it makes 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? But business model that's still most astounding is, is media buyers who get paid a commission off of the ads they place when.

Percent of ad spend. And, you know, digital advertising is more labor intensive for them. But buying TV is, you know, there are only so many stations in, in Wisconsin that you put ads on and, you know, it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a commission off of it in their, you know, that and that's, and it's been that way for decades. And this is, is it is there one like dominant ad buyer that like is no. I mean, there are a handful in each party, but, and, you know, 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 a high end. in the $100 million revenue range. So we're not talking about, you know, huge companies, but it really does not require at this point a lot of savvy or labor. Ad buyers one. Give me one more. Is there any other cool business that maybe it's like a one-man shop that makes, you know, 10 million a year just doing a specific thing or is there any other

interesting business niche that you just stumbled into? There's still some interesting stuff to be done with data and modeling. especially, you know, there are a lot of sort of boutique firms that will do campaign-specific modeling. But what's happening now is that the things that presidential campaigns were able to do, only presidential campaigns were able to do maybe 12 years ago. Now somebody running for county executive can use. And I'm not sure that there are, this is more an opportunity that people have mastered,

but I think that there 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 person running for state rep in your neighborhood, her brother might be like the effect de facto campaign manager and whatever else. And often the delta between what a sort of engaged layperson trying to run a campaign can do and the sophistication of the tools and data available is just too much to bridge and they don't do it.

But there probably is a way to price those and create tools that are more accessible. That's where I think that's a place that if people were looking to try to get into the sort of tech end of the political business. There's probably some opportunity. Very cool. Sasha, I appreciate you coming on and give us an extra time. This is fascinating. Thank you so much. Where should people find you, send them to your book? Tell them what they need to know.

Yeah, my new book's called The Lie Detectives in Search of a Playbook for winning elections in the disinformation age. And I have a website, Sasha Eisenberg. So it's my first name and last name.com. You can find all my books there. My first one is about the global sushi business, which may be of interest to, to, to, To you too. So it's been really fun.

I love talking about politics from an angle that's different than what people are saying on CNN on any given day. So thank you. All right. Thanks so much, man. That was great. The future. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.

I put my all in it like no days off. On a road, let's travel, never looking back.