Art, everybody, Election Day in the United States is just few days away.
And I'm here to officially endorse.
Nobody because you should not be trying to get political advice from a podcaster that you like.
I'm just a guy who does business and I've made a little bit of money on the internet that does not make me an expert in politics.
However, today's episode is about politics, but not in the way you might expect.
I am fascinated by the marketing machine that is underneath political campaigns, regardless of which candidate you're going for.
They're spending over a billion dollars trying to persuade people to do a thing.
That's how business works, too.
There's 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 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.
And it seems like there's this thing where this whole industry that gets paid to help politicians get elected.
I think it's something like six billion dollars a year goes to this group of people whose job is to be marketing machines for for political purposes.
And when something works, they love 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 for to survive.
When you were writing your book, which is called The Victory Lab.
Did you I guess, like, how did you get around that bias?
Like, how could you figure out how open were these people in sharing what's actually working or not?
And did you have to kind of like read between the lines to try to figure out where are they just sort of grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened?
Yeah, it's one of the most difficult things reporting in this area.
So, you know, I was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles.
If you go in right now and you ask the Harris campaign or the Trump campaign or the Super PACs working for them, you know, show me exactly how you're you're testing your ads on online platforms.
They are that maybe they will tell you some stuff.
They very selectively will leak out stuff that they think will help them raise money usually.
So you'll read a story in Wired, one story in Wired that's like inside Kamala Harris's ad testing machine and details are very carefully selected over the course of, you know, during the campaign to give out to one piece that then they can send out when they go out when she does to do a fundraising
tour, you know, 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.
All right, let's take a quick break because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot has.
Now, they let me freestyle this ad here, so I'm going to actually tell you what I think is interesting.
So they have this thing called the Fall Spotlight showing all the new features that they released in the last few months.
And the ones that stood out to me were Breeze Intelligence.
I don't know if you've seen this, but if you're in HubSpot and you have, let's say, a customer there, you can just basically add intelligence to that customer.
They estimate a revenue for that company.
How many employees it has.
Maybe their email address or their location if they've ever visited your page or not.
And so you can enrich all of your data automatically with one click using this thing called Breeze Intelligence.
They actually acquired a really cool company called Clearbit.
And it's become Breeze, which is great because now it's built in.
I always hated using two different tools to try to do this.
Now it's all in one place.
And so all the data you had about your customers now just got smarter.
So check it out. You can actually see all the stuff they released.
It's really cool website.
Go to HubSpot .com slash spotlight to see them all and get the demos yourself.
Back to this episode.
Right. After Election Day, the campaign basically ceases to exist.
So everybody is on to another job.
A lot of them are, you know, looking for work or are returned to their consulting firms or starting new firms, developed some trick or tool during the campaign is that they're like some conference where they all go to like some some beach resort area where they go and they all get drunk and start talking.
Yeah. I mean, so there's like a post election sort of conference circuit where Democrats or Republicans come together to to kind of trade notes.
But they they need to launch a business.
I mean, it's basically like every two years, there's like a new sort of window for startups and 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 to 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 that they had like fifty to fifty four people in this analytics.
That's huge. They called it the cave.
And these guys, you know, I was reporting throughout the year for Slade at that point and and was able to eke out bits of of news over the course of the campaign through really judicious reporting.
And I would hear stories about the campaign manager summoning people on the analytics department into his office to say, did you talk to Sasha because, you know, there were some inquest to find that like 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 we're out giving interviews to everybody who wanted and taking credit for a whole bunch of things that probably were not theirs alone to take credit for.
And the issue with that campaign is it has a binary outcome.
Right. One candidate wins and the other one loses.
And no one thing ever shapes that outcome.
Not traditional things like, you know what?
Whatever happens on Tuesday, it did not happen because one of the candidates chose the right vice presidential nominee or not.
It did not happen just because of 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, we'll see because she took moderate positions on this and that.
But there are people who from a sort of technical, tactical perspective want to want to say it's because the TV ads are really persuasive or it's because our social media strategy was so good.
And you need a good bullshit meter.
And you know, and then the best way to do that is just really be alert to everybody's incentives for telling certain types of stories and be skeptical of of of the times where people have a real, obviously transparent agenda.
And I think I and I think, you know, from a reader's viewer's perspective, be wary of any sort of monocawsal 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, 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, Chaldean 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 Alpha on the shelf.
Right. That's that's.
Hey, the elf is watching and he's going to tell Santa if you're been naughty or nice.
It's as simple as that.
I don't need to explain the virtues and why you should be naughty.
It's just very simple.
Somebody's watching.
And and I think that that's a very powerful thing.
I also found it interesting because what we traditionally hear, if you just go turn on the news, you turn on CNN, you're going to hear a talking head explaining they're going to talk about certain stories and they're going to be they're going to bring on some expert pundit who's going to tell you about how
this thing that the vice president said during the convention and how that has this huge ripple effect.
But it's actually just the most recent thing that happened.
And one thing I found fascinating was the story that you wrote about Biden's 2020 campaign.
And you talk in the in the article, you wrote about they realize 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 asked somebody on the 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 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 a 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, ten years in politics, campaign operatives would track communication by you could get a record of all the TV ads that are bought by by cans.
You could see all of them.
There are services that will that will record and allow you to access them digitally.
You could see all your opponents campaign finance reports.
You have a pretty good sense of where they're getting money and how they're spending it.
But you can have you 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.
Like we know what our opponents trying to accomplish.
They have the same brain we do.
But if this is like Macedonian teenagers who are trying to game like online clicks for for ad revenue or this is a foreign intelligence service or this is somebody like in their basement doing it for for the last.
Like we don't we can't game out like what they're saying.
Stories are going viral.
It could have an impact and we don't know who or why it's it's who's behind it.
Yeah. And so the initial 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 it an attack go unanswered.
Right. Always be on offense and like yeah that makes sense if your opponent is attacking you on what you know is one of their big themes.
But if like somebody in in Saskatchewan is making something up about you to impress their friends maybe you shouldn't respond and maybe you can make the problem a whole lot worse by responding right.
You elevate it. You can you can end up engagement algorithms can end up could end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it.
And so the binding campaigns mentality was let's shift from thinking about this as a supply side problem which is thinking 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 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 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 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 targeted the ticket so they you know and they would ask voters basically like three questions why 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 three questions and they're doing this in person this is online how do they get this out online this was online panel testing I think that they and they would just show him a headline right they'd be like Hunter Biden's laptop.
Corruption 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 they 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 the campaign they find that 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 tell him to jog up the stairs to his plane and and what came back from the focus groups was like
this was all wrong.
Voters were not worried about his physical well -being they weren't concerned like that he wasn't going to get his steps in in the White House they were they saw him as a fundamentally weak political figure.
I think a lot of this had to do with being defined as vice president he was like he won the he won the primaries he's never the main character of that race and there 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 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 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's been this effort on the left for a while to to boycott Fox News and Breitbart websites on the Biden campaign said no we're buying advertising
there because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing too they bought like search terms so if you typed in you know Biden and senile or something you 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 was about his age the most successful ad that they tested to these people was 15 seconds of Biden to camera just talking about like I grew up in Scranton I have middle class values and that's why I
want to you know cut taxes on middle -class people and raise them on the rich or something like really banal because all the research suggested that these people just wanted to hear him in his own voice saying what he cared about and what he would do that's the people who 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 world view right in in a firm voice direct to camera not edited like you know and they were suspicious of of things that looked too glossy or too slick 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 like abortion and here's and here's some stock footage of farmers you know eating ice cream and like no it's like really something very clearly
looked unedited um because the because 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 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 on people figure out three questions have you heard about this do you think it's true and is this gonna like you know make you less likely to vote for for for biden super simple and then basically counter figuring out what is the counter programming message at first they thought hey show
them on a bike that counters the sleepy joe message i think they had the score where on the x -axis it was like number of people who were aware of it on the y -axis it's like how much it's going to impact their vote so they can they can 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 effective to vote low harm score a 25 harm score and then yeah i skip that mark sean because like i think the first little podcasting is described charts people love that yeah the x -axis was the reach says harm index the x -axis was the reach right
how many people had heard about it right and y -axis was what the impact yeah you know impact and so you know and basically that 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 fortune to to you know mass media or you know getting to normal people on facebook then we will have a problem so let's be prepared and then the stuff in the upper right hand corner it's reaching the voters
we care about and it'll change their opinions like that's where we need to act right right hey let's take a quick break to talk about another podcast that you should check out it is called the next wave it's hosted by matt wolf and nathan lands as part of the hub spot podcast network which of course
is your audio destination for business professionals like you you can catch the next wave with matt wolf and he's talking about where the puck is going with ai creators ai technology and how you can apply it to your growing business so check it out listen to the next wave wherever you get the podcast
what about um trump so you wrote that book in 2012 i think 2011 -2012 time yeah yeah so then this guy who is you know this person this tv personality comes from the business world not a politician at all runs 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 i didn't really have a plan because like you know nobody thought we would win we just thought we were doing our best and then when we got when we won i had to figure out the plan on day one what do you when when you look at that what do you see do
you see this kind of like master marketer do you just see this anomaly do you did he use the normal playbook was did he throw out the normal playbook what did what did trump do so trump in 2016 what he did in the conventional sense was the big the big shift was he went from a tv dominated campaign for paid
advertising he obviously dominated tv almost every day of the year in terms of free media coverage but his budget um which is much smaller than hillary clinton's was typically there's a lopsided indifference between tv spending and digital spending and and and also by direct mail and some of the the non -digital
tools and i think he had he had like half the money which is like unheard of the only place where you might see that these days is like a city council candidate in a place where it's too expensive to buy television and all they can do is is you know spend forty thousand dollars on facebook ads right
you never see high level campaigns of any size that are that are at parity in those days and the reason trump spent was ready to spend money online starting uh in real way starting in the spring of 2016 was that jared kushner came to him and convinced him that this what trump doesn't like spending money
um and he's you know he's claim also doesn't use a computer yes 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 yeah so it's it's uh 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 that right yeah and so he's sitting next to this blonde woman i don't know who she is and he's literally like orating his tweets so he sees kamala say something on tv and then he goes um no way
we're going to let that happen exclamation point um not on my watch send and then she's typing and she says and he just does like 16 of those in like this like clip because people never knew like wait this guy doesn't use a computer is he even behind his social and they shoved him doing that which is hilarious
from 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 kusher came to him and convinced him that instead of all the other things in the campaign where consultants are begging you to spend money and it goes out the door that you could make this a revenue center by fun by through for fundraising so you typically tv ads you
you pay the money to try and change people's opinion and you hope you get votes afterwards if you buy ads you 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 and that resonated to him it was 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 um by the combination of his organic ability to draw attention um online in ways that that traditional
politicians couldn't and the fact that they were um amplifying and catalyzing it through through what ends up being eventually some some real paid spending mostly on facebook advertising but also a little bit on other platforms he was able to create a community online that was you know really deep and meaningful
and to the people who were part of it and you know i think that we thought at the time you know the idea was that obama was the great digital era politician because he had he had developed the best you know the best and biggest lists that was the measure in in 2016 the measure of a successful online
politician was how many signups how many email addresses do you have how many people have given you their cell phone number and opted into letting you text them how many people followed you on platforms and that basically was supporters that you can now communicate with for free right that's all that all
that represents is you no longer have to pay to advertise to them they have have given you the information and authorization to talk to them and but what did obama do with that these tens of millions of supporters who had had chosen to to um sign on in some way he basically asked them to give money
and occasionally to volunteer or take some action um but it was very transactional it was very one -sided uh and what we realized in retrospect and that was for basically every politician in the united states till trump came along and what trump did mostly by instinct not by any strategy or i think great abstract
conception of like how to communicate digitally because just because he gets it in a in a animalistic way was that you should engage like a poster does right and that means obama never like re -amplified his retweeted or shared his his supporters content why because if you're the obama campaign in 2012
you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on opinion research polling focus groups other qualitative research testing your ads and your mail you have come down at that point you have come to the to the syllable on what you want to say on which issues when to whom how and the whole campaign is this command and control
exercise to make sure that you are saying the exact right saying 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 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 magga community is is is a i think a far more satisfying satisfying place for its members to reside online because they get all this reinforcement from like -minded people that obama or hillary clinton or joe biden never gave even if they collected a lot of names of people
who ended up giving them money online right and that i mean that is that is a gift that i have not seen we've seen politicians 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 support the idea you have to relinquish a certain amount
of control over your communications and there are very few politicians who who are willing to do that that is fascinating to me that i did not know the the story there of kushner coming in and basically like changing the frame from we spend money to try to buy votes versus we spend money to rake in more
money and then that 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 going to 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 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 on some
of that will go to people who will end up shipping in 10 bucks and signing up for a recurring payment right some of it will also will go in front of people whose opinions you are helping to shape some of it will go help term people already support you into volunteers by getting this 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 already support you and you're
trying to get them to give more yes yes um okay so i like that and it seems like you know trump is this kind of blend of celebrities like an influencer brand right in the same way that you know kylee jen you know kylee jenner can sell you know makeup better than uh than a makeup brand that doesn't have an influencer
or that you know george cluny can sell alcohol or you know ryan retalds 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 magga 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 like it would only be people who hate trump i think is the only
answer and there was a little bit of they call themselves the k -hive um uh 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 was a particularly broad -based um enthusiasm for her never met a lot of k -hivers yeah and she has been
at some disadvantage and there've 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 there'll be an interesting conversation to have after the selection as
to whether she will have had the shortest presidential campaign in modern american history by far right i mean that the general tendency has been towards these two -year campaigns and she's gonna have a four month uh campaign well she's done a couple things well right she raised a lot of money very quickly
she's she's outraised trump she's also i've you know her tick tock 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 the podcast seems to be a bigger part of the equation this this time
she went super viral on tick tock right away and they had a bunch of songs and little earworms like you know jd van says 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 tick tock as a song that somebody remixed and so i think they've done a lot of interesting things there does any of that stand out to you do you have opinions on any of that i'm curious how you look at that um you know i think one other thing that they did which is pretty
novel is that they have gotten into the like clipping and amplifying little bits of every crazy little thing that trump says i mean there was this school of thought among democrats it was pretty prevailing i think for for most of the trumps which is don't give them 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 a speech as live and why are you guys sharing clips of everything he says and i'll go to the camel hq account and it will be it's like those guys you know the media matters guys or whatever else we're just
clipping like all these wild things that that go on fox news just these seven seconds he said that you know you can electrocute yourself with uh with a car on the moon or something and like look at this crazy old guy and that's a very different mentality about how to go with trump in particular than democrats
had and so you know i think that they they feel like they the 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 um 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 uh with the campaign they also you know i think that there was a sense that biden um 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 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 is sort of pettier than their brand um you know and so so yeah i think they've been far more willing to mix it up in online um i i i
do think though this is an area where she probably you know and engage with influencers and such but if she'd had an extra year to cultivate those relationships online some of that would be showing fruit now in a way that they've just been you know scrambling to i mean and they were doing things in august
that campaigns are usually doing the previous march like you know designing a logo right i mean like really like day one type type things you've studied 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 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'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 though 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 feature we should a volunteer from a voters 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 and and all of that stuff and the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that you know what what people call ground game or field organization but the real boots on the ground part of campaigning to america pack
which is the elon musk funded super pack and typically the division of labor on campaigns has been that that sort of nuts and bolts labor intensive work that does not scale up easily right it you know that going from 100 people in west philadelphia knocking on doors to 200 people knocking on doors in west
philadelphia takes twice as much work and capital going from 100 ads on tv in pennsylvania to the same ads running twice as often takes basically no more effort and so the way that there's been this big question for about 15 years about how do you divide responsibilities between campaigns and the super
packs outside different sets of rules different advantages for each of them and typically the way it's broken down is that campaigns and the party committees will do that labor intensive work that doesn't scale up and the money on the outside will basically buy ads mostly tv some digital that amplify
the message because they can't coordinate with one another directly the the trump people blown up that model and they're now trusting this outside group that musk runs to do this door knocking thing what is he doing because i actually haven't followed it fully i saw he's going mr beast he's giving away
a million dollars a day i i don't even understand what that is can you explain that what is elon doing so he's paying people to get their friends to sign petitions you can get like in 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 um and what is that why why that i can come up with a few theories of what they could do with that information but it seems like a pretty roundabout way to get information that's already available like there's already a database of every voter in the state and if i
wanted to know people in pennsylvania who care about uh you know who are conservative or you know or mega or and own a gun like that's a combination of publicly available or viable information i shouldn't have to pay people to go collect it from their neighbors um uh and so it seems like a tactic you
would use that's far better if you're trying to have a long -term movement organization building thing which doesn't i haven't seen any indication that that elon musk is trying to build a a generational movement here um it does not seem like a particularly effective way to to to get people to to vote
for the first time or the second time in their in their lives so that's one big part of what they're doing then they're doing just a lot of basically hiring day laborers to go knock on doors and there's been a bunch of reporting wires have some good reporting uh daily beast i think on it's like it isn't
any industry hiring people off the street and paying them by the hour or or um or pro contact um leads to a lot of bad work and you have a lot of really poor incentives for people to either be inefficient or or give you bad data if you're if you're if you're paying them uh per complete so i i i've sort
of shifted my view on the competence of that the the trump organization uh over the course of year because it seems like they they they haven't aligned their strategy with their their tactics and an organization and i think common heroes is like a far more traditional democratic campaign and there's
a kind of you know sensible logic to it even if she's made a few mistakes along the way it sounded like the thing elon's doing um you know he's trying to sign you can't pay people to vote that's illegal so it's kind of like i'll pay you to sign the petition and the petition says something that sounds
very like agreeable like i i support free speech yeah who doesn't right like that sounds pretty reasonable but like it seems like there must be some some 3d chess going on that i've not i i don't fully understand which is what 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 to voting yourself to the cause now do this and this like there's
actually a reason to think that works but that's just then one step that's just the first step in a three or four step process and you need to be really good and targeted at the next few steps because you know one real difference that's important i think for for your audience keeping when you learning
from adjacent fields is is great and important a lot of the breakthroughs i've written about have come from people in politics looking to to business or elsewhere but there's some really different really important differences between business marketing and political marketing and one of them is that the cost
of of mistargeting out of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics right so if you are if you have a consumer product and your coke and you put a coke ad in front of somebody who's on a diet or doesn't like sugar has diabetes or like whatever okay you wasted 10 cents for that person big
deal if you are the trump campaign and you send a door 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 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 or credit cards where if if a company thinks that 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 if an insurer decides that you that you're you know should be a 500 premium and it turns out that you cost them a lot more they've really screwed screwed up but most consumer marketing like there's not a huge
downside to getting your in front of the wrong people but politics there is and i think that's the big mistake that a lot of people and perhaps elon or the people around him make is they move from business to politics they say let's just throw resources at it when i needed to when i needed to build
you know create interest in tesla i just bombarded all these people digital advertising about tesla offered them all a free test drive and you know a cocktail in our at our at our cool um uh showrooms like that probably works to start building interest in tesla it's a terrible way to to try to turn
out voters for your candidate all right a quick break i know that if you're listening to my first million that means you love numbers well i've got a new podcast called money wise and the premise is simple we talk to high net worth people so people who have somewhere between 50 to 500 million dollars
and we start with simple premise which is tell me exactly how much money you have how much money you make every month what your portfolio looks like how much money you spend every month and every other bit of information that involves your net worth and your spending and the reason we do this is because i
want to demystify money so we just had this woman named who has a 94 million portfolio after selling her business and she spends 360 000 a month and she talks about where the money is and what she spends it on and why she spends that much and if it makes her happy or not and then we dive deep on different
topics like children buying versus renting giving money away we basically are having a conversation that i see a lot of rich people having behind closed doors we do it publicly so check it out it's called money wise and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts and when you've been looking into
a space like this like how disillusioned do you get and really i guess the question is you've now studied multiple election cycles you've heard you've talked to the teams behind this and then the different subsections of this industry what's like you know when i clean my house and i move the couch and i'm
like oh my god there's 10 years of my kids snacks under here like what's the thing where you're like i wish i didn't see that i wish i didn't know that what is the ugliest part of this that that really has you know you you saw or turned you off i mean i think they the disinformation stuff is is you
know i generally was encouraged in the early years of writing about this because the people who 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 and that struck me as like
democracy was was improving because of technology and innovation if i use campaigns have a lot of data about individual voters that doesn't really scare me a lot of people have a lot of data about voters and they're usually instead of giving you some vague thing about you know america 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 targeted message about what i my campaign would do for cancer research like i think that that's generally good for the country what what has changed is i think you have so many people have the ability
to reach large numbers and voters now we're just not constrained by a lot of the expectations about honesty and can't be held accountable for what they say and and i think that that that is is is scary to me what's going on now because ai has now made it easy to do deep fake audio i can make i can make
it i can make donald trump say anything yeah for like you know 30 cents on my computer right now i can make a video that shows you know something that i want happening um i could have hey if uh if phone banking works why can't i just spin up an army of ai phone agents to just call everybody what is what have you
seen as the new tools and is that has that happened this cycle or you think it's next cycle relatively maybe less the cycle than i would have thought if we'd had this conversation a year ago um you know i think 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 are afraid of the backlash of of um of being associated with with ai even for not necessarily even from for manipulation but just like you know on non -live callers and and so i there's a hurdle that campaigns
have from a kind of brand image perspective about being associated with with new or potentially sort of invasive feeling technologies um and so there's been less of that where people are using ai the most in this campaign is like sort of the same way we all might use it which is like brainstorming first
drafts of 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 going to e -b test them anyway so instead of having a bunch of you know 23 year olds
who just you know graduated from liberal arts colleges like typing out your first drafts and trying to see whether the the one that scares people into thinking you're losing is going to do better than the one that has like jalo's signature under it why not have the machine come up with 10 different
jalo ones and test those and that's i think like probably that that 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 cambola doing like a fortnite map they just released like uh 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 they have a fortnite player what's the psychology around that so it starts from the position of having more money than they know what to do with and they're being
an unusual scarcity issue for political markers which is like one you have one day by which all your sales have to be completed i don't think there's another industry i mean they're seasonal industries i guess like a july 4th fireworks store yeah right so like um halloween store probably makes some
interesting pricing decisions on november 1st right um so one thing is that they like have a lot of money they have to get out the door and all of the tv is bought up in you know we're down to seven battleground states the tv markets are saturated there's a point at which you can no longer send out
new direct mail um if you wanted to get more volunteers knocking on doors you probably had to start building offices and having staff to train them months ago and so at the end of the campaign you start to see uh the end of this you know right before election 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 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 just nowhere else to put it some people have called this election the the sort
of the the podcast election because you have podcasts have become this huge medium you have unedited unfiltered conversations kind of one of the only ways you can actually see what a candidate is really like i was joking with my buddy i said i think going on theo vons 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 theo von might be the only guy who could save us there um you know trump did rogan jd vance just did a three -hour thing with rogan and famously 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 30 million people in a like super meaningful way another was how dare you joe she's the vice president and there's a few days left for the election how
do you have demands you should be you know crawling to her to do this and other people would say you're not going to convince anybody who listens to rogan to vote for you 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 was slow to put her out in a lot of different venues you know there's a week where she did call uh uh and and the view and it was like oh and then maybe she did call bear or camel or something it was like oh she's doing media now and right part of what was shocking about that was that she
was doing so little of it early on and like again they had to build a campaign from scratch really quickly at a at an inopportune point you had to pick a vp she had to get ready for you know a nomination speech debates all the stuff that she did not expect she was going to have to do a few weeks earlier
so um but also you know one of the advantages that democrats had in in dumping biden from the ticket and getting her was you had somebody who for assault just had 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 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 non -stop and she's charismatic and and and telegenic and all these things and that never really came to fruition and i don't know how much this i think might be one of the things we start to learn after the election when when some journalists or book authors get a little access
into what they were thinking i think one of the questions is how much of that was just that they didn't have the time to do as much of it and and that would be could be sensible to me um the other or was it that the staff was fundamentally afraid that 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 this sort of new era we've we've we've bounced in there 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 could be you know 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 search for a playbook for for learning how to communicate in that environment because it blows up so many of the expectations about about campaign strategies and i write a bit
about that biden uh uh example in there which i think was really a really important shift in starting to think about the recipients of disinformation more than the producers of disinformation which has been i think a big mistake that that not just campaigns with people in the media make and trying to
understand what impact something will have but i also have a group that uh has been trying to fight basically conspiracy theories um around the 2020 election and around around covid vaccines they basically have gone out and hired some of the more successful like jiff and meme makers online um uh you
know a guy who had like the most likes on himgiver and stuff and their theory of the case is that you need to be engaging 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 the unique 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 um and you know i i quote one of their um the sort of head guy there he says like
you need to earn the right to communicate with people and to do that you have to usually entertain or inform them first and i think it's a really interesting way of starting to think about how traditional political communication has to fundamentally rethink itself from the 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 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 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 got to watch this video like i hang out with mr beast and he's like he could recite to me the first 40 seconds of of script from a video he did three years ago
because he drilled it so many times and every word was chosen of like i cannot like leave this first minute up for grabs right and what he talks about because i asked him i said you know do you ever look at tv and what you could learn from them and he goes yeah but what they could learn from us i mean he's
like dude tv would never survive uh on youtube like you he's like people would click away it'd 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 going to respond to not a one v one but sort of you versus the entire field of content that's out there right now and what's your playbook to win there yeah absolutely and i think we're only now starting to get you know people have campaigns having a more instinctual understanding it used
to be so much of online campaigning you know in the 2000s 2010 was basically let's take things we're already doing offline and figure out how to move them online right okay so we know how to make 30 second videos and put them on tv let's just turn them into you know maybe we have to go from vertical
horizontal or 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 its democrats realizing how poorly they've been outfoxed 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 you communicate to certain people i want to i want to leave
with one last question which is uh what do you think is the most mispriced or misunderstood opportunity in elections meaning if somebody hired you and they're like all right you're gonna you're our consultant 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 2021 2022 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 have distance helped him and if democrats had kept like a foot
on his neck through advertising reminding people yes the reason you know wherever unemployment was in in an inflation war in 2021 was because of the guy who was just there reminding people about some of the covid dynamics but like they pulled away from him at just the moment that they prop they could have 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 they're sure people starting to talk about party based branding right so like so much of our political our political communication paid community
tv s are almost entirely about candidates and yet like where we started this conversation was that basically 45 percent of of the country are democrats and 45 percent are republicans and they'll always vote for their party and yet no political advertising is spent branding the parties and i think their
advantage is to doing doing that in a counter cyclical way when people are not being bombarded by tons of tv ads but be reminding people the republican party stands for this and this here's how the democrats screwed up last time or vice versa and try to think about not just winning votes in an election but but sort
of long -term audience building for for a party i like it uh maybe you could also be one of these these political consultant shops that are making bank what's what is the what is the business that stunned you with how much it makes in the uh in this sort of election in this election marketing business
is there any whether it's a polling company or a research company that like is there any like multi hundred million dollar companies out there that do this the business model that's still most astounding is is uh media buyers who get paid a commission off of off of the ads they place when percent of ad
percent of ad spend and you know digital advertising is more labor intensive for them but buying tv is you know they're only so many stations in in wisconsin that you can put ads on and you know it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a commission often they're you know that that that's
and it's been that way for decades and this is is is there one like dominant ad buyer that that like there's no one in each party but um 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 in 100 million dollar revenue range we're not talking about you know huge companies but um but it really does not require at this point a lot of savvy or or or or labor ad buyers one give me one more is there any other cool business that uh that maybe it's like a one man shop that makes you
know 10 million a year doing a specific thing or is there any other interesting business niche that that you just stumbled into there's still some interesting stuff to be done with data and modeling um especially you know there are a lot of sort of boutique firms that will do campaign specific modeling
but what's happening now is that the things that presidential campaigns were able to do only presidential campaigns were able to do maybe 12 years ago now somebody running for county executive can use and i'm not sure that there are this is more an opportunity that people have mastered but i think that there
are probably opportunities to figure out how to package and translate that for small scale campaigns that do not have professionals always working on them the person running for state rep in your neighborhood her brother might be like the effect the fact that campaign 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 create tools that are more accessible that that's where i
think that's a place that if people were looking to try to get into the sort of tech end of the political business there's there 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 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 um you can find all my books there
my my first one is about the global sushi business which may be of interest to to to you too so um it's been really fun i love talking about politics from an angle that's different than one people are saying on cnn on any given day so thank you all right thanks so much man that was great to see you
in check 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 less travel never looking back
