Summary Sasha Issenberg - The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns - 11/14/12 (Youtube) youtu.be
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Speaker 0 For tonight's program, we have the distinct honor of hosting Sasha Eisenberg, an accomplished journalist and author. He will be discussing his newly released book, The Victory Lab at the Secret Science of Winning Campaigns. Now that this election is over, this is a wonderful time for us to take a look back and consider some of the factors beyond the behind the outcome. Mister Eisenberg is a graduate of Swarthmore and began following the processes of political influence in the streets of Philadelphia. He further honed his skills covering the 2,008 presidential election as a national political reporter in the Washington Bureau of the Boston Globe.
Speaker 0 He is now a columnist for Slate and the Washington correspondent for Inc, The Atlantic, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. Sasha Eisenberg's first book was a fascinating name, The Sushi Economy, Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, published in 2007. So maybe we should ask him how he happened to choose that particular topic, for those of us who like sushi. This new book, recently published, that he'll be discussing today began as an article planned for The New York Times Magazine and then grew like topsy into wide ranging research and interviews that emerged as the the victory lab. There have been many articles referencing his book throughout the fall, and, many more since the election have 5 Ways to Hack Voters' Brains, and I hope that he'll talk about some of those ways tonight.
Speaker 0 Responses to the book so far have been rave reviews. Nate Cohn of the New Republic states, There are few other books that address the complexities of the political ground game, and those that do are too old to incorporate the rapid changes in campaigning over the past decade. Richard Ben Cramer, author of What It Takes, says of our guest, Sasha Issenberg is our most acute observer of the modern political campaign. With vivid portraiture and crystal clear prose, he takes us beyond the charge and countercharge, the rallies and stump speeches that we've heard so much about, to show us the hidden persuaders. This is the politics you'll never see on the nightly news.
Speaker 0 And I must say that based on a very fascinating dinner table conversation just now, you're in for a real treat tonight because those are not just, blurbs on the book. It it's for real. Will you welcome to the Ford Library, Sasha Eisenberg?
Speaker 1 Hi. Thank you all for coming out. Thanks to the the library and, for having me and, foundation for, helping to sponsor such a nice program. So we at dinner, of course I had to nostalgize about past visits to Michigan. And I was thinking back to times I was here in 2,008, while a reporter at the at the Boston Globe, mostly covering McCain.
Speaker 1 And and again, that sort of parade of of rallies and speeches, which sort of represent the entirety of my, at least, political memories of of having been a reporter in the state. And it's a reminder to me of of so I I spent, the 2008 cycle, as a reporter for The Globe, basically covering campaigns the way that you, I assume, experienced this last 1 with a real focus on sort of big events, candidate speeches that sort of understood mandate for a modern political reporter was to basically stick as close to the candidate as you possibly could. So I flew around with with with McCain and Obama and to some degree, Hillary. And the goal was always to make sense of what they were saying, where they were saying it, the sort of slight shifts in their language, how what they were saying matched up with what their ads were saying, what what their pollsters would tell us about why they were saying it. And all of it seemed to be in the service of trying to distill the election to sort of 1 big thing.
Speaker 1 What is that 1 issue that we're go this is gonna be decided on? What is that single sort of defining contrast between the candidates? What is that 1 state that's gonna prove pivotal or that demographic group that's going to sort of hang in the balance? And I didn't fully appreciate until after that election was over until 2009, the extent to which I had sort of seen only a very little bit of, of campaigns and failed to really understand what was going on in them. And that's when I, came to fully appreciate the extent to which, there was a whole lot else going on, Often back at the campaign headquarters, dozens of hundreds of people, dozens or hundreds of people whose not only did I not know who they were, I didn't even know that their job descriptions existed in in politics.
Speaker 1 A group of people that all very loosely and generously lumped together as geeks who were, posing and beginning to answer a bunch of questions that were never kind of part of the the language that, that that that we as reporters had or that the at least the people we interacted with on campaigns, had. And at in the broadest sense, they weren't at all interested in finding the 1 big thing that was gonna determine a race because they actually didn't believe that there was 1 big thing that would determine a race. But what they did all day was sort of, focus on trying to isolate and measure the many, many millions of little things that can determine the outcome of a race. And it marked a sort of dramatically different so not only so the stuff I was looking at, the the sort of rallies and speeches and those big events like debates or conventions, I realized represented only a small share of the sort of levers that that these people inside campaigns thought that they had to actually move votes. As a result, they were concerned about tactics that, we in the press corps sort of didn't think of as part of the the broader strategic goals of the campaigns, and they all they thought about the electorate in in in an entirely different set of terms.
Speaker 1 Terms. And, fundamentally, they thought about the challenge of what you do to move a vote as, in in ways that I couldn't even begin to imagine. And what sustained this were sort of 2 major innovations that had migrated into politics in the decade or so that I had been covering campaigns, but to which I and, basically, all my peers in the press corps and by extension the public had been almost entirely oblivious. 1 moving into politics effectively from the commercial world, from from from the corporate world, people doing commercial research and consumer marketing, the other from academia and from the social sciences. They fundamental fundamentally changed what, at least the smartest people in campaigns, understood about how to sort of sort through the electorate and actually move votes.
Speaker 1 And so, the the the book I wrote is sort of the story of those 2 ultimately intertwined innovations and how they've they've changed, campaigns. And what happened a week ago yesterday, more than anything, I think affirms, the the sort of primacy of the the sort of new mechanics of of actually, moving votes in the 21st century, and it's it's no longer I think we're starting to sort of come to an acceptance that that that election wasn't necessarily about 1 big thing, but there was 1 campaign that understood how to, isolate the lots of little things and and move them in the direction that they wanted. But what had happened in the in the time that I had been covering campaigns, which is more or less my whole professional life when I wasn't writing about sushi, First of all, it was a huge influx of data into the the political world from from other sources. I'll give you a brief sort of history of of what campaigns know about you. There's the information that you put down when you register to vote, which which is your name and your address and your age and your gender, and in some places, your race and ethnicity, and in some states, not this 1, a party registration.
Speaker 1 And then the history of elections in which you vote, which often includes whether or not you vote in primaries, although that's a peculiar piece of data in this in this state. But, but that's ultimately a very limited profile of who you are. Beginning in the sort of sixties seventies with the first generation of of computer punch card technology, it became possible to organize information about how your precinct voted, which gave some sense of the sort of political complexion of of your neighborhood. And, gradually, to do the same thing with census information that offered some ability to sort of sketch the socioeconomic status or household type of of of your neighborhood. And with that, campaigns could begin to extrapolate, things about how you who you were and how you lived.
Speaker 1 The big breakthrough in, campaigns came after 2,000 where people in, inside the world of politics said, ultimately, that's a fairly limited amount of information about the people that we're trying to reach and persuade and mobilize. And they looked over at the corporate world and realized that companies knew a whole lot more about their their, customers or potential customers. And that massive databases had been developed initially to develop to credit rating scores, then became useful to direct mail marketers who wanted to figure out that they should send you catalogs and buy charities that would buy list to go out prospecting for new donors. And this was information that came from a lot of sources. Much of it's stuff that we, sort of give away a little unknowingly, probably when we fill out warranty forms or apply for a sweepstakes or fill out a customer service questionnaire, and you check the box that your household income is is in a certain range, or you have 2 children living at home, or you're a college graduate, or you take a certain number of vacations a year.
Speaker 1 These companies would also go out, and they'd buy up lists of magazine subscriptions, or cruise ships would sell a list of their customers. And then they'd go out and they'd collect lots of public records that were maintained in maintained locally, but nobody had ever brought together before, like people who had gun licenses or hunting permits or applied for construction permits to put a pool in their backyard. And they collected all this information in in data warehouses in the private sector that were useful to companies because they you know, if Home Depot wanted to decide where to put a store, they'd go look for people who had pools. Or if Cabela's wanted to go figure out where they should send catalogs, they would try to find people who were likely to be be hunters. And people in the political world realize, wow, this is they know these companies know a lot more about the people they're trying to reach than we do.
Speaker 1 And so what happened after in the first few years of the last decade, 2001, 2002, people who did political data went out and started acquiring this data from from the commercial from commercial data warehouses and linking it up, with, with voter registration records. The other major source of information that campaigns know about you is the stuff that they collect, every day over the course of a campaign in seemingly innocuous, interactions that you have with volunteers.
Speaker 0 I
Speaker 1 have a lot of respect for for people who volunteer in campaigns, but to take the unsentimental view, they are unpaid data collectors. And, every time somebody calls you during dinner or knocks on your door and says, I just wanna ask you a few questions. Do you plan to vote next week? Who do you plan to vote for? What issues do you care about?
Speaker 1 Each of those becomes a a data point, a variable, about you. Those are pieces of data that used to get written down on the clipboard, and the clipboard got put in the file cabinet, and the filing cabinet cabinet went into the dumpster the day after the election. Now, that goes on the clipboard, and the clipboard at some point, becomes a data entry project for somebody, and it goes on to a database, and it never disappears. And so what you started to have a decade ago was the campaigns went from having maybe a few dozen data points about you from your voter registration record in the census and how your precinct voted into maybe a 1,000 data points about you. And that could be whether or not you would take in a cruise and whether or not you subscribe to to to Harper's and whether or not you once checked off a box that you said your household income was between 75 $100,000, and whether or not you told the canvass or for John Edwards that global warming was the most important issue to you.
Speaker 1 And it became possible to, run statistical models in which algorithms would look for patterns between the information that's available about every, registered voter and what campaigns were learning about public opinion through massive large scale polls that they were doing. And these aren't just the 700, 800 sample polls that probably drove most of us batty throughout October, but often thousands of people, sometimes tens of thousands of people in the state so that the sort of subgroup categories that you had were much bigger. So in in your normal New York Times or CNN poll of Ohio, after sample is women and a 5th of your sample is African American, and, you know, a quarter of your sample is rural. But if you wanna look at rural African American women, you have, like, 6 people in your sample, and you can't really learn anything about them. But if you do 10,000 interviews in the state, that number becomes a lot larger, and you can see a whole lot of other patterns.
Speaker 1 And so what these algorithms would do is they'd weigh the individual influence of each of those 1,000 variables for a voter on predicting the answer to a few questions that mean a lot to campaigns, which is how likely are you to vote and how likely are you to support my candidate? And then sometimes how likely are you to be pro choice or be a gun owner or whatever else they care about? And the result is, something that I like to or a set of scores. They're individual level predictions. And I like to think of them as basically credit rating scores for politics.
Speaker 1 And so in the same way that a financial institution will not sign off on a line of credit for you, until they have a quantitative assessment of your likelihood of paying off a bill on time or defaulting on a loan or running up more than $1,000 of charges in a month. A field organizer in a modern campaign is not gonna send somebody to knock on your door or have, a brochure sent to you in the mail or have somebody call you without having a probabilistic assessment of your likelihood of going out and casting a ballot already, of already supporting their candidate, of sharing their position on on abortion, whatever it is. And what it allows them to do is you come up with these individual level scores, and campaigns can now sort through the electorate, in with a set of individual, assessments. And so they no longer have to say, we're gonna just put our resources in these precincts or just look at these demographic groups. But you can say, here are 3 people on a block that we want to mobilize.
Speaker 1 Here are 4 people on that same block that we want to persuade. We know that 3 of them we can persuade with our standard message about jobs and the economy. 1 of them will persuade with a message about about guns. And, campaigns can go out and develop what in effect amounts to a sort of unique, prescription for interacting with each of them. And in, the last decade, this has dramatically changed the way campaigns understand, who they should be talking to.
Speaker 1 So the question is, okay, we know, we know a lot more about who they should be talking to. What do you do when you get there? And in that area, campaigns have been transformed by a series of of innovations and research breakthroughs that have come not out of the commercial world, but out of academia. In 1998, 2 political scientists at Yale went out on the streets of New Haven before the midterm elections, and they ran a field experiment, which was a radical thing for political scientists to do. The discipline always lagged behind the other social sciences in doing randomized experimentation, for a number of reasons.
Speaker 1 A lot of them having their origins here at the University of Michigan, which is that, massive investments were made in election studies and certain and collecting survey data over the course of of of, every 4 years. And it produced huge pools of data for any, anybody who wanted to try to understand what actually went on in campaigns. You could basically run regressions and look at the relationship between any population group and anything you wanted to measure in the polls. And there were seemingly infinite numbers of questions that you can answer that way. And so while economists started to realize that we could go out and actually try to test sort of people's behavioral responsiveness to certain types of of interventions in the real world.
Speaker 1 Political scientists were very reticent to do this. Nonprofit funding restrictions and human subjects review boards made it very difficult for political scientists to go out and get involved in partisan politics. And more to the point, political campaigns and parties wanted nothing to do with academics. And so the people who studied campaigns lived often a very sort of cloistered life detached from the campaigns that they thought that they were explaining. And so these 2 guys at Yale, Don Green and Alan Gerber, decided they were gonna do an experiment, mostly to address what were a bunch of sort of debates within their discipline over rational choice theory and over collective action problems.
Speaker 1 But the core of it was this question of of why do people vote. And political scientists have been inclined towards a very sort of, rational explanation that was often explained in these very long equations that basically, presuppose that every registered voter, on before deciding whether or not to go cast a ballot on on the morning of the election, weighed the cost and benefits of doing it, The cost being all the time of of, learning about the candidates and making a decision among them and, going to the polls and waiting online. And the benefits were some estimation of the likelihood that their vote could be the pivotal 1 in tipping an election with tens, if not 100 of millions of other people in a direction that would, uniquely accrue material benefits to them. And of course, the only way you can honestly make that calculation is if you are simultaneously judging how, in this case, a 129,000,000 other people will make those calculations because otherwise, you never know whether you're gonna be the pivotal voter. And political scientists were pretty happy with the idea that when you decided whether or not to get in your car to go to, like, the elementary school in your neighborhood to cast a ballot, you were simultaneously refining these calculations for your personal use.
Speaker 1 These 2 guys at Yale thought that was a really silly, way of thinking about human behavior. And so they decided that they were gonna set up a test, and with the idea that if they could do anything to change somebody's likelihood of voting with a really small interaction, that they would call into question some of these big theories about how rational this decision is. And so they partner with a local league of women voters chapter in Connecticut, and they randomly assigned, New Haven voters to, 1 of 4, treatment groups. And this was basically a randomized control trial like you'd set up a pharmaceutical trial, except voters were the guinea pigs. And instead of randomly assigning drugs and placebos, you were gonna randomly assign doses of political communication, then look at what it did to the people who got them.
Speaker 1 And so a quarter of the people got a, get out the vote reminder by on the postcard. A quarter of them got it, from a phone call, from a paid call center. A quarter got a an in person visit at the door from a Canvas or a paid grad student, and then there was a quarter that were in a control group. And after the election, you can go back and you can see who voted and who didn't. And it turns out that the people who got the, phone call saw no increase in their likelihood of voting.
Speaker 1 The people who get the mail, there's a small but appreciable increase. The people that get the in person visits see a significant, jump in their in their in their, turnout. And they, try to get this paper published. Political Science Journals think it's, makes no it gets initially rejected from the American Political Science Review because they're told that it it makes no meaningful contribution to any of the theoretical debates that, are relevant to campaigns, irrelevant to the study of elections. I I think in the book, I describe it as embarrassingly practical.
Speaker 1 And what you start to have is political professionals who, in my experience, very rarely pay much attention to what's going on in in scholarly journals, take interest. And there tends to be 1 of 2 reactions. Academics have developed a scientifically credible tool for disentangling cause and effect and and, assessing the empirically assessing the impact of of methods that we convince candidates to spend, tens, if not 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars on every year. Or there's another reaction, which tends to be a little more widespread, which is, oh, no. Academics have developed a scientifically credible tool for determining whether the things that we spent we get candidates to spend tens or 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars on every year actually work.
Speaker 1 And you get this sort of petty war in certain corners of the political consulting profession where the people who sell phone calls to campaigns start needing to defend themselves against the people who sell direct mail because they're sending this journal article around like it's consumer reports, and they have 2 different dishwashers to to hawk. But in that first group, you have a very small sort of cadre of people who not only say, this is pretty neat. We should be paying attention to the specific findings, from these experiments. But this is especially the case in a bunch of liberal interest groups that do spend a lot of money year after year doing campaigns in Washington. Hey.
Speaker 1 We're out doing politics every year. We're sending mail and putting out phone calls and knocking on doors. Why don't we start running our own experiments to see what works? And over the first half of the last decade, you had a sort of new experiment based research culture emerge in politics. Some of it based in academia, some of it coming out of of people who actually do, elections, in the real world.
Speaker 1 And at times, interesting collaborations be, between the 2. And over a few years, basically, people test every combination of comparative effectiveness in individual voter contact that you can. So instead of just you go doing comparing mails to mail to phone calls, then you do 2 pieces of mail versus 1 piece of mail. So the last piece of mail arrived at Thursday before the election, the Friday before the election. And does it work in Spanish, and does it work in Korean?
Speaker 1 And, pretty soon, basically, every permutation of this has been tested. And there's a sort of important moment that takes place in 2004, 2005 when a behavioral psychologist named Todd Rogers, who at the time is at Harvard, sort of stumbles onto the scene. And he had spent a little bit of time at a polling firm and had become frustrated by what he thought were the limitations of polling to because it was relying on people self reporting or projecting their own future behavior, the sort of limitations of the inability of people to honestly, project what they were were going to do. And, he sort of found solace in in in the literature from behavioral psychology, which he thought sort of got to some of the imperfections in how we assessed or predicted our our our our own behavior. And at the time, he was, volunteering for Wesley Clark's campaign, in New Hampshire before the primary in late 2003, early 2004.
Speaker 1 So he would drive up on the weekends from Cambridge, and he'd go to Clark's office in Manchester. And he'd see these scripts that were given to, can volunteers who would go out canvassing or make phone calls. And the scripts had this sort of standard bit of language that sort of came out of, like, the League of Women Voters, you know, sort of culture of encouraging higher turnout and felt a per particularly acute for Democrats after they had lost so narrowly in in 2000 after the recount in Florida. And they would say something like, there are tens of millions of people who didn't exercise their right to vote in the last election. Don't be part of this problem of of of low civic participation.
Speaker 1 Go out and vote. And Rogers thought that that made voting sound like a very sad, lonely thing that nobody wanted to do. And he knew that there was a pretty rich literature in behavioral psychology that showed that you can increase somebody's likelihood of doing something just by making it sound popular. And so he he, he knew well a series of experiments that a psychologist named Bob Cialdini had run-in the, in 19 eighties, where he worked with hotel chains that were very interested in in getting people to reuse their towels. Now hotels don't want to wash their towels every day because it wastes a lot of they spend a lot of money on detergent, and it takes housekeeping longer to turn over a room.
Speaker 1 And so for years, they had put like a placard in the bathroom that said something like it wastes so many gallons of water every time you wash your towels. Don't be part of this ecological nightmare. Reuse your towels. And Cialdini designed an experiment where they randomly sign some bathrooms to get a different placard that will go on the counter next to the sink, and it said something like, the majority of guests reuse their towels. Reuse your towels.
Speaker 1 And towel reuse went up just by giving people a different queue at this moment where they had a relatively low cost decision to make, and you played to somebody's desire to sort of fit in with what they thought other people like and around them were doing. And so Rogers designed an experiment where the in ran in a series of gubernatorial elections where they, in a nonpartisan get out the vote program, voters were assigned to get 1 of 2 reminders, both of them accurate based on the same underlying set of facts. But more or less because of population growth, you can either make any election sound highly attended or or ignored. Right? And so 1 1 of these scripts would say something like more people, turnout in the last election for mayor of Ann Arbor was lower than in any other election in the city's history.
Speaker 1 Don't be part of this problem of low turnout, go vote. And the other 1 would say something like more people vote in the last election for mayor of Ann Arbor than any other election in the city's history. We expect big turnout next Tuesday. Go out and vote. And turnout went up a few points when people just got a different cue, the sort of so called high turnout message.
Speaker 1 And it was a really important moment in understanding what motivated people to vote. Because here was something that was demonstrated to turn nonvoters into voters. And it didn't once mention the candidates, the parties, the issues, the policy concerns, the supposed stakes or consequences of the election. In fact, it didn't really have any conventional, sort of political content to it. It wasn't about the candidates.
Speaker 1 It was more about the voter, and in this case, their desire to fit in and do something that was popular. It opened up a sort of new vein of research in which people who were running these experiments started looking at at things we knew from elsewhere in the behavioral sciences that had been demonstrated to change somebody's motivation to do something, not always something that they particularly wanted to do, often by changing the sort of social dynamics around it. And so the the most successful thing we know for, turning a non voter into a voter was first demonstrated in an experiment in Michigan in in 2006, in which, the super professors at Yale, Don Green and Alan Gerber, partnered with with Mark Grebner, who is a, consultant who's based in East Lansing, who does direct mail and also happened to have happens to have built the 1st statewide voter file in in, in Michigan. What and some of you may know us, which is a particularly arduous task in this state given how, decentralized, election administration is. And their experiments, once again, assigned voters to get, different types of of mail.
Speaker 1 And 1 letter, would say something like, Darryl Lane, your history as a voter is a publicly available document on file with the county board of elections. Here is your history as a voter. You did vote in last year's senate election. You did not vote in the school board election. You did vote in the county commissioner primary.
Speaker 1 You did not vote in the in the governor's race. And here are your neighbors' vote histories. And it had other people on your block and whether or not they had voted in those same elections. And then there came a threat. There's another election coming up, and afterwards, we'll send everybody an updated set.
Speaker 1 Now this increased turnout among the people who received it by 20%. It also got Mark Revener death threats. And both of those facts convinced the people who were behind the experiment that they were onto something pretty potent. And it was what, psychologists called social pressure. In this case, it it preyed, I think, on the, I the expectation that people have because we're in a country with a secret ballot that your vote is, because your vote is private, that everything about voting is private.
Speaker 1 In fact, it's not. Who you who you vote for is is private, but whether or not you vote is completely a mad a public matter, and campaigns have been using it for, forever to determine who who's a voter and who isn't. And in this case, letting people know in a not particularly subtle way that, their neighbors could become aware of this fact, and that their neighbors could judge them on this fact, was obviously a a huge driver to get them to to change their behavior. And once again, though, you were getting somebody to vote, and you weren't talking to them about politics. You were talking to them about themselves and their desire to fit in, their desire to live up to whatever standards of good citizenship they may hold for themselves, their desire, in this case, not to be sort of outed as a bad citizen.
Speaker 1 And, what you had in politics in the years after was, in many cases, some desire to figure out how to channel the power, the psychological power of this, tool, to not get the death threats. Right?
Speaker 0 Because if
Speaker 1 you're if you're, an experimentally minded, East Lansing direct mail vendor, you may be willing to put your name as the return address. But if you're a candidate or a party, you might not want to be the ones, seen as as doing the blackmail. And so there were sort of years of of experiments, trial and error, almost all initially on the left, with academics and and increasingly, eventually involving the Democratic National Committee in in 2010, trying to figure out how you can harness the sort of psychological potency of this idea of social pressure without the sort of backlash. And what in the end, people realized was there's an experiment that the Democratic National Committee did in in 2010 that, informed a lot of what the Obama campaign, did this year, where they they realize that they could get some of that impact, not all of it, but by sending a letter, often on the letterhead of a respected local politician or civic figure, it said something like, Jolynn, you're I I can see that you voted in the 2008 elections, and I wanna thank you for having taken the time to, to participate. There's another election coming up, and I hope that, once again, I can thank you for your good citizenship.
Speaker 1 And, this once again increased turnout by a few points. It didn't seem to bring in any death threats. And that little bit of language, I was out in Ohio with with, canvassers from both campaigns the weekend before the election. And in the scripts that every canvasser would have is, something that played, to to that language. I could see that you voted in the last elections, referring to people as voter or as the type of person who votes, all of which different experiments had established changed the sort of psychological dynamics around around voting and made somebody more likely to respond.
Speaker 1 And so we've now concluded another election season in which I think the sort of full flower of these 2 innovations, has become apparent. Campaigns now have remarkable ability to individually target voters. Now not only predicting your likely behavior and attitudes, but by combining those with experiments, having, a surprisingly refined idea of how likely you are to respond to their efforts to persuade you or their efforts to mobilize you. And because of these sort of behavioral science inspired, experiments around, motivation, I think a much more nuanced, honest understanding of how to make voting meaningful to people, and how to make the experience of voting a more social 1. And so we still don't know exactly what turnout was this year, but we have seen since 1996, which is sort of a low point for turnout in presidential elections, it has increased every year since, and we'll probably end up somewhere right around where 2,008 was nationally.
Speaker 1 And this has happened all during an era in which people are, I think, often rightfully cynical of their political leadership, are often depressed by what they see in Washington, probably, feel a little bit hopeless that what they vote for will necessarily bring about whatever they they they wanna see. People are less trusting of institutions, especially political and governmental ones. Our campaigns are often, like, petty and soul crushing and, superficial and depressing, and yet, more and more people are voting. And we saw this year people voting, from demographic groups that traditionally have been voting at higher rate from some demographic groups that are often, that the lowest participating, young people, minorities. And there has been, for all that I think the sort of pageant of campaigns and the sort of spectacle of governing in Washington has been frustrating, an awakening of a new type of civic culture around campaigns in the last decade.
Speaker 1 And I think too often, we look we tell the story from the sort of perspective. You know, and we've sort of seen a sort of sequence of campaigns that are have a a huge volunteer culture emerge around them, really focused on person to person contact, mostly face to face at doors, sometimes in phone calls. And we often tell the story from the perspective of the volunteers. Right? So we look like the Dean campaign in 03 and the Bush reelection in 04, and I think these 2 Obama campaigns, and we say, well, volunteers were so excited because there's a charismatic candidate, and there was this movement that started, and they just wanted to give up their nights and weekends to go talk to their neighbors about this guy.
Speaker 1 And there's a little bit of truth in each of those cases. I don't wanna discount it. But we never fully tell that story from the perspective campaigns, which is campaigns are investing in the infrastructure that makes a volunteer culture possible, and it makes those type of person to person interactions with voters, profitable because they understand that those are uniquely, valuable interactions. And so, they know from from the sort of what we call microtargens, individual level targeting, how better to to assign who they should be sort of interacting with and how. And, from these experiments, we know that there's something that goes on.
Speaker 1 We've seen sort of time after time that a door knock is more effective at turning somebody into a voter than a phone call. A phone call from a a volunteer is more effective than a phone call from a paid call center. Even if somebody doesn't introduce themselves at the beginning of the call, voters apparently can hear the difference between a real person and somebody calling from Omaha. And we know that what campaigns now call chatty scripts, which is where the canvasser or the caller is, asks questions so that there's an interaction, a back and forth between the the the the questioner and the responder is more effective than what they call robotic scripts, where somebody just reads at you for 45 seconds. And so, all of that is in the service of creating meaningful interactions among real people, around campaigns.
Speaker 1 And we still don't have a great handle on what a TV ad does or a great debate performance does or a convention speech does in terms of public opinion. It's effectively impossible to design good ongoing experiments that isolate the effect of those really big things in mass media. But what we do know now and what the smartest people in campaigns know now is that something happens when a volunteer knocks on a door and talks to another voter that cannot in any way be replicated by any number of TV ads. And that's why the smartest campaigns aren't waiting for volunteers to just, like, come out of their doors and and, take initiative. They are creating the infrastructure of field offices and staffers to oversee them and to train volunteers so that when they go door to door, they're they're doing something that is actually bringing turning nonvoters into voters.
Speaker 1 I'll leave it there with the invitation that if you wanna ask me blunt questions about 2012, we can, we can we can transition neatly.
Speaker 0 I thought the turnout in this election was significantly less. There were 10,000,000 less Obama voters, 3,000,000 less, Romney voters than there were in the last election today. It was that correct?
Speaker 1 So there's a bit of accounting problem because there's a lot of votes that are still out, and the gap is certainly gonna be smaller than we thought it was immediately after election day. So some of this was stuff in the northeast where New York and New Jersey changed their, in in very high population areas, changed their voting rules around Sandy. There's some totally unexplained, problem with Arizona counting their ballots, but there are it sounds like at least half a 1000000 ballots out in Arizona, and then California has been incredibly slow. And and part of the turn towards, vote by mail or no fault absentee ballot, but various all all sorts of things where you can't count all the votes at 8 PM on election night mean that there are a bunch of states that I think in Colorado or Washington state, the window to even have your stuff get into the board of elections was still open until early this week. So I think that people were rushed a little quickly to the assumption that turnout was gonna be down a lot.
Speaker 1 Turnout might not get right up to 129 or something million, the vote in 2008. But I think what we'll see is it's probably gonna be in the same ballpark. And that certainly, you know, the increase from 2,000 to 2004 to 2,008 that I think the broad the the overall arc of that is will remain intact even if it doesn't get exactly there. But it's not gonna be 15,000,000 less.
Speaker 2 Mark Grebner says hello, by
Speaker 1 the way. Great.
Speaker 2 It seems almost maybe you haven't had a chance to dig behind the headlines and look at this yet. It almost seems like the Romney campaign left behind some science here. And I don't just mean on global warming and a lot of other things. But but because they genuinely seem to be going with models that and I don't know what they were based on, and what they expected a different, complexion of the turnout, than happened. And there was this massive amount of polling, which has been collectively pretty reliable, and they seem to go off on a tangent, say, we'll just assume a model of the 2012 turnout, and they actually seem to believe they're gonna win based on that.
Speaker 2 Did they go off the rails in following this, parade towards greater reliance on actual tested, techniques? Because they seem to make up their own this year.
Speaker 1 Yeah. So, I think the premise of your question is right. I mean, I think that the at the core of this is there's a huge gap between the 2 parties on on almost every matter of technique right now. And at the core of it is that I think that, democrats are not just synthesizing individual findings from specific experiments and using them to change their scripts and and, and do a better job with with individual level statistical models, but there's a sort of conception of what voting is that I think democrats more fundamentally get out of this research than republicans do. Let me step back.
Speaker 1 So, like, you know, the basic way that campaigns historically have tried to determine who is likely to vote is you ask people. And so what are called likely voter screens, Gallup has the most baroque of them, which has 7 questions that are, how close are you following this election? How excited are you to vote? Do you know where your polling place is? Do you really know where your polling place is?
Speaker 1 Are you sure? But most people use some version of the how close are you following this election? How excited are you to vote? And what you're basically measuring there is often what campaigns call enthusiasm. And so, at the core of the, Romney world and it's not it really wasn't just the Romney campaign.
Speaker 1 It was most people who were doing something on the right, whether on the super pac side or in in state races, was not just wishful thinking that this electorate would look more like 2010, but they looked at measures of enthusiasm that came through on polls, and they said Republicans are a lot more enthusiastic about voting than Democrats are. And by the traditional measures of the poll questions that asked that this was true, like, consistently for the last couple years. 1 thing that we realized is that, people, when they're asked how likely they are to vote, first of all, are really bad at knowing in advance. And so I wrote, at some point, for Slate about, some research that the firm Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner, democratic polling firm, didn't work for for the Clintons, did where they, they do monthly polls for Democracy Core, which is James Carville's vanity project. Or James Carville is a vanity project, but apparently, he gets people to he gets people to fund, 1 with special tax status.
Speaker 1 And so they go out and they do, like, a 1000 a sample of a 1000 people a month or something every month, and they put out a poll. And so at the end of 2,008, Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner went back and looked at the people that they had interviewed. Now the a big change that's taken place in polling in the last decade is that instead of, as was traditionally the case, you randomly dial digits. You need to randomly, you wanna randomly, create a you wanna create a randomly assigned sample of people who are likely to vote. So you randomly dial numbers, then you ask people these questions to filter out people who who look like a a likely voter to you.
Speaker 1 What's changed in the last decade is now because you have this huge database of voters, and you you have information about whether or not they voted in the past, which is a better prediction often of how they're going to vote. You can, campaigns will often call people. They'll decide who looks like a voter based on attributes, and they'll randomly pick, respondents out of that out of that sample. So, but Greenberg, Quinlan, and Rosner would call people so they didn't they knew who you were even if they didn't get to the part of the poll where they asked you how old you are and your gender and where you live and all that stuff. And so they and but they would ask people how likely are you to vote.
Speaker 1 And depending on your answer, you would either be allowed to continue with the rest of the survey or not. And they went back at the end of the year, and they they learned that I'm mean, get the numbers slightly wrong, but close enough. Like, 87% of the people who said that they were very likely to vote had ended up voting. You go back and you look at the voter rolls. Something like 70% of people said that they would probably vote or whatever ended up voting.
Speaker 1 But 54% of the people who said that they would were unlikely to vote had ended up voting. Now there are a lot of good explanations for this. These people are polite. Instead of hanging up on the pollster, they offered a socially acceptable answer, which is I'm not gonna vote, and then you, you know, you get kicked off the call, and you can go they call somebody else, and you go on with your life. But maybe also these people had no idea in June what they would be doing on a Tuesday in November.
Speaker 1 And maybe they weren't that interested in the race in August, and they had no honest ability to foresee, what they would be interested in in November. And the 1 thing they definitely wouldn't know, even with all the self awareness in the world, was all the things that campaigns would do to increase their likelihood of voting in September October and in the 1st days of November, which is what we call mobilization. And all of these experiments have pointed to the idea that campaigns can do discrete things to increase an individual's likelihood of voting in very small ways. A point here, a point to the 2 points or 3 points there. But, I think at the core of the Romney campaign's assumptions about what the electorate would look like was that they don't really understand or believe in mobilization.
Speaker 1 So I was on the receiving end of, you know, all the stuff that came out of the Romney press office and the RNC where people would write stories that would say, hey. The Obama campaign has a 130 offices in in Ohio. The Romney campaign has, I don't know, 40, 50 offices in Ohio. Obama has a better ground game. Now which is like, these are stupid stories that have, like, no texture.
Speaker 1 But the response of the Romney folks or the RNC folks would be, like, what? Field offices don't vote. What does it matter how many offices you have? These have a lot of offices. As though, like, the Obama campaign went out just to find a lot of leases that they could sign to put in press releases.
Speaker 1 Right? It's like, no. The Obama campaign opened offices because they wanted they had volunteer capacity. They wanted to fill or support because they realized that there were things that volunteers could do that would increase the likelihood of getting their neighbors to vote And that we have a huge body of empirical research that demonstrates how exactly you do this and what the impact is. And I think at the core of their skepticism wasn't just sort of spinning the idea of we don't have enough offices, but that they don't really get or believe that those interactions are, things that change people's behavior.
Speaker 1 And so at the core of it, 1 of the things we see in these experiments is time and time again that you do not that there are 2 separate things that campaigns can do. And these experiments have clarified the extent to which these are 2 separate paradigms of interacting with voters. There's persuasion, which is giving people information or arguments to get them to change their minds, ideally in your direction. And then there is mobilization, which is getting people who are not habitual voters to do something they're not used to doing. Voting.
Speaker 1 And every time people run experiments in which they try to chain try to give people more political information or arguments, it doesn't change their likelihood of responding. The things that are changing change their likelihood of voting. The things that change so many likelihood of voting are these psychological interventions that change the social dynamics around voting. And what what I think the left has fully internalized from this experimental stuff, and the right is amazingly oblivious. And this stuff's like all in academic journals, so it's not a secret.
Speaker 1 I've written about a lot of it. You can Google it. The is that the things you do to to change somebody's mind are dramatically different than the things you do to modify their behavior. And if you want to affect turnout, you need to figure out how to modify people's behavior. And the thing that that does not leave room for is enthusiasm.
Speaker 1 That fundamentally, you know, it doesn't matter how enthusiastic you are in either of these paradigms. The you get 1 vote. So it doesn't matter how intensely you were voting for Mitt Romney or against Barack Obama or for Barack Obama. You go in and you vote. Your votes worth the same thing.
Speaker 1 So I don't care how enthusiastically you pull down the lever or you press the button. And if you're the type of person who votes, you're you're likely to vote. If you're the type of person who doesn't vote, everything we've seen is telling you about more issues on which the person you already support agrees with you is not going to change your behavior. The things that are gonna change your behavior are psychological. And I I was out in Chicago this past weekend doing some reporting and having kicking this idea around with somebody from the Obama campaign who put it really nicely.
Speaker 1 He said, go go out and ask people if they're enthusiastic about going to the dentist. Now this was 4 days after the election, so he was apparently comfortable comparing voting for his candidate to going to the dentist, which I probably would not have heard from him before Tuesday. But I think it was like the right paradigm, which is, yeah, nobody's gonna say they're enthusiastic about going to the dentist. But people go to the dentist. They're either the types of people who regularly go to the dentist or maybe they have 1 of those dentists who sends you the postcard and has somebody who calls you with a reminder saying it's your time to go to the dentist, and that does something.
Speaker 1 You either feel guilty about not doing it. It reminds you. It gives you the information that you needed. You didn't realize it was that time of year. Whatever it is.
Speaker 1 And and I think that Republican pollsters, especially and there's a lot of wishful thinking involved in this, but just looked at those enthusiasm numbers and said, how could all of these people who don't typically vote, voted 1 time for Barack Obama when they were really excited about him, Still vote for him 4 years later when we know from everything that they're less excited about, less enthusiastic about his candidacy. And it turns out as best we can tell, and we'll know a lot more as as sort of information comes out about who exactly voted, that the thing that turned them out to vote 4 years later, even if they didn't they weren't enthusiastic about, was that something that the campaign was doing. And the Obama campaign understood that and invested the resources to create those interactions, and the Romney campaign never did. And they they had no way of accounting for that in in any of their polls. I think I heard the question.
Speaker 1 What, about the effectiveness of yard signs, especially in residential areas? So this is, everybody loves the question about yard sign efficiency. So this is 1 of the things that's really hard to test. I know people have tried to run experiments where they test the effectiveness of yard signs, but it's very hard. I I read my book about, Rick Perry's 2006 reelection campaign in Texas where, his top political adviser, Dave Carney, invited these 2 guys from Yale, who I talked about, into the campaign.
Speaker 1 They brought in 2 other academics who'd worked on Republican campaigns, and their mandate was you can run experiments on anything the campaign is doing this year, to measure their effectiveness as long as you can sort of come up with a a good design for it. And so they randomly assigned Perry's travel across Texas over several days. They randomly assigned the TV and radio buys for 3 weeks. And they, as best I could tell, had set up some sort of a design to randomly assign signs across different precincts in San Antonio to measure their impacts, and I could never find any evidence or memory that we had of ever actually executing the test. And the few times academics have tried to do something similar for research purposes, the problem you come up with is if you go in some place where there's a campaign that people are paying attention to, people are putting up yard signs on their own, and it's very hard to isolate the impact of of the sort of the the treatment.
Speaker 1 So, the the long answer is we we don't know. I think that there is a I think it's become very sort of trendy for people in campaigns to show how skeptical they are of the old ways of spending money to say, you know so the what people say is, like, yard signs don't vote. It's just true. They don't. That's but, like, I say, well, registration forms don't vote, but I'm do you find a use for those?
Speaker 1 And so I think often we end up asking the wrong questions when people wanna be skeptical of yard signs, which is, first of all, on what level of races are they? Are we using them in a presidential race? I can't imagine that that they're influencing anybody's choice among the candidates or changing somebody's likelihood of voting because they're not having any interaction with you or giving you any information that you haven't gotten anywhere else. Now if you get down to a sort of lower salient selections where you don't have any information, if the only piece of information you have is that somebody on your block or several people on your block like this guy. And especially if it's a primary where you don't have party to guide you or other indicators.
Speaker 1 Yeah. Like, why I'm I'm perfectly willing to, like, think that that that's a a useful sort of information shortcut for voters who who don't know anything else about the candidates. The 1 way in which I think that they're, and so what happened in in in the Perry example was they didn't run an experiment in 2006, but Kearney in 2010 decided that they weren't gonna print any signs. And so in Texas, yard like, we think of yard signs as, like, these little cute things you put on your lawn. In Texas, they're like, you know, the size of a stage, and, you know, they're in the middle of, like, these farm to market highways, and and they're not like you spend, like, 40¢ printing each of them.
Speaker 1 They're, like, incredibly expensive. And his thinking was, we don't know whether or not these things are doing anything. I'm appropriately skeptical that anybody who that there's anybody driving on a highway in Texas who doesn't know who Rick Perry is and is gonna, in any way, gain information from seeing his name in very large font. But what he did know was that the campaign had developed, basically, a huge supply chain infrastructure just to move these things around a fairly large state and to have volunteers spend a lot of time putting them up and nailing them into the ground and then going replacing them when their opponents tore them down. And he basically said, like, I don't know what these things are doing, but I know a whole lot I've now been able to measure a whole lot of other ways in which I can make my volunteers useful, and I think that this is, you know, the opportunity cost of doing this probably doesn't justify it.
Speaker 1 And so he made a decision they weren't gonna print up any signs whatsoever, which he thought was great because he likes pissing people off, which is 1 reason he's been a sort of amazing sponsor of of innovation that challenges a lot of conventional wisdom about campaigning. But it wasn't so fun for a lot of people at the campaign office who spent a lot of time they wanted to spend doing other things, having to explain to their volunteers or some supporter who just, like, drove an hour and a half in to get a yard sign that they don't have any. It's like, no. Really? We didn't print any?
Speaker 1 No. Like, they just don't exist. And eventually, the, campaign manager, sir, told me that she had surreptitiously spent $20,000 to print her own reserve of lawn signs that she could give out just to, like, short circuit these, you know, conversations. And I think that the better question isn't, like, do they move votes. Right?
Speaker 1 But are they useful for satisfying volunteers? Or, you know, what what happened each of those times is somebody drove into a campaign office, and smart campaigns realized, wow. You're already in the office. Now I have an opportunity to, get you to volunteer or get you to give money. You know, the Obama campaign in 2,008 decided they weren't gonna give away lawn signs.
Speaker 1 They charged, I think, $5 for them everywhere. And I think that they went in sort of skeptical about what lawn signs could do, but they recognized they had a lot of leverage because everybody wanted stuff that had Obama's name on in 2008. Times have changed. But what they realize is there's an opportunity there to get people to fill out financial disclosure reports. All of a sudden, you start to get a lot of more information about people to once you have them filling out a form off, and they'll give you their email address or their cell phone number, which you can't get easily otherwise.
Speaker 1 The thing that the Obama came in as really smart about is once even if they only gave you $5 for a long time, you can call them a donor. So when they wanna put out a press release, it says, we have 10,000,000 small dollar donors. Like, millions of them only bought little bits of merchandise, but then you were on their list, and they knew from a behavioral psychology literature that once you, you know, sort of foot in the door, once you're sort of in, you're more likely to respond to future requests to do things. And so I think that there's a way that people rise at law and science can be the beginning of a different type of interaction with somebody. And the goal for a smart campaign should be, what can I ask of people that isn't just go vote and vote for my candidate?
Speaker 1 What are other types of interactions that I can create with them to develop a relationship?
Speaker 3 Personal interaction, the hierarchy there, the chatty phone call versus that. And and I was really intrigued when you said, plain official looking communication is better than high impact visuals. Experimental findings confirm the value of simplicity. If so, how come all the stuff I got was glossy and the number of robocalls I got was incredible.
Speaker 1 Yes. Great question. There's a whole lot of the political profession that has not learned from research. You know, the political profession is in many ways innovation resistant. You know, 1 thing that sort of made me really interested in sort of delving into the world of the the secret world of the quants and the geeks as as whatever time called it, was that once once I learned that there were people inside the world of campaigns who were, basically, at their core, skeptical, that was really interesting to me because I had met very few people in campaigns that had any sense of self doubt about what they were doing.
Speaker 1 You know, I I sort of and, you know, there's sort of at the core of it is an an you know, the the reason that these experiments and this recollection of data has prove proven useful, I think, is because it has challenged a lot of that sort of institutional certainty that you can never be proven wrong. And so, you know, I always felt this, rather acutely, as a reporter that, I would ask I was covering politics in Philadelphia a decade ago, and I would ask people you realize if you ask, like, 2 or 3 follow-up questions involved, the words how or why, to anything that you ask a person in campaigns about why they do something that nobody has any ability to explain how or why they do anything. And this was always really clear to me the morning after an election. So, like, Wednesday morning, I'd call around my sources on the campaign, the consultants, or the staffers and just you know, they'd be a little more candid usually about what had happened, so it was a good time to actually learn something. And you always have 1 of 2 types of conversations.
Speaker 1 You call the people in the winning campaign. You say, like, so what happened? Why'd you win? And pretty soon, you're on a conversation about some discrete activity that that person was directly involved when involved in that made all the difference. Right?
Speaker 1 So you call the media consultant, and it's like, so why'd you win? And you get hear some story about how, like, you know, week out, we were down. So I looked really closely in the polls, and we were getting, like, slaughtered among married women. So I tore up our media schedule for the last weekend, and, you know, we drove into the studio, and I told the director, I want the last ad to just be all pink. And we went out, we shot the candidate in front of a house with a jungle gym.
Speaker 1 And we went into the studio and we edited all night and we drove station, we pulled down all our other ads, and last weekend we just went wall to wall with the pink house ad. And, you know, on election night we closed the gap among married women and we pulled it out. It's like, okay. And then you talk to, like, the, you know, communications director or the speech writer, and you hear the story of, like, that 1 zinger that they wrote in the, you know, in the radio debate that, like, totally changed the terms of the the voter's choice. And then you talk to, like, the advanced director who schedules the events and you hear the story about how, like, 6 weeks out, they made some brilliant decision to, you know, stop going to diners.
Speaker 1 They would only go to pumpkin patches. In the end, like, we we just killed it with the pumpkin patch vote. And then you call the people on the losing campaign. You're like, so what happened? Why'd you lose?
Speaker 1 And it's always the candidate was horrible. She wouldn't raise any money. It was the worst year to be a Democrat. The economy was, you know, in in a mess. And you realize there's a fundamental inability to honestly take credit or attribute blame.
Speaker 1 And what that did was it insulated people from ever sort of being proven wrong, and created just a sense of inertia. And what's happened is despite a sort of huge body of experimental work that shows what works and what doesn't, the that type of inertia remains the sort of governing, sort of dynamic of most campaigns, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that candidates aren't particularly good customers of the services that they buy. And so, even if the consultant knows that maybe this glossy mail is not the best thing we should be doing and the glossy mail is not even the best thing. Maybe they know, like, hey. I've heard a lot that shows and this is true.
Speaker 1 Probably, hundreds of experiments now. They show that robocalls have no impact on turnout whatsoever. But you know what? If you sell robocalls for a living you know? And so, you know, you and you sort of have to appreciate that political campaigns are the worst companies that you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 1 Right? So here's, like, a start up company that exists for, like, 6 months or 9 months, sometimes 18 months. It exists purely to win market share on some random Tuesday in November. The day afterwards, it goes out of business regardless of whether it's been a success or a failure. The CEO or the chairman of the board, the candidate is somebody who either has done it before and thinks they know exactly what to do and will keep on doing it over and over again with the same people that they did it last time, or has never done it before, in which case there is no good reason why a county commissioner or a justice of the peace or, you know, some local lawyer who is running for Congress should have any idea how to oversee a $1,000,000 political marketing, corporation and probably should have a whole lot of other things to worry about over the course of that year than, whether their direct mail vendor is best synthesizing, you know, research about about efficiency.
Speaker 1 And what happens is nobody invests in any sort of research or innovation over the course of the campaign year to test what they're doing because the only thing you care about is what happens on Tuesday, and it's not gonna the company is not gonna exist the next day regardless. And so often campaigns, the day when I'm calling around to my sources to ask what happened, you'd be shocked by how few campaigns are having a conference call, any sort of post mortem to go over what happened and what didn't. Everybody scatters. I mean, I I would be shocked if the Romney campaign has had any systematic, not even systematic is pushing it, any serious examination of what happened last Tuesday. You know, this isn't just about Mitt, but what happens after any election is, you know, the consultants are already on to the next thing.
Speaker 1 The if you if the candidate wins, rightfully, the candidate is back to governing or figuring out how to run a transition as they should be. That's ultimately what this is about. Or if they lose, they're, like, on a beach feeling sorry for themselves. And there's very rarely any institutional effort to learn from the experience of campaigning. And so almost all of the my guess is that the stuff that you're getting that's from that doesn't work is from institutions that exist solely to win this year.
Speaker 1 And so and what what comes through, I I hope, in the book is that the the places that are able to break this sort of cycle of inertia in are not candidate campaigns, but are institutions that have some degree of of durability beyond the 2 year cycle. And so academics are invested in that type of research, obviously. But, you know, 1 1 of the big drivers of innovation in in politics, in the last decade has been the AFL CIO, which goes totally contrary to, I think, a lot of our stereotypes about, about, you know, how high bound labor unions are in practicing politics. But the AFL says we spend a lot of money every year on campaigns. We're gonna be around in 2 years.
Speaker 1 We're gonna be around in 4 years, and we're willing to take voters out of our program as a control group to understand what works. We're willing to invest in, you know, in data and analytics, even if it's not gonna yield lessons for this year. And, and so the groups that and they're they have permanence. So they can tell consultants, you can do it our way or you can be locked out of next year's budget. And next year's budget is large enough that if you're a direct mail vendor or a phone vendor or a pollster, you'd rather be on the side of cooperating with their research and following their instructions than ignoring it, which is in most cases with candidate campaigns, even if the candidate or the campaign manager has some idea that they wanna do something differently, the consultants and vendors are smart enough to realize that they can usually just wait the person out and that the leverage is totally inverted.
Speaker 1 Because in too many candidate campaigns, the candidate feels grateful that the consultants are working for them. I mean, it is amazing how often press releases go out where a candidate brags, hey. I just signed this pollster. Like, I mean, you know or or you as a as a journalist interview somebody, and the way they validate themselves as a candidate for congresses, you won't believe who's doing my TV ads. You know?
Speaker 1 Like, I never hear, you know, successful business people say, like, you will not believe my accountant. I sign the best accountant in town to do my taxes this year. I'm a pretty good businessman. And so if you can't break out of that cycle, you're gonna keep on doing things even if there's good reason to believe that they don't work.
Speaker 4 But but when you vote and whether you vote is not. So my question is how quickly do they know that I voted? I sort of had the impression that things that I've read that this is actually happening in real time, that when I walk into the poll place, maybe a a poll watcher will watch how I sign in or listen if somebody greets me by name and with that information can probably identify me and then with smartphone technology and databases can transmit that to the central office. And then at some point during the day, somebody will know if I haven't voted and I'll get a call during the day. Is is that going on, number 1?
Speaker 4 Is that really legal, number 2? And and number 3, is it sort of related to the technical crash that the Republican campaign experienced on election day?
Speaker 1 Yeah. Great question. So, you know, the official way that we know whether or not you voted is when the state or the county or in Michigan, the township updates their voter file, which sometimes in in some states happens really quickly. Like, North Carolina is really fast. We might know in very the next couple of days or something who voted actually down to the name of North Carolina.
Speaker 1 Some states take a lot longer. Sometimes into December, January, February, and they release a new a new list. And there's 1 more line of who voted in November of 2012. Campaigns obviously don't want to doesn't help them a lot to know in January who voted. And so there's been a sort of constant effort going back decades to know in real time who's voted on Election Day so that you can adjust your get out the vote program on Election Day.
Speaker 1 So historically, in the sort of precomputer era, what very good party organizations would do, is you have like a precinct captain or ward leader or something who would start election day with a list of note cards of every 1 of their targeted voters in, let's say, the precinct. Right? And that would have people who are registered voters, people that they had gone out and identified as likely to vote, And they'd start the day with a stack of all these people, and then as people came in and signed in, they'd remove okay. So Jack just voted, take him out of the pile. Susie just voted, take her out of the pile, and the pile would shrink over the course of the day.
Speaker 1 And then at some point, let's say at 5 PM, you'd go give that list to your, you know, field organizer, your volunteer, your your local committee people. And then they now would have a list of names, and they go out and can knock on those doors or call those people to remind them to vote. And you'd know you'd be able to, over the course of the day, sort of narrow your attention towards people that were still outstanding. The challenge has been, for the last 5 years, how to leverage not just computer or network power, but the fact that now most of your volunteers, poll watchers have access to to, you know, data networks in their pocket to take this from a paper process to a digital 1. And so the Obama campaign in 2,008 invested in, a they didn't make huge investments, but it was their software developers or tech people were working on this a lot.
Speaker 1 It's something called Houdini with the idea name for the idea that they would be able to sort of disappear people from their national voter file over the course of the day. And the way it was set up was through IVR, which is interactive voice response. And so, they assigned I think it was every voter in a precinct would get a 4 digit code, and you'd be voter 642 or something. And when you came in and signed in, their poll watcher would then, on their phone, type 0642, and you in an automated way would be removed. And they had a protocol for people who could speak the number and or something.
Speaker 1 They it worked fine in the morning on election day in 2008. The volume of calls was far more than they, had planned for. There were people in that headquarters spent Election Day 2,008, calling phone companies to see if they could put in more phone lines and increase capacity because the volume of calls was coming in. And eventually, the system but by the time the West Coast started voting in the morning, you had the whole country going, the system crashed. And it was 1 of the certainly the most sort of spectacular of the tech failures of of a campaign that was otherwise very much celebrated for bingo with technology.
Speaker 1 This year, the sort of spectacular failure was on the Romney side. I don't know if you guys have heard about this thing called Project Orca, which has gotten a bit of attention in the last week, which was sort of Romney campaign's effort to develop a version of this. Smart phones are obviously in a in a new era. So they developed, they hired a software firm. It's still not exactly clear, who who got the contract.
Speaker 1 But if you hear of anybody who just bought a house in Bermuda, you might have
Speaker 5 an idea.
Speaker 1 And, it was a it was an app for smartphones. It would basically do the same thing where you get a list of all the voters in a precinct, then you could, I think, literally just swipe them off as they came in and voted. And by all accounts, the thing was depending on your political persuasion, comedy or tragedy of errors from like the first moments. They didn't test it properly internally. They didn't test it to see if it could handle the volume of the real world.
Speaker 1 They didn't the the instruct the manual that they gave to to volunteers was, like, hopelessly confusing. They gave people the wrong log ons and passwords. Words. They didn't give them the information until the night before so nobody could actually have experience using this. And it too crashed on election day when they, couldn't get it to to to carry the volume of like 30,000 people that they were supposed to be entering data.
Speaker 1 The bigger problem for the Romney campaign, which I think is sort of lost in all the attention of this as a, like, software failure, and it was a sort of spectacular software failure, was that the Romney campaign acted as though this was the entirety of a get out the vote program. And we're incredibly grandiose in how they talked about this program in the week before the election. So, you know, their deputy political first of all, the the deputy political order was describing this conference call with people who were participating in it that they would have so first of all, they rented so they wanted to have people who would monitor all this information coming in. So they rented the Boston Garden because if you need a room full of people with computers, why wouldn't you rent a basketball and hockey arena? So there's, like, these great pictures of floor the floor of of the garden of people sitting on using laptops.
Speaker 1 It's the most expensive boiler room in the history of election day operations. And, but the way they talked about it was that this would be a data operation the Obama campaign couldn't match, and they would know in real time not how many votes, not just how many votes they had in every precinct in America. They could move resources back and forth, and they would know exactly who had voted. And I was thinking, like, great. Like, I will know exactly how many votes are in every precinct in America at 8 PM when the polls close, and the Associated Press puts out updates every 5 minutes.
Speaker 1 And I will know exactly who voted in December or January. And it'll be out of as much use to me as a private citizen to know in January the name of everybody who voted in Ohio as it will be for you Tuesday at 5 PM to know everybody who voted in Ohio. But the I think their idea at the core was still this idea that they didn't understand mobilization, which is they thought that, okay. Fine. Tuesday at 4 PM, we'll know people who didn't vote, and then we can hit them with a whole lot more robo calls and have paid call centers call them a bunch and tell them to vote.
Speaker 1 And that's not going to turn nonvoters into voters. That's not the time when you sort of change the dynamics around voting or or or make it meaningful to them or give them information about when and how to vote that's gonna change the way that they plan their day. And I think that at the core, the reason was such, got so much more attention as a failure than the Obama campaign did in 'eight. It was not just that Obama won. And so it seems like a technicality.
Speaker 1 But that Romney came in what went wrong with ORCA wasn't that the software failed. What was what they thought it could do, which is they thought it was a substitute for actually having a real mobilization program. And election day is too late. Election day, you can sort of tinker at the margins. And, but that's not when when you can can really modify the behavior of people who who are not habitual voters anyway.
Speaker 1 1 more? Sure. Yes. Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1 Okay. Sorry.
Speaker 5 You've described, campaigns modeling the voters. Are any of them modeling the volunteers to figure out which type of volunteer should be matched with which voter or even which volunteer with which voter?
Speaker 1 Yeah. Great question. So, it's something that I know campaigns are trying to figure out. So that there are so they they first of all, you know, model volunteer response in which is knowing who is most likely to respond to so the Obama campaign had, I think, had a model that sort of predicted your likelihood of showing up to fulfill a shift, a volunteer shift if you were asked, which is 1 way for them to target their request for volunteers and people who are most likely to respond. And they did come up with a persuasion model, which is the likelihood that a, voter would change their mind after in after getting a phone call from a volunteer, which they use to they recognize you still need a lot of training to get volunteers who would do that because you don't want volunteers, like, get in fights with people who disagree with them.
Speaker 1 But this is but once you have that, you know, traditionally, campaigns don't wanna have peep volunteers do persuasion because it means you're not going out and talking to people who probably support you, but you're probably talking to people who disagree with you or hate politics and are undecided for that reason. And arguments, it's it's a potentially volatile situation. But I think that that's gonna be the next, the next stage. If campaigns now feel confident that they can model which voters will be responsive to volunteers trying to persuade them, then then the next natural question is, which volunteers are optimal? And so, but already that's that requires a culture shift.
Speaker 1 I think the Obama campaign moved into, which is understanding how you can persuade people when it's not TV ads or mail, but how you can use in that case a lot of volunteers and create, put them in situations where they are likely to be interacting with people whose minds they can actually change. I don't know anybody that sort of nailed it yet, because it wasn't really a particularly meaningful problem until now. Because the idea of mobilization is pretty easy if you have a script that you know works, which is you're going to people who are relatively unlikely to vote, and you're delivering them these sort of prepackaged psychological nudges, persuasion is a lot more difficult, because, you know, somebody you you say you should vote for Barack Obama because of the auto bail, and somebody says, well, I don't like what he did with the contraception mandate. Now you need to have a pretty good volunteer to know what to say to that. And most campaigns have said, well, just forget it.
Speaker 1 We're like, we'll just do TV ads. We'll do mail. We'll just have our volunteers identify voters and and and try to mobilize them. The Obama campaign felt comfortable doing some persuasion on the ground, and then the question is, how do you optimize it? Right?
Speaker 1 So
Speaker 0 Are you willing to take more questions, or do you want to switch to the perception in the lobby? Your decision. We we have a reception and a book signing in the lobby. And to our guests, we wanna present 2 pens, in in embossed with the signature of our favorite president, Gerald Ford, who, ran for election and came very close. And so we thank you.
Speaker 0 This is I told you this would be fantastic. Just a pleasure to have you here.