According to Steve Friess, NYMag:
… While the media focused on Mark Leibovich’s frothy gossip festival This Town as the Beltway’s favorite summer read, Republican operatives looking ahead to 2014 were finally embracing an extremely wonky book about how the Obama campaign revolutionized the science of modern elections.
When Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab, an insider’s guide to the pivotal statistical concepts and methods behind the vaunted Obama data machine, first came out at the height of the presidential campaign, many on the right rejected it with an allergic ferocity. Top Romney digital operatives told me on a Boston visit last year that his geek squad was evenly matched technologically with their opponents’. (They weren’t, as the “ORCA” election night debacle proved.) In a typical dismissal, RedState.Com founder Ben Domenech mocked Issenberg as “perpetually amazed” by Obama and doubted that his campaign’s microtargeting would work.
One year later, after a period of mourning and introspection over how they could have been so blindsided — and egged on by told-ya-so GOP digital operatives — the Republican Party is trying to learn how to stop worrying and love the non-partisan truths of modern campaigning. And they seem to have embraced Issenberg as a spirit guide. A few months ago, he was summoned to meet with Republican House Leader Eric Cantor, who quizzed him about how the Obama campaign played with language to woo Romney voters. Subsequently, Cantor’s office ordered Republican House chiefs of staff to read the book in preparation for a summer digital training session. “[T]he metric-based evaluation methods in this book can be applied to the official side to help your office better communicate with constituents in your district,” Cantor staffer Tim Cameron wrote in an e-mail to the chiefs of staff.
At the Republican National Committee annual meetings in Boston last month, copies of The Victory Lab were ubiquitous, toted around by GOP strategists and aides in the midst of midterm campaign prep. (“Many of us have read The Victory Lab,” Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the RNC, said in an e-mail.) Though he declines all partisan speaking invites, Issenberg has been heavily sought as a speaker at GOP events — including at the Republican Governors Association “tech summit” in Mackinac, Michigan, later this month….
Issenberg had extraordinary access to the Obama campaign — Obama chief analytics officer Dan Wagner told me that Issenberg was “the one journalist who got it right” — and was able to provide details on the ways it tested the efficacy of various forms of communication, the use of Facebook to create social pressure to register, and vote and voter modeling. All of it now helps explain enduring mysteries of the campaign to many Romney aides, from why Wagner changed nothing after Obama’s disastrous first debate performance to what the Obama camp was doing running TV ads in such GOP strongholds as the Florida-Alabama border.
Even as the paperback edition of The Victory Lab emerges this month with a 2012 postmortem epilogue, the hardcover — which had six printings — climbed back into the top twenty in several categories on Amazon in August….
I’d suggest it for a BJ book chat, but when it comes to numbers, MEGO.
Doug Milhous J
Sasha I’s piece on Bobo was priceless too. Great journalist.
Ash Can
LOL. “If only we can duplicate the technology of Obama’s campaign, we’ll WIN!!”
No, you cement-headed assholes. If only you can come up with some policies that don’t suck goat ass, you’ll win. Maybe.
the Conster
All this time I thought Sasha was a she. I’m kind of disappointed that the fileting of Bobo’s Bobos wasn’t done by Kick Ass Issenberg.
c u n d gulag
And after reading this book, just think how much more effective the Republicans voter outreach will be!
SCARY!!!!!
They’ll reach a far, far higher percentage of their base – older white Conservatives (mostly men) – than Obama reached with his multi-media, multicultural voter outreach efforts in 2012, or anything the next Democratic candidate for President can hope to accomplish, in 2016.
WE ARE DOOMED!!!!!
NOT!!!
Now, the Republicans will find many more mediums through which to insult potential voters, who aren’t older white Conservatives (mostly men)!!!
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
President Cantor will be the first social media president.
shelly
And actually put up a candidate that doesn’t repulse the majority of the country. But it still seems that political purity is more important than electability. At least to the teatards.
geg6
@Ash Can:
This. These idiots think that if they can just duplicate the hard mechanics of the digital campaign, they will win over everyone without ever having to change a thing about their message. Why they think tweeting better will change how people feel about the substance of the tweets is one of the many mysteries wrapped in an engima that is today’s GOP.
dmsilev
@geg6: It’s the same mindset that lead to the choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate. “Never mind the policies, if we pick a woman, women are bound to vote for us.”
dan
We should applaud every effort that is made to get the Republican message out to the people. It should be broadcast loudly and frequently.
Baud
The GOP’s secret weapon in 2016: Instagram!
aimai
I don’t have the book–why did Obama’s campaign not do anything after his lackluster performance? Is it because they knew it wouldn’t change the ground metrics at all? If anyone has the book and would like to put up that section I’d be interested.
Chyron HR
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
President Palin will be the first social Medea president.
Alex S.
So they asked Issenberg how he ‘played with language’ to convince Romney voters to vote for Obama? Sounds to me as if the Republicans want to know how Obama made white people vote for him.
negative 1
@Ash Can: Yeah, I don’t think that there’s enough of that going around. I’ve seen one of the legacy programs that came out of the Obama campaign, and it is neat no doubt, but there are some campaigns it just won’t help.
I’d normally just shrug these analyses off, after all a tech guy is going to say tech won the election, policy folks are going to say policy won it, etc. but this seems to be creeping into the “conservatism can’t fail” realm. People didn’t like Rmoney’s policies, himself, or his campaign. That’s the biggest thing. Obama’s turnout stuff was great, but having seen it up close in another election it makes life a lot easier for campaign workers than it does “socially pressure voters to turn out”. Let’s face it, does a facebook post really influence you that much? A lot of the supposed genius of it was recognizing that young people don’t watch much TV and don’t care about lawn signs. After that, it’s still a campaign, and it’s still campaign marketing.
NotMax
You’re not really playing the “Math is hard” card, are you?
As it’s an Open Thread, some other stuff a bit off the beaten track.
A Middle East problem of an apolitical sort.
In less weighty news, a peculiar possible pageant punking?
ppcli
A few months ago, he was summoned to meet with Republican House Leader Eric Cantor, who quizzed him about how the Obama campaign played with language to woo Romney voters.
Sigh. Every word that passes a Republican’s lips is given the Frank Luntz obsessive focus-group treatment first. The message gets hammered out and repeated obsessively in those specifically chosen words by every Republican politician, consultant, wingnut welfare blatherer, and Fox news talking head. “Job creators”, “death tax”, “common – sense solutions”, “not public schools: government schools”…
And after a loss, Cantor’s only reaction is to think they didn’t massage language enough. That bubble really is impermeable, isn’t it….
hoodie
Assuming it isn’t hype, you wonder how this may play out over the long term. Republican base voters already tend to turn out, so I fail to see how this helps them there. The problem is that their base is small, something around 27%. Using data to troll for new GOP supporters might reveal a need for policy changes, because GOP policies tend to be unattractive to non GOP base voters. But the GOP base tends to be allergic to facts, so if they start changing policy to attract new voters, they risk alienating the existing base and driving its turnout down. What will FOX do? Some of the GOP pols may think this is Direct Mail 2.0, but it differs from that in being reflexive. Adopting these techniques in the GOP bubble might be like planting a virus in a host that has no acquired immunity. It may kill it or mutate it into something that may be more rational than it’s current incarnation.
Kay
@hoodie:
I think they have to turn out more white voters to make up for the fact that they’ve decided to alienate everyone else.
I think “populist” is code for attempting to reach and turn out more lower income white voters, because they’ve maxed their share of middle income and high income white voters.
The more lower income the voter, the more “sporadic” (or unreliable) the voter. I would bet they’re going to use the tools the same way Obama did, except to turn out their sporadic voters.
They don’t have to “find new voters” as much as they have to “find those voters who mostly support them and then turn them out reliably”.
IMO.
Chris
They believe in an ideology that tells them that every last unpleasant, inconvenient fact that they don’t like can be dismissed as “liberally biased,” and corrected simply with a “fair and balanced” counterpart which will release its own, “unskewed” facts which will just happen to say whatever they want to hear.
And for the most part, there are no consequences for them when they do that (media, think tanks, political appointees), so they honestly believed it would always work that way.
The problems is that not only are they self-deluded, but they operate in a climate where anyone who does try to bring up those inconvenient facts is immediately shouted down as a RINO and a liberal traitor – and those who tell the pleasant untruths are welcomed with open arms, because telling the boss what he wants to hear is how you get ahead. Whether the GOP can change its internal disposition isn’t at all clear – that kind of cronyist, ideologically blind, Party Above All discipline is to a large extent the reason movement conservatism exists in the first place.
scav
Those were our voters, how’d you steal our precious with your trixy words and riddleses, our Precious, ours by right and theory and matching melanins . . ours ours ours, must have itz back.
CaseyL
This fits perfectly well with the Cargo Cult that passes for GOP theoretical thinking.
They hate science, and don’t understand it. But they also don’t understand or believe that Obama won the 2012 (or, for that matter, the 2008) election simply by being the candidate most voters wanted.
So they’re willing to fetishize this specific aspect of science, because they think it holds a magical ability to manufacture reality (and manufacturing a reality that doesn’t exist is something they really like doing).
So they will buy the book, and carry it around like a totem. They might even read parts of it – probably without understanding much. But the key is having, holding, carrying and flourishing the book.
The next step is creating giant wicker voting booths…
Amir Khalid
If I click to open John Cornyn’s ad in a new tab and then close that tab right away, does John Cole still get his cut?
Frankensteinbeck
My prediction: They will proudly trumpet how they’re following the numbers this time, and the moment the numbers don’t say what they want it’ll be right back to unskewing the polls.
aimai
@Alex S.: It was a magical incantation. If you thought that there was some kind of Adava Kedavra spell that would get a Muslim Kenyan Usurper with big ears elected you’d go all out to learn it too.
Kay
@hoodie:
I think they believe they have room to grow among younger, low income white voters. It’s not completely crazy. A lot of lower income, younger white males here have a general GOP “line” but it doesn’t matter, because they don’t vote.
I see it in the law practice and my middle son tells me this (he works with this “demo” here) and it’s true. He teases them for giving him shit for being a liberal, because he tells them it doesn’t matter because he votes and they don’t. That’s true, generally.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
I’m not sure it is. Don’t the polls say the young very heavily skew liberal, and ours vote less than theirs?
Shalimar
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
President Ryan always gets there first.
scav
@Frankensteinbeck: I might count on polls less in younger demographics and the same behaviors that drive low rates of voting might drive low rates of not responding to polls. And it’s not as though they couldn’t combine SSM friendly attitudes with gun-loving low-tax fetishism either.
PurpleGirl
@Chyron HR: I applaud your use of mythology.
Frankensteinbeck
@scav:
The gun fetishists are also dying off in exactly the same way. Less and less people buy more and more guns, disguising the problem. I don’t think there is a low-tax fetishism. It has always been a cover for racism or religious fundamentalism, both of which are on the ‘dying’ list. The Tea Partiers claim to be ‘fiscal conservatives’, but when you look at the numbers they’re old white racist fundamentalists.
EDIT – Make no mistake, conservatism is not about to die, but it’s no longer in the majority and its numbers are dropping and will continue to drop for decades. The young people aren’t all liberal, but they skew that way heavily.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Chris: They believe in an ideology that tells them that every last unpleasant, inconvenient fact that they don’t like can be dismissed as “liberally biased,” and corrected simply with a “fair and balanced” counterpart which will release its own, “unskewed” facts which will just happen to say whatever they want to hear.
Yup.
@CaseyL: This fits perfectly well with the Cargo Cult that passes for GOP theoretical thinking.
Yup.
That, and the emphasis on analyzing the language for how Obama worked his evil spell is just more authoritarian, medieval magical thinking. If owning the entire television infrastructure didn’t make people like the GOP, learning to use Twitter won’t.
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
Well, they do, but 30% of 30% is better than 15% of 30%. Just as we put a lot of energy and time into turning out “our” younger voters in 2004, 08 and 12, they can do that too. I think they have to.
It’s not like they never knew how to run the operational part of elections. Bush was better at it than Kerry, and that was 2004. We had our own problems with grifters and top-heavy campaigns in 2004. One of the best things Obama did was not allow that to happen. They didn’t hire every consultant and affiliated org in the Democratic sphere. There’s no guarantee that the next Dem candidate won’t, though. I would just assume Republicans will get a little better, and Democrats might backslide a little.
Belafon
@aimai: Not having read the book, but understanding a bit about history, it probably goes something like this: Reagan, Bush2, and Clinton all had lackluster first debate performances for their reelection.
Xecky Gilchrist
Oh yeah! And as soon as they get a Conservative Nate Silver, all the numbers will go their way.
Idjits.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Kay: I would just assume Republicans will get a little better, and Democrats might backtrack a little.
Agreed re: Dems backtracking, but I have a hard time believing the con-man feeding frenzy is over – or even slowing – on the Republican side. There’s a LOT of money involved and no ethics.
boatboy_srq
Because it has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with the packaging.
HEY GOTea – NEWSFLASH: deciding what new colors for the box of shrinkrwapped elephant-droppings and how big and bright the “New and Improved” text should be doesn’t change the fact that you’re still peddling elephant droppings. Racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are ugly, and dressing them up in shiny new wrappers won’t make them any different.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
I believe there’s a fundamental difference in scale. They have more and crazier ultra-rich people, and their funding depends on it. The GOP is the grifter’s dream market. There are absolutely useless, corrupt grifters in the Democratic Party, but we have bad eggs while they have an entire rotten system from top to bottom. In addition, denial of reality is now entrenched, a core part of their ethos. How are they going to shake that? Unless they do, their campaign strategies will be based on pleasant lies they tell themselves. Our worst will be their best.
We will need to fight like lions for a long time, but the numbers don’t look good for the GOP. When the numbers don’t look good, the GOP will go ‘LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU’ instead of adapting. This will happen until there’s a fundamental change in the Republican Party, and when that will happen and what it will look like, who knows?
Kay
@Xecky Gilchrist:
I think it actually got worse between McCain and Romney. I SAW the McCain organizer. I didn’t see a single human being from Romney. Not one.
Bush had this terrifying army of religious people and crazed hawks who were madly in love with him, but it was also a well-run “ground” campaign so it wasn’t just “love”. Kerry’s campaign was like 9 paid orgs running around in circles, and that was here, where he doesn’t even really have a huge bloc of voters. I can’t imagine what it was like in places like Cleveland where they’re frantically trying to run up huge Dem voter margins.
I think the PAC and unregulated money thing works great for Republicans as far as funds, but it’s a disaster as far as coordination.
Alex S.
@CaseyL:
Very nice observation.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
This made my morning.
The Climate Name Change
Kay
@Frankensteinbeck:
I was at the county fair on Monday night and I saw the former county chair and he was talking about the 2012 campaign here. He is “retired” (although he still helps) but he wasn’t around that much in 2012. He was asking about the Obama organizer (Joe, from Michigan, who really was great ) but what he forgets is Joe was the third “shift”. Joe got here in August. We had two woman here prior, one and then the other, and the first one got here in April. He forgot all about that.
So if they’re going to imitate that approach, it’s hugely labor intensive and the people they hire have to actually work although they’re (essentially) unsupervised, which may be where they run into problems :)
aimai
If its a spirit guide I hate to imagine the drugs, drumming, and dancing that they need to do to summon it.
Anoniminous
CaseyL said this so I don’t have to.
GOP operatives are at their best when shoveling emotive drool out the door to their Fundie/Con – rebranded as TeaBaggers – base. They can’t change the Message so they fixate on Narrative and communicate channels used to distribute Narrative.
Anoniminous
@hoodie:
As we saw in 2010 and most recently in Colorado, the GOP is very effective at turning out their vote. In small turnout elections their 27% base is a majority. It doesn’t matter what the Real Majority of people think if they don’t minimally engage in the political process by voting.
Betty Cracker
Patsy Stone is my spirit guide.
scav
@Frankensteinbeck: All this ‘dying off’ talk is a little too close to the rightly mocked “our voters” attitude for me and is dangerously passive Yes, people get into habits, voting included, but they can also get out of them (see NYC, we’ll see if that holds). They need to be convinced on the principles and that actions will be taken on same and that it’s important enough to get out of their damn chairs and vote. The demographic fairy might be handy and well intentioned but I wouldn’t count on her and her alone.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
This. I mean, what are they supposed to do? Go on Fox and tell their voting public “okay, you got us, we’ve actually been lying to you about everything for the last five decades”? Yeah, that’ll fly… assuming Fox doesn’t cut their mike before they get halfway into the sentence, and assuming that any of the leaders is even self-aware enough anymore to realize that they are in fact lying. (Rove’s “we create reality” statement would indicate that willful self-delusion replaced simple old fashioned lying a long time ago).
hoodie
@Kay:It isn’t crazy, but it may be really difficult. Maybe, in combination with various voter suppression tactics, it buys you a few tactical victories, but it’s hard to see how can change the long-term trend. It looks like young white voters will be generally less affluent than their parents and grandparents, will suffer less from the nominal illusion that plagues their parents and grandparents, and are less hung up on social issues. The GOP will still have to come up with a narrative that will make inroads under those conditions, and recycled Birchite horse manure from the 50’s ain’t gonna cut it. They’ll may try some version of libertarianism, but that’s a hard sell in an economy in which urbanization and globalization have created entities that are so large that it becomes obvious that libertarianism is a pipe dream. The GOP really hasn’t had a solid interest-based demographic in a while, i.e., it doesn’t have that cadre of farmers, small town burghers, flinty NE types and Nixon loving hard hats that were it’s backbone for years, because those ways of life are largely gone thanks to Walmart and Wall Street. Accordingly, they don’t have a coherent interest-based narrative and have had to increasingly use manufactured issues like race and culture to garner votes. That kind of stuff matters more to retirees than to people who have to send their kids to the doctor or college. I naively hope they do follow on this path to potential enlightenment, maybe they’ll figure out something that isn’t so toxic. The Dems need a decent opposition because they’re certainly capable of screwing things up.
Seanly
Language & phrasing are important, but how successful can retooling “I’m a mean-spirited, mysognist, racist petty a$$hole who favors my rich corporate overlords over you serfs” really be? A pile of dung is still a pile of dung no matter what pretty face or sweet words assigned to it.
linda
@Ash Can: This.
There is a belief that every shitty product can be sold with the right campaign. No, sometimes your product sucks and people hate it. But you have to respect people to respect their judgement.
Trollhattan
Now, all the Republicans have to do is convince the 70-90 Y.O Fox watchers (but, I repeat myself) to get Facebook accounts and they, too can be winnin’ these election thingies.
Trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Sweetie darling!
Chris
@linda:
I think their lack of respect for voters’ intelligence has a lot to do with their own voters. They’ve spent fifty years pushing demented memes on the 27%ers, they’ve watched them swallow and believe each and every one of them in turn, and they’ve learned that there’s no such thing as a product that their base isn’t credulous, deluded and high-misinformation enough to believe if you just tie it up with a few of the right buzzwords and scapegoats.
And it’s worked so well for them that naturally, they think every voter out there is like that.
Mike G
The central facet of arrogant Repuke ideology is “We’re perfect, it couldn’t possibly be us.” Thus the endless search for an “other” as bogus scapegoat — it was ACORN, it was voter ID fraud, it was technology, the librul media, etc., an endless mighty struggle to avoid breaching the authoritarian taboo of blaming the people in charge for the fact that their policies suck, their candidates suck, and people hate them.
Patricia Kayden
@boatboy_srq: Preach! Better technology won’t disguise a disgusting message and/or messenger. Sorry Cantor.