[AND Magazine] After reading Sasha Issenberg’s 2013 book called The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, the methods, and techniques, used to manipulate the U.S. electorate and control the outcome of our elections, have become much clearer. The prologue of the book says it all: How to Win an Election Without Anyone Knowing.
The Victory Lab follows the academics and maverick operatives rocking the war room and re-engineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions. Armed with research from behavioral psychology and randomized experiments that treat voters as unwitting guinea pigs, the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do. Issenberg tracks these techniques—which include cutting-edge persuasion experiments, innovative ways to mobilize voters, and heavily researched electioneering methods.
For the 2008 election, the game-changer, as Issenberg explains, occurred when Obama’s operatives began buying and integrating data from Catalist to feed Ken Strasma's algorithms to generate predictive scores on eligible voters across the country. The scores are used to isolate liberal progressives to be micro-targeted to register to vote and cast their ballots. Strasma states "We’re able to update scores in near real-time; ... it will take about a third of a second for us to get a new piece of information in, for it to ripple through the system, update, and predict its scores."
As a Catalist client, and due to Calatist’s non-profit status, the Obama campaign was able to "create seamless links across the activist left, including outside groups with whom candidates were legally prohibited from coordinating directly." Catalist and Democrats bragged to Issenberg about the immediate and practical benefit of this link.
When [outside group] Democracia USA collected a new voter's registration form in Florida, Obama's targeting team often knew about it before the local board of elections. Democracia would create a record in its databases, which synced daily with Catalist servers. When the Obama campaign conducted its daily download from the Catalist database, per its contract with the information vendor, the new record would show up in VAN. The campaign could start treating the person as a voter-assigning model scores, canvassing her, communicating by mail and phone, or getting her an absentee ballot-even before the registration had been officially processed.... Republicans wouldn't have an idea the new voter existed until she went on the books.
The strength and power of Catalist are based on the huge number of groups feeding it data. Leftist players sacrifice their egos for the larger messianic call of ’destroying Republicans’, obliterating conservatives, and ultimately gutting the Constitution. Non-profit interest groups on the left gladly feed their internal data into Catalist because it helps progressives win — period. They don’t care about profit, glory, connections, or a new car.
Fast forward to 2012. Obama's "re-election team built a vast digital data operation that for the first time combined a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before. Digital analysts predicted that 2012 would be the first election cycle in which Facebook could become a dominant political force. The social media giant has grown exponentially since the 2008 presidential election, rendering it for the first time a major campaigning tool that has the potential to transform friendship into a political weapon. |