The Sabermetricians: The Digital Innovations that Win Campaigns
Nate Cohn Reviews Sasha Issenberg’s ‘The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns’
OVER THE LAST ten years, political campaigns have become extraordinarily sophisticated. New technology and an eagerness to identify and exploit the slightest competitive edge have turned campaign strategy into a number-crunching, detail-oriented science. Campaign coverage, on the other hand, has remained mainly concerned with unsubstantiated assertions and campaign lore: the attacks, the themes, and the advertisements that are assumed to be central to the outcome of the race, even without strong evidence.
Enter Sasha Issenberg, a journalist with interests that range from politics to sushi. (He is the author of The Sushi Economy, which explains the global economics of raw fish.) His new book, The Victory Lab, takes a hard look at the data-driven techniques of modern political campaigning. Through a series of vignettes, with each chapter dedicated to a different effort to reshape campaign tactics (one chapter might focus on a single person, another a broad subject like get-out-the-vote efforts), The Victory Lab recounts the efforts of entrepreneurial political operatives. Personalities, specialties, motives, and political persuasions vary, but all the characters Issenberg examines are unified by their commitment to empiricism; they want to know how to deliver the right message to the right voter, and they’re not that interested in the pageantry of the horse race.
Issenberg’s innovators throw the storied tales aside. Direct mail works better than a phone call? Prove it. The effects of advertisements dissipate quickly? How do you know? In place of these accepted legends, the new-world operatives measure effectiveness through the field experiment: trying a technique on one group of voters, while a control group is left untouched. Political scientists (read: eggheads) employed by Rick Perry—of all people—aired advertisements for varying periods of time across Texas, testing the effectiveness of each, and demonstrated that the effects of advertisements dissipate quickly.
But the most innovative approaches aren’t just those that rewire old approaches. The most decisive advances come when new sources of data—often from outside politics—are creatively applied to resolve fundamental challenges. The Republican effort to improve their get-out-the-vote operation after the 2000 presidential election is one such example. Geography gives Democrats a fundamental advantage: they are concentrated in cities, which makes door-to-door canvassing highly effective. Republicans, on the other hand, are generally spread thinner across more square miles.