Shattered by Jonathan Allen

Author:Jonathan Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

As Donald Trump took control of the Republican race, one of Hillary’s longtime advisers circulated a memo. The very top read “FACT: Donald Trump can defeat Hillary Clinton and become the 45th President of the United States.” Hillary, the memo went on to say, should not “underestimate his capacity to draw people to the polls who normally do not vote.” That could “tip the scales in key states (and put certain states in play that would otherwise be more safely Democratic),” the adviser wrote, adding that in assessing polls, “I’d routinely add three or four points to whatever they say about his support.”

For a Brooklyn command that worshipped hard data, such musings were the kind of misguided old-school hocus-pocus that had very little to do with winning modern campaigns. So perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that the adviser’s memo never gained traction. This campaign engine, driven so much by the science of analytics and so little by the art of political persuasion, was really starting to hum. Mook had tuned out his internal and external critics, focused on the numerical path to victory, and now it had paid off. Hillary was poised to become the first woman ever nominated for president by a major political party. Better yet, she was going to draw Trump—the clown prince of the Republican primary field—as a general-election opponent. Soon the increasingly popular Barack Obama would join her on the campaign trail and bless her as the natural heir to his historic presidency.

These young data warriors, most of whom had grown up in politics during the Obama era, behaved as though the Democratic Party had come up with an inviolable formula for winning presidential elections. It started with the “blue wall”—eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia, that had voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1992. They accounted for 242 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. From there, you expanded the playing field of battleground states to provide as many “paths” as possible to get the remaining 28 electoral votes.

Adding to their perceived advantage, Democrats believed they’d demonstrated in Obama’s two elections that they were much more sophisticated in bringing data to bear to get their voters to the polls. For all the talk of models and algorithms, the basic thrust of campaign analytics was pretty straightforward when it came to figuring out how to move voters to the polls.

The data team would collect as much information as possible about potential voters, including age, race, ethnicity, voting history, and magazine subscriptions, among other things. Each person was given a score, ranging from zero to one hundred, in each of three categories: probability of voting, probability of voting for Hillary, and probability, if they were undecided, that they could be persuaded to vote for her.

These scores determined which voters got contacted by the campaign and in which manner—a television spot, an ad on their favorite website, a knock on their door, or a piece of direct mail. “It’s a grayscale,” said a campaign aide familiar with the operation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.