Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns

Shaan Puri

Alright, everybody. Election Day in the United States is just a few days away, and I'm here to officially endorse nobody. You should not be trying to get political advice from a podcaster that you like. I'm just a guy who does business, and I've made a little bit of money on the internet. That does not make me an expert in politics. However, today's episode is about politics, but not in the way you might expect. I am fascinated by the marketing machine that is underneath political campaigns. Regardless of which candidate you're going for, they're spending over **$1,000,000,000** trying to persuade people to do a thing. That's how business works too. There's a marketing machine trying to convince people to push a button at the end of the day. I wanted to understand the science, the tactics, and the persuasion techniques that the different campaigns have used over the years. I wanted to hear the best stories about what's actually going on under the hood. So, I invited a guy named Sasha Isenberg. He has studied this for a couple of decades now, and he wrote a book that I thought was really good called **The Victory Lab**. I invited him on to come tell us some stories about how the marketing machines underneath political campaigns work. I think it's fascinating. Enjoy this episode! It seems like there's this whole industry that gets paid to help politicians get elected. I think it's something like **$6,000,000,000** a year that goes to this group of people whose job is to be marketing machines for political purposes. When something works, they let you know. The incentive is to go tell the world how genius you are and how it was your tactic that was the thing that worked. When it doesn't work, it's like, "The politician had no charisma; nothing we could do there," right? They need to deflect in order to survive. When you were writing your book, which is called **The Victory Lab**, how did you get around that bias? How open were these people in sharing what's actually working or not? Did you have to kind of read between the lines to try to figure out where they were just sort of grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened?

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, it's one of the most difficult things—reporting in this area. So, you know, I was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles. If you go in right now and you ask the Harris campaign, or the Trump campaign, or the super PACs working for them, you know, "Show me exactly how you're testing your ads on online platforms," they may tell you some stuff. They very selectively leak out information that they think will help them raise money, usually. So you'll read a story in *Wired*, one story in *Wired*, it's like "Inside Kamala Harris' Ad Testing Machine," and the details are very carefully selected over the course of the campaign to give out to one piece that they can send out when she goes on a fundraising tour in Palo Alto. This can convince a bunch of tech executives that she's running a smart campaign. However, during a campaign, it's very difficult to get real details on what they're doing. They don't want to. The value of impressing their donors is up against not wanting to give away anything to the competition.

Shaan Puri

Right.

Sasha Issenberg

But after election day, the campaign basically ceases to exist. So, everybody is on to another job. A lot of them are, you know, looking for work or have returned to their consulting firms or are starting new firms. They develop some trick or tool during the campaign.

Shaan Puri

Isn't there like some conference where they all go to a beach resort area? They go, get drunk, and start talking?

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, I mean, there’s like a post-election sort of conference circuit where Democrats or Republicans come together to kind of trade notes. They need to launch a business. I mean, it’s basically like every two years there’s a new sort of window for startups, and especially every four years. So there’s a window where they go from being afraid that they will get fired if they talk to a reporter. If you are caught leaking even the most minor thing inside a campaign, that is a fireable offense. They don’t want anybody but the spokesman or the candidate talking for them. Then, two days later, they are trying to figure out what they’re going to do with the rest of everybody in the campaign. They start to take credit for everything they did. I remember in 2012, you had the Obama analytics department, which was really pioneering. They had like 52 or 54 people in this analytics program. It was huge. They called it "the cave." I was reporting throughout the year for Slate at that time.

Sasha Issenberg

And I was able to eke out bits of news over the course of the campaign through really judicious reporting. I would hear stories about the campaign manager summoning people from the analytics department into his office to say, "Did you talk to Sasha?" because there was some inquest to find that. It was pretty sad. Then, the day after, a whole bunch of them were basically getting Eric Schmidt to launch a firm for them. They were out giving interviews to everybody who wanted to listen and taking credit for a whole bunch of things that probably were not theirs alone to take credit for. The issue with that campaign is that it has a binary outcome: one candidate wins and the other one loses. No one thing ever shapes that outcome. Not traditional things like, you know, whatever happens on Tuesday. It did not happen because one of the candidates chose the right vice presidential nominee or not. It did not happen just because Harris had a better debate performance than Trump. It did not happen just because turnout was up in Pennsylvania and down in Nevada. It was a confluence of dozens, hundreds of big and small things. It's a storytelling exercise to see who can tell the most convincing story about why the election turned out the way it did. There are political actors who want to tell that story. For example, moderates in the Democratic Party will sing if Kamala Harris wins because she took moderate positions on this and that. But there are people who, from a sort of technical tactical perspective, will want to say it's because the TV ads were really persuasive or because our social media strategy was so good. You need a good bullshit meter. The best way to do that is to be really alert to everybody's incentives for telling certain types of stories and to be skeptical of the times when people have a real, obviously transparent agenda. From a reader's or viewer's perspective, be wary of any sort of monocausal explanation for anything in electoral politics. No one thing did anything, right? Right? It's not.

Shaan Puri

Well, I do think it's fascinating that, you know, when you're talking about the behavioral change aspect, one of the great things any entrepreneur could do is sort of learn from adjacencies. So basically saying, "Hey, if we want to win in politics, we could do things that have worked in politics, but maybe there are things that have worked in the business world." You know, Cialdini wrote that book about persuasion—not for politics at all—but you could use things like that. I mean, it's like the way you describe that kind of like, "Hey, voter history is public. Here's yours and here's your neighbor's, and we'll be sending an update later." That's Elf on the Shelf, right? That's not just, "Hey, the elf is watching and he's gonna tell Santa if you've been naughty or nice." It's as simple as that. I don't need to explain the virtues and why you should be good or naughty. It's just very simple: somebody's watching. I think that’s a very powerful thing. I also found it interesting because what we traditionally hear, if you just go turn on the news, you turn on CNN, you're gonna hear a talking head explaining certain stories. They're gonna bring on some expert pundit who's gonna tell you about how this thing that the Vice President said during the convention has this huge ripple effect, but it's actually just the most recent thing that happened. One thing I found fascinating was the story that you wrote about Biden's 2020 campaign. You talked in the article about how they realized that they were flush with cash. They were gonna have more funding than they needed, not less. So, I guess the campaign manager or somebody asked someone on their team, "If you had an extra $10 million to spend to have the highest impact, where would you spend it?" There was this idea about misinformation and, as Biden called it, the "malarkey factory." I thought this was pretty fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about the malarkey factory and specifically this idea of the harm index, if you remember that? I can kind of prompt you on what I found fascinating there.

Sasha Issenberg

So, you know, I think that in 2020 there was a campaign called "Disinformation."

Shaan Puri

But

Sasha Issenberg

I think, really, to step back, they were trying to understand this new viral media environment. So, you know, if you go back just 8 to 10 years, in politics, campaign operatives would track communication. You could get a record of all the TV ads that were bought by cans. You could see all of them. There are services that will record and allow you to access them digitally. You could see all your opponents' campaign finance reports. You had a pretty good sense of where they were getting money and how they were spending it. You could read the press coverage or see what's on the news. You had a pretty good idea of where voters were getting their information. What the internet changed is that now basically anybody has the ability to launch a story. Some of these get called disinformation because they're transparently false. But for political operatives, the real issue was that stuff is moving, and we don't know where it came from or where it's going, and what the motives of the people behind it are. It's not coming from our opponent; we know what our opponent is trying to accomplish. They have the same brain we do. But if this is like Macedonian teenagers who are trying to gain online clicks for ad revenue, or if this is a foreign intelligence service, or if this is somebody in their basement doing it for laughs, we can't game out what they're saying.

Shaan Puri

Stories are going viral. Yes, it could have an impact, and we don't know who or why. It's... it's who's behind it.

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, so the initial impulse was, "Don't you know?" You'd have all these sort of lessons from the old world, kind of media consultants, like "Don't let an attack go unanswered," right? Always be on offense. That makes sense if your opponent is attacking you on what you know is one of their big themes. But if, like, somebody in Saskatchewan is making something up about you to impress their friends, maybe you shouldn't respond. You could make the problem a whole lot worse by responding, right? You elevate it. Engagement algorithms can end up helping spread it by you trying to fact-check it. So the Biden campaign's mentality was, let's shift from thinking about this as a supply-side problem, which is thinking about individual bits of content that are coming out every day and deciding how and when to respond to them. Basically, as they said, playing whack-a-mole with whatever the new thing that was trending that day. Instead, let's think of this more as a demand-side problem. Most of the stuff we probably don't need to respond to; it's not actually going to change voters' opinions. But the stuff that we do need to respond to, the campaign said, is the stuff that meets existing anxieties that voters have about Biden, or about Paris, or about certain issues. So let's preemptively try to understand which viral narratives would be most damaging to the campaign and would do the most harm. That way, when they pop up on a given day, we have a framework for not overreacting or reacting to the wrong one.

Shaan Puri

Hey, let's take a quick break to talk about AI. We all know AI is a big deal. You see demos all the time of people doing really cool things. But as a business owner, sometimes it's hard to figure out, "How do I actually use this? What do I actually do?" I've been trying to use it across all my businesses. You know, things like making little prototype websites without needing to hire a coder, or writing copy for our website. I give it a bunch of data and ask it to analyze it for me. It's been kind of amazing. But the thing I always need is inspiration. I know the tool can do a lot, but it can almost do so much that I'm not really sure what I should actually be doing with it. That's why I think it's great that HubSpot has created a report where they surveyed 2,000 global marketing leaders and asked them what's separating the high-growth and low-growth businesses, and what strategies they're using with AI in their business. You can grab these strategies and apply them to your own business for free. The link is in the description below. So, this was the Harm Index; that was the idea there.

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, that's what we entered with this big survey over the course of the summer of 2020. They took a lot of storylines, some based in truth and a lot based in some version of lies that they targeted the ticket. So, they would ask voters basically three questions: 1. Are you familiar with this? 2. Do you think it's true? 3. Would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden?

Shaan Puri

That's very simple, right? The three's 33 questions, and they're doing this in person. This is online. How do they get this out?

Sasha Issenberg

This was an online panel testing, I think, that they did.

Shaan Puri

And they would just show them a headline, right? They'd be like, "Hunter Biden's laptop."

Sasha Issenberg

Human corruption, right? So, yes, the Hunter Biden corruption stuff. This was before the laptop, I think. But, you know, Trump had already been impeached about trying to draw attention to his Ukraine ties. A lot of people said that they were familiar with this Hunter Biden stuff. Not that many people said that it would actually make them less likely to vote for Joe Biden. Then they did focus groups, and it came out that people did not think that Biden was fundamentally driven by his personal financial gain. So, they might have thought it was true; they might have even thought that there was some truth to it, but it didn't really change the way that they thought about Biden on a core issue. However, the stuff related to his age and his mental infirmity— that stuff, obviously, a lot of people knew about. At the same time, though, a lot of persuadable voters said it would make them less likely to vote for Biden. The focus groups revealed that this wasn't news to the campaign; they found an age problem in 2020. The way that the communication staff on the campaign had dealt with this thus far was they would set up photo ops of him bicycling or like tell him to jog up the stairs to his plane.

Shaan Puri

Right, like...

Sasha Issenberg

And what came back from the focus groups was that this was all wrong. Voters were not worried about his physical well-being. They weren't concerned that he wasn't going to get his steps in at the White House. They saw him as a fundamentally weak political figure. I think a lot of this had to do with being defined as vice president. He won the primaries, but he was never the main character of that race. There were a lot of voters who said basically, "I kind of like the guy, but I don't really know what he cares about or what he wants to do or who he's going to listen to." That manifests itself; it wasn't just about his political weakness, but it manifested itself in being susceptible to questions raised about his physical and mental condition. The way the campaign responded to those concerns was first, they went out and started buying ads in places where persuadable voters would be exposed to that type of content. There had been this effort on the left for a while to boycott Fox News and Breitbart websites. The Biden campaign said, "No, we're buying advertising there because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing." Secondly, they bought search terms. So if you typed in "Biden" and "senile" or something similar, you would probably get targeted and shown a YouTube pre-roll ad. These ads were designed for persuadable voters who were sensitive to age-related issues, but you would not have any idea that it was about his age. The most successful ad they tested with these people was a 15-second clip of Biden to camera, just talking about how he grew up in Scranton and has middle-class values. He stated, "That's why I want to cut taxes on middle-class people and raise them on the rich," or something really banal. All the research suggested that these people just wanted to hear him in his own voice, articulating what he cared about and what he would do. Those who could be turned off by the attacks claiming he was senile just wanted to hear that he could articulate his basic worldview.

Shaan Puri

Right in a firm voice, direct to camera, not edited.

Sasha Issenberg

Like, you know, they were suspicious of things that looked too glossy or too slick. There was a sort of push away from the traditional aesthetics of political advertising. Right? Like a lot of, "Here's a headline, and here's a thing, and here's a cut, and here's some..." Yeah, it's worse. And here's some stock footage of farmers, you know, eating ice cream. No, it's really something that very clearly looked unedited because the people who were sort of open to this were ones who were innately suspicious of political communication.

Shaan Puri

Right, right. So this idea of taking the stories... You've got the "Sleepy Joe" stories, the "Creepy Joe" stories, and the "Hunter Biden" stories. Test it on people. Figure out three questions: Have you heard about this? Do you think it's true? Is this going to make you less likely to vote for Biden? Super simple. Then, basically, countering by figuring out what the counter-programming message is. At first, they thought, "Hey, show him on a bike" to counter the "Sleepy Joe" message. I think they had a score where, on the x-axis, it was like the number of people who are aware of it. On the y-axis, it's how much it's going to impact their vote. They could just have a board that showed all the issues, like, "Oh, a lot of people are aware of this Hunter Biden thing, but it's not effective to vote." Low harm score, a 25 harm score, and then...

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, I skipped that part, Sean, because I think the first rule of podcasting is to describe charts. People love that.

Shaan Puri

In podcast, yeah, yeah, the...

Sasha Issenberg

The x-axis was the reach, so it's Harmon's Dex. The x-axis was the reach, right? How many people had heard about it? And the y-axis was what the info was.

Shaan Puri

The effect, yeah.

Sasha Issenberg

You know, impact... and so, basically, the campaign's thinking tactically on this was: if it's in the bottom, if it's on the left of this thing, we don't need to worry about it. If it has high impact but low reach, let's keep an eye on it. Because if it spreads, if it makes the jump out of like some corner of 4chan to, you know, mass media or getting to normal people on Facebook, then we will have a problem. So, let's be prepared. Then, the stuff in the upper right-hand corner, it's reaching the voters we care about and it'll change their opinions. That's where we need to act.

Shaan Puri

Right, right. What about Trump? So, you wrote that book in 2012, I think... 2011, 2012 at the time. Yep. So then this guy, who is, you know, this person, this TV personality, comes from the business world—not a politician at all—and runs this campaign. I think he even admitted that he didn't think he was going to win initially. Therefore, he's talked about how he didn't really have a plan because, you know, nobody thought he would win. They just thought they were doing their best. Then, when they won, he had to figure out the plan on day one. When you look at that, what do you see? Do you see this kind of like master marketer? Do you just see this anomaly? Did he use the normal playbook? Did he throw out the normal playbook? What did Trump do?

Sasha Issenberg

So, Trump in 2016, what he did in the conventional sense was a big shift. He went from a TV-dominated campaign for paid advertising. He obviously dominated TV almost every day of the year in terms of free media coverage. However, his budget, which was much smaller than Hillary Clinton's, typically showed a lopsided indifference between TV spending and digital spending, as well as direct mail and some of the non-digital tools.

Shaan Puri

And I think he had like half the money, just...

Sasha Issenberg

Like unheard of. The only place where you might see that these days is with a city council candidate in a place where it's too expensive to buy television. All they can do is spend $40,000 on Facebook ads. You never see high-level campaigns of any size that are at parity in those two. The reason Trump was ready to spend money online, starting in real ways in the spring of 2016, was that Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that Trump doesn't like spending money and he hates claims.

Shaan Puri

Also, he doesn't use a computer. Yeah, so this is kind of amazing. Did you see this clip that's going viral right now of him sitting there watching Kamala's speech? Have you seen this clip? I know you have.

Sasha Issenberg

I can see this. Haven't you?

Shaan Puri

So, it's from some... I think there's like a documentary. I guess this is a clip from it, and it's called "The Art of the Surge." I'm not sure if it's that.

Sasha Issenberg

New, right? Yeah.

Shaan Puri

And so, he's sitting next to this blonde woman; I don't know who she is. He's literally orating his tweets. He sees Kamala say something on TV, and then he goes, "No way! We're gonna let that happen. Not on my watch!" Then she types it out, and he just does like 16 of those in this clip. People never knew, like, "Wait, this guy doesn't use a computer? Is he even behind his social media?" They showed him doing that, which is hilarious.

Sasha Issenberg

From that, he had a Twitter account for five years, and he understood that it was a big part of his celebrity and ability to drive traditional news coverage. However, spending real money on Facebook ads—not just on self-made content and hoping it spreads organically—came because Jared Kushner convinced him that, instead of all the other things in the campaign where consultants were begging him to spend money, he could make this a revenue center through fundraising. Typically, with TV ads, you pay the money to try and change people's opinions, hoping to get votes afterward. If you buy ads and target them well, and you have people who want to give you money, you can obviously see a return. This is why charities do online fundraising and such. So, Trump started spending real money on Facebook because he was seeing a return on it, and that resonated with him. It was fundamentally an economic model more than it was part of a political strategy. What he ended up doing, through a combination of his organic ability to draw attention online in ways that traditional politicians couldn't, and the fact that they were amplifying and catalyzing it through what eventually became some real paid spending—mostly on Facebook advertising, but also a little bit on other platforms—was that he was able to create a community online that was really deep and meaningful to the people who were part of it. At the time, we thought the idea was that Obama was the great digital-era politician because he had developed the best and biggest lists. In 2016, the measure of a successful online politician was how many sign-ups, how many email addresses you had, how many people had given you their cell phone numbers and opted into letting you text them, and how many people followed you on platforms. That basically represented supporters you could now communicate with for free. What did Obama do with those tens of millions of supporters who had chosen to sign on in some way? He basically asked them to give money and occasionally to volunteer or take some action, but it was very transactional and one-sided. What we realized in retrospect was that this was the case for basically every politician in the United States until Trump came along. What Trump did, mostly by instinct—not by any strategy or great abstract conception of how to communicate digitally—was to engage like a poster does. Obama never re-amplified, retweeted, or shared his supporters' content. Why? Because if you were the Obama campaign in 2012, you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on opinion research, polling, focus groups, and other qualitative research testing your ads and your mail. You had come down at that.

Sasha Issenberg

You have come to the syllable on what you want to say on which issues, when, to whom, how, and the whole campaign is this command and control exercise to make sure that you're saying the exact right thing at the exact same time, at the right time, to all the right people. So, the idea that you would take your most enthusiastic supporter who's tweeting at you all day and just share it with your followers is so antithetical to the way that political professionals think about the best way to communicate. Trump does it because he does it impulsively. That's funny, let's share it, right? What he did was create a community of people who were invested and felt like they were part of the campaign. The whole meme culture around him, the online MAGA community, is a far more satisfying place for its members to reside online because they get all this reinforcement from like-minded people that Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden never gave, even if they collected a lot of names of people who ended up giving them money online.

Shaan Puri

Right.

Sasha Issenberg

Right, and that is a gift that I have not seen. We've seen politicians get some part of that for some time. Bernie Sanders had some of that, whatever else. But there's still the idea that you have to relinquish a certain amount of control over your communications, and there are very few politicians who are willing to do that.

Shaan Puri

That is fascinating to me. I did not know the story there of Kushner coming in and basically changing the frame from "we spend money to try to buy votes" versus "we spend money to rake in more money." Then that $1 becomes $2, that $2 becomes $3, and $3 becomes $4. We can just continue to fundraise this way. Ultimately, if somebody's giving you their money, they're probably also going to give you their vote, right? So it's not like you're only doing one versus the other.

Sasha Issenberg

Japan has always had a very clear divide, both in terms of the organizational chart within the headquarters and in terms of the budget. This divide also extends to what you say and where. Some of this is due to regulations around political spending. Fundraising communication is a very different beast inside a campaign than persuasion or get-out-the-vote communication. These are handled by totally different offices in the campaign. What Trump sort of naturally found out was that if you're spending a lot of money prospecting on Facebook, telling people why you're great, some of that will go to people who will end up chipping in $10 and signing up for a recurring payment. Some of it will also go in front of people whose opinions you are helping to shape. Additionally, some of it will help turn people who already support you into volunteers. Campaigns did not typically think of it this way. They thought of fundraising targets as almost by definition not being your persuasion targets. Your persuasion targets are people whose minds aren't made up, while your fundraising targets are people who already support you, and you're trying to get them to give more.

Shaan Puri

Yes, yes, okay. So I like that. It seems like Trump is this kind of blend of celebrity; he's like an influencer brand, right? In the same way that, you know, Kylie Jenner can sell makeup better than a makeup brand that doesn't have an influencer. Or that, you know, George Clooney can sell alcohol, or Ryan Reynolds can sell cell phone service through Mint Mobile. It seems like the ads using Trump worked. And it sounds like you've also kind of pointed out that he created a bit of a community. Whereas, like, I can't even really tell you what Kamala's community is. I could tell you Trump's community, which is the MAGA movement. I kind of know who they are, what they look like, what they stand for, and what they're all about. I don't even know what the name of the community would be for Kamala. It would only be people who hate Trump, I think, is the only answer.

Sasha Issenberg

Even there was a little bit of... they call themselves the K Hive, a little cluster of Kamala supporters. But that campaign did not last long for a reason, which is I don't think that there is a particularly broad-based enthusiasm for her.

Shaan Puri

Never met a lot of K hivers. Yeah, look.

Sasha Issenberg

And she has been at some disadvantage. There have been advantages to starting a campaign in July, but a lot of disadvantages as well. You know, an online audience takes a long time to build. I think there will be an interesting conversation to have after the election as to whether she will have had the shortest presidential campaign in modern American history by far. I mean, the general tendency has been towards these two-year campaigns, and she's going to have a four-month campaign.

Shaan Puri

Well, she's done a couple of things well, right? She raised a lot of money very quickly. She's actually outraised Trump. Also, her TikTok presence when she started was significant. She picked a medium, and it seems like they were choosing alternative mediums. For example, Trump has done a lot of podcasts; she's done a couple, but podcasts seem to be a bigger part of the equation this time. She went super viral on TikTok right away. They had a bunch of songs and little earworms, like JD Vance's "I'm a Never Trump Guy" song, which was great. They've done a lot of interesting things, like when he said the thing about "eating the dogs, eating the cats." Within minutes, it went viral on TikTok as a song that someone remixed. So, I think they've done a lot of interesting things there. Does any of that stand out to you? Do you have opinions on any of that? I'm curious how you look at that.

Sasha Issenberg

You know, I think one other thing that they did, which is pretty novel, is that they have gotten into clipping and amplifying little bits of every crazy thing that Trump says. I mean, there was this school of thought among Democrats that was pretty prevailing for most of Trump's presidency, which was: "Don't give him oxygen. Don't give him exposure. You're only feeding the whatever." They would scold journalists, asking, "Why are you taking his speeches live? Why are you sharing clips of everything he says?" I'll go to the Kamala HQ account, and it will be like those guys, you know, the Media Matters guys or whatever else, who are just clipping all these wild things that go on Fox News. Just these 7-second clips where he says something like, "You can electrocute yourself with a car on the moon," or something. It's like, "Look at this crazy old guy." That's a very different mentality about how to deal with Trump, in particular, than Democrats had. So, I think they feel like the digital team in the campaign, which is basically inherited entirely from the Biden campaign, feels a little unshackled. They have much more to work with. I think there was, you know, obviously, a candidate who's more dynamic and closer to pop culture. They have more celebrities who are eager to be associated with the campaign. There was also a sense that Biden emphasized the dignity of the office, and Trump is beneath this. There was a sense of, "Let's not get down in the mud and play Trump's game." I think there's a real freedom to do kind of name-calling and stuff that the Biden people would have thought was sort of pettier than their brand. So, yeah, I think they've been far more willing to mix it up online. I do think, though, this is an area where she probably should engage with influencers and such. If she'd had an extra year to cultivate those relationships online, some of that would be showing through now in a way that they've just been scrambling to achieve. I mean, they were doing things in August that campaigns are usually doing the previous March, like designing a logo. I mean, really, like day one type things.

Shaan Puri

You've studied and covered elections for more than 15 years, I think. Who do you think is running the better campaign right now? Not who's going to win, but who's running a better campaign?

Sasha Issenberg

I thought Trump, for most of the year, was running as good a campaign as he could run. Now, I start to see a real mismatch between what they claim as their strategy and the organization that they have been building for it. In short, so much of the Trump plan seems to be based on mobilizing young men, especially young men of color. There are reasons in polling to suggest that there's real room for him to gain in a way that fewer Republicans have. But, you know, that's the job of basically going to people who are not voters and turning them into voters. All the research I've written about suggests that the best way to do that is through high-quality, face-to-face interactions from a volunteer. It's important to ensure that the volunteer is from the voter's community. They need to have these socially meaningful interactions and provide really practical advice, like, "Where's your polling place?" and all of that stuff. However, the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that, what people call the ground game or field organization. This includes the real boots-on-the-ground part of campaigning to America PAC, which is the Elon Musk-funded super PAC. Typically, the division of labor on campaigns has been that this sort of nuts-and-bolts, labor-intensive work does not scale up easily. For example, going from 100 people in West Philadelphia knocking on doors to 200 people knocking on doors in West Philadelphia takes twice as much work and capital. In contrast, going from 100 ads on TV in Pennsylvania to the same ads running twice as often takes basically no more effort. There has been a big question for about 15 years about how to divide responsibilities between campaigns and the super PACs. They operate under different sets of rules and have different advantages. Typically, the way it's broken down is that the campaigns and the party committees will do that labor-intensive work that doesn't scale up, while the money on the outside will buy ads—mostly TV, some digital—that amplify the message because they can't coordinate with one another directly. The Trump people have blown up that model, and they're now trusting this outside group that Musk runs to do this door knocking.

Shaan Puri

What is he doing? Because I actually haven't followed it fully. I saw he's going, "Mr. Beast, he's giving away $1,000,000 a day." I don't even understand what that is. Can you explain that? What is Elon doing?

Sasha Issenberg

So, he's paying people to get their friends to sign petitions. You can get like a $47 bounty or something if you can get your friend to sign a petition that says, "I believe in the First and Second Amendments" and give your information.

Shaan Puri

And what is that? Why that?

Sasha Issenberg

I can come up with a few theories about what they could do with that information, but it seems like a pretty roundabout way to get information that's already available. There's already a database of every voter in the state. If I wanted to know people in Pennsylvania who care about, you know, who are conservative or MAGA and own a gun, that's a combination of publicly available or viable information. I shouldn't have to pay people to go collect it from their neighbors. So, it seems like a tactic you would use if you're trying to have a long-term movement or organization-building thing. However, I haven't seen any indication that Elon Musk is trying to build a generational movement here. It does not seem like a particularly effective way to get people to vote for the first time or the second time in their lives. That's one big part of what they're doing. Then, they're doing a lot of basically hiring day laborers to go knock on doors. There's been a bunch of reporting; Wired has some good reporting, and Daily Beast, I think, on this. In any industry, hiring people off the street and paying them by the hour or per contact leads to a lot of bad work. You have a lot of really poor incentives for people to either be inefficient or give you bad data if you're paying them per complete. I have sort of shifted my view on the competence of the Trump organization over the course of the year because it seems like they haven't aligned their strategy with their tactics and organization. I think Kamala Harris is running a far more traditional Democratic campaign, and there's a kind of sensible logic to it, even if she's made a few mistakes along the way.

Shaan Puri

It sounded like the thing Elon is doing. You know, he's trying to sign... you can't pay people to vote; that's illegal. So it's kind of like, "I'll pay you to sign the petition." The petition says something that sounds very agreeable, like, "I support free speech." Yeah, who doesn't, right? That sounds pretty reasonable. But it seems like there must be some 3D chess going on that I don't fully understand. What do you do after that? What's the next step?

Sasha Issenberg

Of that, yeah. I mean, if you use that information and then you have a really good operation to call those people, maybe target them with digital advertising, call them, and knock on their door and say, "I know you're a 1st and 2nd Amendment voter and you signed a petition devoting yourself to the cause. Now do this and this." There's actually a reason to think that works, but that's just one step. That's just the first step in a 3 or 4 step process. You need to be really good and targeted at the next few steps because, you know, one real difference that's important for your audience to keep in mind when learning from adjacent fields is that a lot of the breakthroughs I've written about have come from people in politics looking to business or elsewhere. However, there are some really important differences between business marketing and political marketing. One of them is that the cost of mistargeting or a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics. For example, if you have a consumer product like Coke and you put a Coke ad in front of somebody who's on a diet or doesn't like sugar, has diabetes, or whatever, okay, you wasted 10 cents for that person. Big deal. But if you are the Trump campaign and you send a door knocker to do a get-out-the-vote reminder to somebody who your data tells you should be a Trump supporter but they're not, or there's one Trump supporter in that house, but you remind three other people—the three women living with that one Trump supporter—that it's election day on Tuesday too, and it makes them more likely to vote, or your person just kind of inefficient, you know, lazy, and they knock on the wrong door in the apartment complex and end up going to the Harris supporter and reminding them, you've not only wasted that interaction, you've created a vote for your opponent. There is nothing like that in the marketing world where there's that cost to misidentifying your targets. The only exceptions might be in insurance or credit cards. If a company thinks they can extend you a $10,000 credit limit and you're not good for it, they made a big mistake. If an insurer decides that you should be a $500 premium and it turns out that you cost them a lot more, they've really screwed up. But in most consumer marketing, there's not a huge downside to getting your message in front of the wrong people. In politics, there is. I think that's the big mistake that a lot of people, and perhaps Elon or the people around him, make. They move from business to politics and say, "Let's just throw resources at it." When I needed to build interest in Tesla, I just bombarded all these people with digital advertising about Tesla or offered them all a free test drive and, you know, a cocktail at our cool showrooms. That probably works to start building interest in Tesla, but it's a terrible way to try to turn out voters for your candidate.

Shaan Puri

And when you've been looking into a space like this, how disillusioned do you get? Really, I guess the question is, you've now studied multiple election cycles. You've talked to the teams behind this and the different subsections of this industry. What's it like? You know, when I clean my house and I move the couch, I'm like, "Oh my God, there's 10 years of my kids' snacks under here." What's the thing where you're like, "I wish I didn't see that. I wish I didn't know that." What is the ugliest part of this that really has you, you know, saw or turns you off?

Sasha Issenberg

I mean, I think the disinformation stuff is... you know, I generally was encouraged in the early years of writing about this. The people who were at the cutting edge of using this data and experiments were generally in the business of trying to get more people to vote or giving voters information that was more relevant to them. That struck me as democracy improving because of technology and innovation. If I use campaigns that have a lot of data about individual voters, that doesn't really scare me. A lot of people have a lot of data about voters, and they're usually, instead of giving you some vague thing about, you know, "Morning in America," if I think that you're likely to care a lot about cancer research and I give you a more targeted message about what my campaign would do for cancer research, I think that that's generally good for the country. What has changed is that I think you have so many people who have the ability to reach large numbers of voters now who are just not constrained by a lot of the expectations about honesty and can't be held accountable for what they say. I think that is... is scary to me.

Shaan Puri

Oh, what's going on now? Because AI has now made it easy to do deep fake audio, I can make Donald Trump say anything. For like, you know, 30 cents on my computer right now, I can create a video that shows something that I want happening. I could have... if phone banking works, why can't I just spin up an army of AI phone agents to just call everybody? What have you seen as the new tools? Has that happened this cycle, or do you think it's next cycle?

Sasha Issenberg

Relatively, maybe less than I would have thought. If we’d had this conversation a year ago, you know, I think the campaigns... this is a place where some campaigns wanted to be first because they realized they’d get a lot of attention and wanted that. But I think most campaigns are afraid of the backlash of being associated with AI. This fear isn't necessarily about manipulation, but just the idea of using non-live callers. So, I think there’s a hurdle that campaigns have from a brand image perspective about being associated with new or potentially invasive technologies. As a result, there’s been less of that. However, where people are using AI the most in this campaign is in the same way we all might use it: brainstorming first drafts of fundraising emails. Most fundraising emails need to come up with new ones every day to send to people. They’ll basically use the same types of themes and messages. You’re probably going to A/B test them anyway, so instead of having a bunch of 23-year-olds who just graduated from liberal arts colleges typing out your first drafts and trying to see whether the one that scares people into thinking you’re losing is going to do better than the one that has J.Lo’s signature under it, why not have the machine come up with 10 different J.Lo ones and test those? That’s, I think, probably the most we’re seeing AI or automation being used in this campaign. But I think, obviously, that’ll change over the next few years.

Shaan Puri

Right, why is Kamala doing like a Fortnite map? They just released it. They're basically advertising in video games, which I think others have done in the past. But I mean, those people aren't even old enough to vote. I think the average Fortnite player... what's the psychology around that?

Sasha Issenberg

So, it starts from the position of having more money than they know what to do with, and there being an unusual scarcity issue for political markers. It's like, you have one day by which all your sales have to be completed. I don't think there's another industry... I mean, there are seasonal industries, I guess.

Shaan Puri

Like a July 4th fireworks store. Yeah, exactly right.

Sasha Issenberg

So, like Halloween, Storeify makes some interesting pricing decisions on November 1st. One thing is that they have a lot of money they need to get out the door. All of the TV is bought up, and you know, we're down to seven battleground states. The TV markets are saturated. There's a point at which you can no longer send out new direct mail. If you wanted to get more volunteers knocking on doors, you probably had to start building offices and having staff to train them months ago. So, at the end of the campaign, you start to see the end of this. Right before election day, you start to see campaigns making decisions that are driven less by overall efficiency and more by basically where can we very quickly park some money. I think that’s when you start to see things like sound trucks and stuff like that because there’s just nowhere else to put it.

Shaan Puri

So, some people have called this election the "podcast election" because podcasts have become this huge medium. You have unedited, unfiltered conversations. It's kind of one of the only ways you can actually see what a candidate is really like. I was joking with my buddy, saying, "I think going on Theo Von's podcast should be a new federal standard for presidents." I just need to know if my president's a good hang or not. Yeah, and Theo Von might be the only guy who could save us there. You know, Trump did Rogan, and JD Vance just did a three-hour thing with Rogan. Famously, Kamala Harris, when Rogan said, "Hey, you can come out to Austin and let's do, you know, two or three hours unedited in my studio," she said no. There are two reactions to that. One was, "Wow, what a dropped ball! You could have gotten in front of 30 million people in a super meaningful way." The other was, "How dare you, Joe? She's the Vice President, and there are only a few days left before the election. How dare you have demands? You should be crawling to her to do this." Other people would say, "You're not going to convince anybody who listens to Rogan to vote for Kamala anyway." What do you think about the role of podcasts? Was it a mistake for Kamala to not go on Rogan?

Sasha Issenberg

I think that her campaign was slow to put her out in a lot of different venues. You know, there was that week where she did "Call Calladay" and "The View," and it was like, "Oh!" Then maybe she did Colbert or Kimmel or something. It was like, "Oh, she's doing media now." Part of what was shocking about that was that she was doing so little of it early on. Again, they had to build a campaign from scratch really quickly at an inopportune time. She had to pick a VP, get ready for a nomination speech, debate, and all the stuff that she did not expect she was going to have to do a few weeks earlier. But also, one of the advantages that Democrats had in dumping Biden from the ticket and getting her was that you had somebody who, first of all, could send more energy. In theory, she can work a full day and do a bunch of things that Biden isn't expected to do. The other thing is she's more dynamic and more in tune with pop culture. I think there was some sense that, wow, Democrats are going to go from somebody who does like three rallies a week and whose staff is afraid to put him on "Face the Nation"—not even "Meet the Press"—to somebody who can do five events a day and interviews nonstop. She's charismatic and intelligent, and all these things, but that never really came to fruition. I don't know how much of this we will start to learn after the election when some journalists or book authors get a little access into what they were thinking. One of the questions is how much of that was just that they didn't have the time to do as much of it, and that would be sensible to me. The other possibility is that the staff is fundamentally afraid that the downside of going into an unstructured two hours with Joe Rogan offsets the upside of getting in front of that audience.

Shaan Puri

Could you give me a couple of minutes on your new book? So, you got this new book out. What's the premise? And then can you give me maybe one of the juicy findings, learnings, or stories that you had from it?

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, so it's about this sort of new era. We've bounced in and out of this, but the new asymmetry that's created in this digital environment is significant. Campaigns realize that their opposition is not just their opponent; it's not another candidate or party. It could be, you know, a foreign intelligence service or somebody who's attacking you for "shits and giggles," or who knows what. And how... what the search for a playbook for learning how to communicate in that environment looks like, because it blows up so many of the expectations about campaign strategies. I'll write a bit about that Biden example in there, which I think was a really important shift in starting to think about the recipients of disinformation more than the producers of disinformation. This has been, I think, a big mistake that not just campaigns, but people in the media make in trying to understand what impacts something will have. I also read about a really interesting group called "We Defend Truth." This is a progressive group that has been trying to fight basically conspiracy theories around the 2020 election and around COVID vaccines. They have gone out and hired some of the more successful GIF and meme makers online, you know, the guy who had the most likes on Imgur and stuff. Their theory of the case is that you need to be engaging in the vernacular of the internet.

Shaan Puri

Meme warfare. You have to fight memes with memes.

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, to fight memes, you need to be communicating in the way that online audiences expect. This means being coarse, being funny, and being part of the pop culture conversation. It should not feel like political communication or marketing. I quote one of their head guys who says, "You need to earn the right to communicate with people, and to do that, you have to usually entertain or inform them first." I think it's a really interesting way to start thinking about how traditional political communication has to fundamentally rethink itself. It needs to shift from the one-way broadcast dynamic that a lot of modern campaigning was shaped into, to a kind of two-way or multilinear environment that social media creates.

Shaan Puri

It reminds me of when you had TV and movies as the dominant video medium. If you were making a TV show, you could afford to spend the first few minutes setting the scene. If you watch the first couple of minutes of a TV show, it might start with a scene in New York, where a guy is walking. We don't know who he is or what he's doing, and then there's this harmless scene. Finally, you get to the characters and the story. Have you ever watched a TikTok or a YouTube video? In the first five seconds, they're doing something to tell you, "Do not click away! Stay on this video! You gotta watch this video!" I hang out with Mr. Beast, and he could recite to me the first 40 seconds of a script from a video he did three years ago because he drilled it so many times. Every word was chosen carefully; he cannot leave that first minute up for grabs. When I asked him if he ever looks at TV and what he could learn from them, he said, "Yeah, but what they could learn from us." He added, "Dude, TV would never survive on YouTube. People would click away; it would have terrible retention rates and terrible click-through rates. They couldn't survive in our world." Similarly, what you're talking about is in the old world, where it's my message versus the other candidate's message. It's just those two; it's a one-on-one. Now, you're saying you're just playing the field. There's the field of the internet, where stories and information come from all kinds of different people, with varying levels of accuracy and different levels of impact. How are you going to respond to not a one-on-one, but rather you versus the entire field of content that's out there right now? What's your playbook to win there?

Sasha Issenberg

Yeah, absolutely. I think we're only now starting to get people to have campaigns with a more instinctual understanding. It used to be that so much of online campaigning, you know, in the 2000s and 2010s, was basically, "Let's say things we're already doing offline and figure out how to move them online." Right? Okay, so we know how to make 30-second videos and put them on TV. Let's just turn them into... you know, maybe we have to go from horizontal to vertical, whatever. But let's just figure out how to get them onto social media platforms. Can we do something online that looks like our direct mail program? Can we take it out of the USPS and put it into email? Now, I think we're starting to get people in politics to realize—some of it's a generational shift, and some of it is Democrats realizing how poorly they've been outfoxed online during the Trump era. They've just started to think, "We need to really step back and rethink some of these foundational questions of how and why you communicate to certain people."

Shaan Puri

I want to leave you with one last question: What do you think is the most mispriced or misunderstood opportunity in elections? Meaning, if somebody hired you and said, "Alright, you're our consultant, and you have to give us input to do something that maybe we're not already doing, or maybe we're doing but not enough of," where would you place a bet that you think has more upside than people are currently taking advantage of?

Sasha Issenberg

So, less maybe not economic upside, but sort of political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles. I think there's a great example now. If Trump wins this election, we're going to look back and say arguably his best moment was in 2021 and 2022 when he was largely out of the news. Republicans were distancing themselves, the media wasn't covering him, and Democrats had hoped he was gone and stopped attacking him. He was able to start to build up some sense of nostalgia for the Trump years. A lot of it was not based in a real understanding of what 2020 was like when he was president, but the distance helped him. If Democrats had kept a foot on his neck through advertising, reminding people that yes, the unemployment rate and inflation in 2021 were because of the guy who was just there, reminding people about some of the COVID dynamics, they pulled away from him at just the moment they could have continued to define him. I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Political money disappears out of cycle; you only get the surge of interest in cycle. But there are sure people starting to talk about party-based branding. So much of our political communication, paid TV ads, are always entirely about candidates. Yet, when we started this conversation, we noted that basically 45% of the country are Democrats and 45% are Republicans, and they'll always vote for their party. Yet, no political advertising is spent branding the parties. I think there are advantages to doing that in a countercyclical way when people are not being bombarded by tons of TV ads. It would be beneficial to remind people what the Republican Party stands for and how the Democrats screwed up last time, or vice versa. We should try to think about not just winning votes in an election, but also long-term audience building for a party.

Shaan Puri

I like it. Maybe you could also be one of these political consultant shops that are making bank. What's the business that stunned you with how much it makes in this election marketing business? Is there any, whether it's a polling company or a research company, that has any multi-million dollar companies out there that do this?

Sasha Issenberg

The business model that's still most astounding is media buyers who get paid a commission off of the ads they place.

Shaan Puri

Of ad spend.

Sasha Issenberg

Digital advertising is more labor-intensive for them. However, buying TV ads is different. There are only so many stations in Wisconsin where you can place ads. It doesn't take any more work to double the buy, and they get paid a commission off of it. That's how it has been for decades.

Shaan Puri

It is there one dominant ad buyer that is the lowest bid.

Sasha Issenberg

Handle on in each party, but you know, they're probably having revenue. Some of them also make ads, and so they're part of a bigger media business. They're probably on the high end in the $100,000,000 revenue range. We're not talking about huge companies, but it really does not require a lot of savvy or labor at this point.

Shaan Puri

Is there any other cool business that is maybe like a one-man shop that makes $10,000,000 a year just doing a specific thing? Or is there any other interesting business niche that you just stumbled into?

Sasha Issenberg

There's still some interesting stuff to be done with data and modeling. Especially, you know, there are a lot of boutique firms that will do campaign-specific modeling. What's happening now is that the things presidential campaigns were able to do—only presidential campaigns could do—maybe 12 years ago, now someone running for county executive can use. I'm not sure that this is more an opportunity that people have mastered, but I think there are probably opportunities to figure out how to package and translate that for small-scale campaigns that do not have professionals always working on them. The person running for state representative in your neighborhood, her brother might be the effective campaign manager and whatever else. Often, the delta between what a sort of engaged layperson trying to run a campaign can do and the sophistication of the tools and data available is just too much to bridge. They go do it, but there probably is a way to price those and create tools that are more accessible. That's where I think, if people were looking to try to get into the tech end of the political business, there's probably some opportunity.

Shaan Puri

Very cool, Sasha! I appreciate you coming on and giving us the extra time. This is fascinating. Thank you so much! Where should people find you? Send them to your book. Tell them what they need to know. Yeah, my new book is called...

Sasha Issenberg

The lie detectives are in search of a playbook for winning elections in the disinformation age. I have a website: sashaeisenberg.com. You can find all my books there. My first one is about the global sushi business, which may be of interest to you too. It's been really fun. I love talking about politics from an angle that's different than what people are saying on CNN on any given day. So, thank you.

Shaan Puri

Alright, thanks so much, man. That was great, P and J Chen.