Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America, A Sneak Preview from The Victory Lab [Kindle Edition]

Sasha Issenberg (Author)

Book Description

A fascinating, never-before-reported look into how Rick Perry, in his 2006 reelection campaign in Texas, had academics conduct real-time experiments to study what makes people vote--revealing a new side of a major politician and a game-changing trend in American politics.

Despite his folksy personality and disdain for East Coast "elitists," Texas governor Rick Perry helped spark a revolution in campaign politics. For his 2006 reelection effort, his top strategist, the imposing and profane Dave Carney, convinced Perry to invite a quartet of academics into the war room to gauge the effectiveness of various campaign tools. In the heat of the campaign, they ran live randomized experiments testing candidate appearances, yard signs, television ads, etc. No candidate had done this before, and no one has done it since.
Now, in this chapter-sized pull-out from his upcoming book, The Victory Lab, Sasha Issenberg brings us this ground-breaking story. With unprecedented access to Perry's campaign team, including Carney, Issenberg shows how the four academics, known in Perry's world as "the eggheads," made great strides in understanding what works and what doesn't in elections.
Written with energy, insight, and first-class reporting, Rick Perry and His Eggheads shows how social science, political machinations, and big personalities rebelling against conventional wisdom are reshaping the way we elect our leaders.

Product Details

• File Size: 1673 KB
• Print Length: 30 pages
• Publisher: Crown (August 23, 2011)
• Sold by: Random House Digital, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B005HE8ED4
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,064 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #29 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Behavioral Sciences > Behavioral Psychology
  • #29 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Behavioral Sciences > Behavioral Psychology
  • #75 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Politics & Government > Elections & Political Process > Elections

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Book Chapter Details the use by Political Scientists of Randomization Experiments in a Live Campaign August 31, 2011

By Hank Peace

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Please note that this is only a single, sample chapter from a forthcoming book, The Victory Lab. As such it's short and it's not going to come to a fully supported conclusion. But it is still well worth the purchase price.

Despite the name, Rick Perry only makes a cameo appearance. This is a book about the science of campaigning, and Rick Perry advisor and political consultant Dave Carney is the star. Dave Carney is kind of political wunderkind that could have rode his early success--he was H.W. Bush's political director at 29 due in large part to his relationship with former New Hampshire governor John Sununu--to a comfortable life of running different campaigns the same way for big money. As this chapter hammers home again and again, political consultants have little incentive to innovate and plenty of incentive to be risk averse. But something about Carney is different.

There shouldn't be any doubt left that there is a science to campaigning, but I suspect it will take more books like this and, more importantly, more campaigns won to put it to rest. There can be little doubt that the Bush and Obama campaigns in 2004 and 2008, respectively, were much better at the technical stuff than their opponents. In 2004, that might have been the difference maker.

What's revolutionary about what the Perry team did isn't the findings: it's common sense that a personal visit (whether from the candidate or a volunteer) is your most powerful tool, that yard signs are irrelevant when candidates will have 100% name recognition on election day regardless, that media buys need to be sustained, and that social media is a more efficient way to coordinate volunteers. What's revolutionary is that Perry and Carnes were willing to bring in four academics (including two liberals!) and give them (almost) free rein to run rigorous experiments during the campaign to discover what really does work and where money is wasted.

This is nuts and bolts stuff, so it's not for everyone, and it won't tell you too much about Perry, but I highly recommend it for election wonks, political scientists and other academics, and anyone interested how campaign decisions are made.

20 of 25 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Rigorous Campaign Methods Prove, "Half your friends, you don't need them" August 23, 2011

By DRDR

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

How did someone as "disdainful of Ivy League credentials" as Rick Perry end up with the country's most academically rigorous campaign methods in 2006 & 2010? Dave Carney is the Perry strategist behind the contradiction. In this short chapter, we learn why Carney was predisposed to evaluate the impact of campaign strategies, how Carney became exposed to the Yale academics, what the Perry campaign learned from them, and why such rigor is not more widespread in political campaigns.

Sasha Issenberg portrays Carney as an able entrepreneur skeptical of conventional wisdom, while other strategists are afraid to take action that could stand out in an electoral defeat, much like the cowardly football coach who punts on 4th-and-1 against his own interest. A critical moment in Carney's life occurs when he uses experiments to identify a positive use of campaign funds in the 1992 Bush Sr. campaign but gets shot down. When he picks up the book, "Get out the Vote" by Yale Political Scientists Gerber & Green years later, he's eager to give their randomized field experiments a try. Despite Perry's successful use of randomization, the establishment remains dismissive. Political consultants are full of anecdotal evidence to mislead candidates to buy their methods, and who wants to conduct experiments that tell you half your friends are worthless?

Randomization has become more popular throughout the social sciences lately, and while experiments are ideal for identifying causality, the scope of their validity is narrow. Perry's campaign learns that TV ads don't have a long-lasting effect and that visits to small towns are highly effective because of the positive local media coverage they generate. But might better TV ads have a more lasting impact? Would the local visits work as well for a campaigner with less charisma than Perry? Carney acknowledges these issues.

If you're reading this preview solely to learn more than a few insights into Perry's soul, you'll be disappointed. We do learn that Perry became more intensely loyal to Carney after the two were back-stabbed in the 1998 Texas elections by Karl Rove, who brought out moderate Democrats for Bush Jr. Perry is endearingly described by Carney as a "cheap bastard," which makes him amenable to using randomization to test campaign strategies. One dreams that Perry would apply such academic rigor to evaluate the effects of government programs for the good of the country, not just the effects of campaign strategy for the good of his election prospects, but I know such hopes for any politician are naive.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars For anyone who cares about politics September 6, 2011

By Toni Mack

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

To correct a misconception: this is not a book. It's a CHAPTER of one that hasn't been published yet.

If you care about politics, then no matter what your particular opinions, the story of what happened when one turned his real-life campaign strategy over to a bunch of social scientists is intriguing.

As one of Rick Perry's advisers says, "A billion dollars is spent on politics every cycle. No company, no entity, no business would spend that amount of money without knowing what works." Well, yeah. But politicians do it anyway.

You have to read the chapter for the rest. The book promises to be a must for political junkies.

More About the Author

Sasha Issenberg is the Washington correspondent for Monocle. He covered the 2008 presidential campaign for The Boston Globe as a national political reporter, and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. He is the author of The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, published in 2007.