The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns Hardcover – September 11, 2012

This is a book about how to win an election in the age of high tech and big data. Campaigning is no longer about broadcasting a candidate's message to the widest possible audience. It is not even about distinguishing between a candidate's supporters, opponents, and the undecided to send a different message to each group. It is about tapping vast quantities of data available about most American adults and targeting each person with the most effective personalized strategy. And it is about finding the best messages, issues, even rumors, using experimental comparisons. It is about doing this below the radar, out of the awareness of the public. This is the nature of the modern political battlefield as seen by both parties. The strategy, tactics, and personalities who make this possible are the subject of this book.

The book's narrative is a collection of smaller stories. There are brief biographies of those who developed and refined new approaches to collecting and using voter data. There are success and failure stories of various campaigns and of major battles within those campaigns. And there are the specific tactics these people deploy. It is impossible to list them all, so here are a few:

- Using public records, pollsters mailed each person in a precinct a list of who had voted and who had not voted in the last election--along with an announcement of their plan to mail out updated lists after the next election. This increased voter turnout by 20%. When this strategy as put into practice, the mailers went only to voters likely to support the pollster's candidate, resulting in a selective increase in voter turnout.

- It is very difficult to sell new tactics. "If you do something different, everyone will point at the thing you did different and say that's why you lost. So if you're the campaign manager you don't do anything different. If you follow the rule book strictly they can't blame anything on you."

- Researchers do not find sufficient similarity among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents to use these broad categories. Instead they develop more specific typologies, such as the one from Times Mirror: "Two of the clusters were distinctly Republican (Enterprisers and Moralists), four Democratic (New Dealers, Sixties Democrats, the Partisan Poor, and the Passive Poor), and two leaning in each direction (Upbeats and Disaffecteds towards the Republicans, Seculars and Followers towards the Democrats). Eleven percent of American adults were found to be fully, and seemingly permanently, detached from politics; Times Mirror called them Bystanders." (See Pew Research's web site for a more current example of such a political typology.)

- It's no surprise that telling people they "should" do something produces defensiveness and resistance to change. But telling them that a large number of other people are doing it increases their chances of doing the same. This approach, developed by social psychologists to encourage general prosocial behavior, translated well to get-out-the-vote programs.

- Prospective voters asked if they would vote for an African-American often answer positively when they have privately decided they are not comfortable doing so. This has led to vote overestimates for African-American candidates. Researchers found they could get more accurate estimates by asking prospective voters if they thought their neighbors would vote for an African-American. This approach worked as "...a way of correcting for the inability of voters to be as honest and self-aware as pollsters like to pretend they are."

The book provides a readable and seemingly thorough account of how campaign tactics have developed in the age of big data. I would be a more valuable book if some of the biographical information were removed in favor of more detailed description of campaign tactics and statistical procedures. As written, it gives a sense of these techniques and how they are used. More detail is needed, if not in this book, then in a companion volume that is more methods-oriented. I'd like to see Sasha Isenberg write something like what the forensic linguist John Olsson has produced, both a serious text, Forensic Linguistics and a popular audience collection of interesting cases, Wordcrime.

Highly detailed and expansive. Spans more than a century of political approaches and tactics. Excellent educational resource, presented in a story compilation form. Dense and sometimes jumps back and forth. Overall, highly recommend for someone looking for quantity and quality on the topic.

We are Winning and have to Continue to push back on Socialism fighting the party of Lincoln! Can;t wait to employ these same techniques in the field.

Great book!

Sasha Issenberg's book "The Victory Lab" profiles the many people behind Obama's winning campaigns. There was Hal Malchow, Alan Gerber, Don Green and many others who creatively used social behavior to influence people to vote. Nonvoters have been "jolted out of their complacency" (197) in the last decade.

Hal Malchow was Obama's political consultant for his re-election campaign and he used micro-targeting as his focus to get Obama elected. The statistic featured in this book are attention-getting and rely heavily on behavioral science: those who commute the longest to work are the most devoted to voting on election day, for instance. But read on and most of the findings are based on poll results over the years. With the younger generation being internet savvy these days, these kind of findings are not unusual.

Issenberg notes that unmarried white women, Latinos, African-Americans, are a growing majority of voters that remains underrepresented. The earlier chapters in this book provide the historical background to his thesis: the younger, more diverse group of voters will create a change in our electorate. The under 34-year-old age group has proven to be more tolerant of gays, blacks, Latinos in power than ever before, and their votes have helped change social acceptance. Further chapters give us small bios on the readers of this book.

My complaint, and it isn't that much of one, is that the author doesn't go in great detail about the savvy internet campaign the current administration is conducting. Emails are collected and log-in times are recorded. The political parties know who has voted and who has donated. The modern political campaign is thus internet savvy and open to anyone willing to snoop around.

This book is 357 pages total and I doubt if the meat of it would fill over 10 pages. It is journalistic and narrative nonfiction at its worst. So bad that any discriminating reader will bail out early on rather than suffer through it hoping to learn something useful. This is one reason I don't read Slate.

Midwest Independent Research, educational websites. Democracy and politics, mwir-democracyandpolitics.blogspot. There are book lists here.