The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

This book really brought a lot of things full circle for me. I dabbled in the 2008 election as a 20 year old (still the best time of my life) and it reminded me of how so much of my empirical prowess came from tutorials with the Iowa Voter File Manager. I dabbled in field organizing, and coalition organizing too even! It's experiences in my own life, yet Issenberg helps me reflect on how impactful they were with his authenticity and comprehensiveness. It's truly the handbook I wish I had been given 5 years ago to understand how unique of a moment I was in.It's also refreshing how well he traces the topic from 1920s Ivory Tower disciplinary squabbles to transit buses in Akron, merging the academic with the tactics, all the while hoisting up the dedication and curiosity of so many individuals without whom this revolution seemingly would not be the same. The 'strivers' are all so quintessentially American that you really just have to smile about how great a political journalist he is!

First, let me stipulate that I am a political junkie. I've worked on campaigns from the local to the federal level. I've worked with challengers and incumbents. I love politics.This is a good book, especially for those who are newer within the campaign management field. This book alone won't help you win a campaign, but will provide you with an overview of where politics is going. The big focus of the book is in micro-targeting voters. Be that as it may, the book isn't technical at all - no "shoptalk" to worry about. One of the nice things about the book is that there really isn't a bias for or against one party/ideology. The book talks about people for R and D campaigns using the info.The largest issue with the book is that it gets long winded. Some of the examples used provide way more background information (for example: about the person the anecdote revolves around) than anyone really cares about.

Man, this a tough but fun, fun read. In telling the story of the scientific and intellectual development of academic Political Science and professional political operators you meet more characters than in a Russian novel. I am on my second time around, this time underlining and making notes. We begin in the twenties with the first true study of voter behavior and end up with the fascinating data mining that aided Obama's 2012 victory. Issenberg is a good story teller, able to weave narrative strands over decades and campaigns. This will become a standard text for those who love the art of politics.

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.

This is a great book. It is filled with amazing insider details about every big campaign in the last thirty years. It will having you grinning and shaking your head at some of the strategy that some campaign analysts came up with.The author has obtained amazing access. This history familiarizes the reader with the the decisions that campaigns make to identify & motivate likely voters. The second half of the book lays out in detail the sophistication employed to great success in 2008 & 2012. I am a campaign veteran and learned much. Fun absorbing read

This is a must-read for anyone interested in how campaigns seek to influence the electorate. As a long-time operative I'm familiar with much of the past research noted and with the more recent behavioral research but the author does a great job putting them all in a continuum that is both revealing and fascinating.