The Exchanges

Q were writing your book, which is called the Victory Lab, did you, I guess, like, how did you get around that bias? Like, how could you figure out, how open were these people in sharing what's actually working or not? And did you have to kind of, like, read between the lines to try to figure out where are they just sort of grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened?

A Yeah, it's one of the most, um, difficult things reporting in this area. So, you know, I, 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, you're testing your ads on, on online platforms. They are, that maybe they will tell you some stuff. They very selectly will leak out stuff that they think will help them raise money usually. So you'll read a story in Wired. One story in wire that's like inside Kamala Harris's ad testing machine and details are very carefully selected over the course of, you know, during the campaign to give out to one piece that then they can send out when they go out, when she goes to do a fundraising tour, you know, in Palo Alto that can convince, you know, a bunch of, of tech executives that, that she's running a smart campaign. So during a campaign though, 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, you know, give away any, anything to the competition. Right. 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 return to their consulting firms or starting new firms, develop some trick or t…

AI assessment note: “I was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles.”

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

A 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 is their strategy and And the organization that they have been building for it, which is, you know, in short, so much of the Trump plan seems to be based on mobilizing young men, especially young men of color. Um, uh, and there re there's reasons in polling to suggest that there's real room for, for him to gain in a way that, that few Republicans have there. But the, you know, that's, that's this job of basically going to people who are not voters and And turning them into voters. And all the research I've written about suggests that, you know, the best way to do that is high quality face-to-face interactions, uh, from a volunteer, you should, a volunteer from a voter's community and them to, to have these sort of socially meaningful interactions to give them really practical advice, like, you know, where's your polling place and, and, and, and all of that stuff. And the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that You know, what, what people call ground game or field organization, but the real boots on the ground part of campaigning to America PAC, which is the Elon Musk, uh, funded super PAC. And typically the division of labor on campaigns has been that that sort of nuts and bolts labor-intensive work that does…

AI assessment note: “I thought Trump for most of the year was running as good a campaign”

Q And you got to give them input to do something that maybe they're not already doing, or maybe they're doing, but not enough of. Where would you place a bet that you think has sort of more upside than people are currently, um, you know, taking advantage of?

A So less, maybe not economic upside, um, but sort of political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles. And, um, uh, you know, I think there's a great example now, like, The best, I think we're gonna, if Trump wins this election, we're gonna look back and say, arguably his best period was a period in 20, 21, 22, when he was largely out of the news. Republicans are distancing themselves. The media wasn't covering him. Democrats had hoped he was gone and stopped attacking him. And he was able to start to build up some sense of nostalgia for the Trump years. A lot of it, like not based in a real understanding of what 20, 20 was like when he was president, but have distance helped him. And if Democrats have kept, like, a foot on his neck through advertising, reminding people, yes, the reason, you know, Wherever unemployment was and, and inflation were in twenty-twenty-one was because of the guy who was just there, reminding people about some of the COVID dynamics. But like, they pulled away from him at just the moment that they prop, they could have, um, continued to define him. And 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, um, there's sort of people starting to talk about party-based branding, right? So, like, so much of our political, ou…

AI assessment note: “political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles.”

Q to try to buy votes versus we spend money to To rake in more money, and then that one dollar becomes two, that two becomes three, and three becomes four, that we can just continue to fundraise this way, and then, and 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.

A Japan's have always had a very clear divide, both in terms of, like, the org chart within the headquarters, in terms of the budget, and in terms of what you say and where, and some of it's because of regulations around, around political spending, but like, Fundraising communication is a very different beast inside a campaign than persuasion or, or get out the vote communication and totally different offices in the campaign. But like what Trump, I think sort of just naturally found now was if you're spending a lot of money prospecting on Facebook, telling people why you're great, um, some of that will go to people who will end up chipping in 10 bucks and signing up for a recurring payment, right? Some of it will also will go in front of people whose opinions you are helping to shape. Some of it will go help turn people already support you into volunteers by getting them. And that campaigns did not typically think that they thought of it as we're having, we have our fundraising targets. We have our, who almost by definition are not your persuasion targets because your persuasion targets are people whose minds aren't made up. Your fundraising targets are people who already support you and you're trying to get them to give more.

AI assessment note: “Some of it will also will go in front of people whose opinions you are helping to shape.”

Q industry. What's like, you know, when I clean my house and I move the couch and I'm like, oh my God, there's 10 years of my kids snacks under here. Like, what's the thing where you're like, I wish I didn't see that. I wish I didn't know that. What, what is the ugliest part of this that, that really has, you know, you, you saw or turns you off?

A I mean, I think they, the disinformation stuff is, is, you know, I generally was encouraged in the early years of writing about this, because 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. And that struck me as, like, democracy was, it was improving because of technology and innovation. Um, uh, if I used Campaigns 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, if I think that you're likely to care a lot about, about, um, you know, cancer research, and I give you a, you know, turn-in message about what I, my campaign would do for cancer research, like, I think that that's generally good for the country. What, what has changed is 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. And, and I think that that, that is, is, is scary to me.

AI assessment note: “the disinformation stuff is, is, you know... scary to me.”

Q the vice president, and there's a few days left before the election. How dare you have demands? You should be, you know, Crawling to her to do this. Um, and other people would say, you're not going to convince anybody who listens to Rogan to vote for Kamala anyways. What do you think about the role of podcasts? And was it a mistake for Kamala to not go on Rogan?

A I think that her campaign, um, was slow to put her out in a lot of different venues. You know, there's that week where she did call, uh, uh, and, and the view and it was like, oh, and then maybe she did Colbert or Kimmel or something. It was like, oh, she's doing media now. And part of what was shocking about that was that she was doing so little of it early on. And like, again, They had to build a campaign from scratch really quickly at a, at an inopportune point. She had to pick a VP. She had to get ready for, you know, a nomination speech, debates, all this stuff that she did not expect she was going to have to do a few weeks earlier. So, um, but also, you know, one of the advantages that Democrats had in, in dumping Biden from the ticket and getting her was you had somebody who, first of all, to send more energy. In theory, she can, like, 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 she's, you know, more in tune with pop culture, and I think there was some sense that, wow, Democrats are going to go from somebody who does, like, three rallies a week, and his, his staff is afraid to put in, you know, on, like, face the nation, not even feels on, like, to somebody who can Do five events a day and interviews nonstop, and she's charismatic and, and, and intelligent and all these things. And that never really…

AI assessment note: “I think that her campaign, um, was slow to put her out in a lot of different venues.”