Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, everybody, election day in the United States is just a few days away, and I'm here to officially endorse nobody because 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 a billion dollars 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, the best stories about what's actually going on under the hood. I invited on a guy named Sasha Issenberg. He studied this for a couple of decades now, and he wrote a book that I thought was really good called The Victory Lab. So 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 thing where this whole industry that gets paid to help politicians get elected. I think it's something like six billion dollars a year goes to this group of people whose job is to be marketing machines for political purposes. When something works, 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, politician had no charisma, nothing we could do there. 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 and not? Did you have to read between the lines to try to figure out where are they just grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened?

**Sasha Issenberg** (2:06)
Yeah, it's one of the most difficult things reporting in this area. 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, show me exactly how you're testing your ads on online platforms.
Maybe they will tell you some stuff. They very selectly will leak out stuff and they think it will help them raise money usually. You'll read a story in Wired, one story in Wired that's like inside Kamala Harris' 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 in Palo Alto, that can convince a bunch of tech executives 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 give away anything to the competition.

**Shaan Puri** (3:19)
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Right.

**Sasha Issenberg** (3:52)
After election day, the campaign basically ceases to exist. So everybody is on to another job. A lot of them are looking for work or return to their consulting firms or starting new firms, develop some trick or tool during the campaign.

**Shaan Puri** (4:09)
Isn't there like some conference where they all go to, like some beach resort area where they go and they all get drunk and start talking?

**Sasha Issenberg** (4:16)
Yeah, I mean, so there's like a post-election sort of conference circuit where Democrats or Republicans come together to kind of trade notes, but they need to launch a business. I mean, it's basically like every two years, there's like a new sort of window for startups, and especially every four years. And so there's a window where they go from being afraid that they will get fired if they talk to a reporter, because if you are caught leaking even the most minor thing inside a campaign that is immediately fireable offense, because they don't want anybody but the spokesman or the candidate talking to them. And then two days later, they are trying to figure out what they're going to do with the rest of everybody in the campaign is, and so they're starting to take credit for everything they did. So I remember in 2012, you had this, the Obama Analytics Department, which is really pioneering out that they had like 52, 54 people in this analytics department, which at the time was huge. They called it the cave. And these guys, you know, I was reporting throughout the year for Slate at that point, and was able to eke out bits of news over the course of the campaign through really judicious reporting. And I would hear stories about the campaign manager summoning people on the analytics department into his office to say, did you talk to Sasha because, you know, there was some inquest to find that like, it was pretty sad. And then the day after, you know, a whole bunch of them basically were getting Eric Schmidt to launch a firm for them, and were out giving interviews to everybody who wanted and taking credit for a whole bunch of things that probably were not theirs alone to take credit for.