The Victory Lab (38 page)

For Texas Tech’s daily student newspaper, the
Daily Toreador
, the news the next morning was not about anything specific Perry said but that he had chosen Lubbock as the first stop on his “I’m proud of Texas” tour. “
I think people are finally starting to see what’s great about Lubbock,” the county’s newly appointed district attorney, Matt Powell, told the paper. “It speaks volumes that he chose Lubbock to come and kick off his campaign.” Congressman Randy Neugebauer noted that “the governor has been a fiscal conservative, and he chose a city that’s fiscally conservative to launch in.”

None of those factors, however, explains the decision to hold the inaugural stop of Perry’s reelection campaign in Lubbock. In fact, it wasn’t really a decision at all: the selection had been made by randomization software on Daron Shaw’s office computer at Texas Tech’s rival, the University of
Texas. The computer had also decided to send Perry by plane from Lubbock to Addison, outside Dallas—where he visited a Texas Instruments plant under construction—and then later in the day to Tyler and Beaumont. It could have just as easily dispatched him to make his debut in deep-blue McAllen or famously liberal Austin.

Carney had given Shaw the authority to control Perry’s travel for a three-day campaign swing, his first of the election cycle and scheduled to begin just as Perry’s “Proud” ads were completing their first week in rotation. The candidate would do four events a day, each in a different media market, and Shaw would randomly assign them. Campaign staff would do the rest, choosing where in each market Perry should appear and what type of event—a speech? a factory tour? a town-hall meeting?—it would be.

Carney had his own hunch that the candidate’s presence mattered, a lesson he learned the hard way. In 1992, when he had served as George H. W. Bush’s political director, campaign strategists had responded to Bush’s poor performance in a town-hall debate in Richmond, Virginia—he was seen checking his watch midway through a voter’s question—by having the candidate hunker down in the White House to prepare for the final debate four days later. “
It wasn’t until that moment that we were able to actually show that in those four days there was a tremendous difference, when every day Bill Clinton was doing something, even if it was only jogging. When we didn’t campaign, we were off television, off the screen,” Carney said immediately after the election. “It was the fatal flaw: we should have been doing something to get back in the mix.”

But a decade later, Carney still had no idea how those dynamics really worked. He agreed to give Shaw the nightly polling data from Butzke’s calls, along with the campaign’s information on its fund-raising intake and volunteer sign-up. Shaw would be able to segregate it all by day and location. If going to Lubbock actually made people there more likely to vote for Perry, volunteer for his campaign, or give money, Shaw would be able to tell.

When Shaw reviewed the local media, he saw that Perry’s physical presence had a remarkable ability to drive coverage. In the twelve media
markets Perry visited, he earned a report on the evening TV news in nine of them and a story in the next morning’s newspaper in all twelve. And unlike the stories produced by the Austin bureaus of the big Texas papers, which Perry’s aides often felt were unfair to their boss, the local coverage of his trips was almost exclusively positive. When Shaw coded the stories in all twelve markets on a five-point scale of how good they made Perry look, they found that the campaign stop warmed the tone of the coverage in all but one. In the eight control markets that Perry didn’t visit, the governor was barely covered in the media during the same period.

Shaw could tell that Perry was boosted by the warm reception he got on the road. Contributions went up in the cities that he visited, along with the number of new volunteers. Across the twelve markets, Perry’s approval rating went up from 41 to 46 percent, with his unfavorable number dropping slightly. While Perry gained four points in the four-way horse race, his lead over Chris Bell, the likely Democratic nominee, remained steady, though, each of them appearing to benefit from voters abandoning the two independent candidates. Shaw assumed, sensibly, that this meant that Perry’s presence energized not only Republicans but Democrats, too. When Shaw went back the following week, however, Perry’s lead hadn’t evaporated the way his TV-aided boost had. He held on to four points he had gained.

This was a valuable insight for Carney, who seemed comfortable, even satisfied, when he learned that something that had been a staple of traditional campaign practice wasn’t as valuable as everyone had assumed. “You always think technology can make the difference. In a state as big as Texas, if you can sit in a studio and do twelve interviews on the nightly news in six markets in the time it takes you to go out to Lubbock,” Carney reflected after the tests, “the actual visits make a bigger, more lasting impact than just being on the news. It makes you realize it’s a better use of your time.”

Among the eggheads, however, the findings reinvigorated the unsettled debate over campaign effects. They knew that mail and canvassing could have limited incremental effects on voting behavior, enough to influence a race at its margins but not to dramatically alter its structure. Now
they had revealed that the dominant political medium was lousy at delivering permanent shifts in public opinion. Campaigns, it seemed, were always going to raise as much money as they could, but political science was running out of useful recommendations on where to spend it. Was there any place a campaign could direct its money in the service of dramatically changing its fortunes? “It says: all these things we’ve been working on so hard are a waste of time and we probably need to be doing something else,” says Gimpel. “Sometimes, the answer to that question—what is the alternative activity?—isn’t that clear. Well, what else
should
we be doing?”

MODELS AND THE MATRIX

I
n September 2007, Dan Wagner left the office of his Chicago economic consulting firm for the final time and walked up Michigan Avenue to join a presidential campaign. The twenty-four-year-old had been a consultant for two years. A self-described motorhead who had grown up in the Detroit area fixing cars with his father, Wagner had exulted when he learned one of his clients would be Harley-Davidson, only to later despair when the assignment left him isolated for a year crunching numbers in a small room in the bike maker’s Milwaukee headquarters. He thought back to something he once heard from Steven Levitt, who taught in the University of Chicago’s economics department while Wagner was studying there as an undergraduate major. Levitt told his students they would be smart to live below their means, so they could always have the flexibility to afford taking a different job if it was lower-paying. Wagner had never worked on a campaign, but like many of his generation who yearned for greater meaning from public life, he was enthralled by his state’s junior senator.
When Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president in February 2007, Wagner looked at the eight thousand dollars he had saved from his consulting paychecks and decided he was ready to deplete it in the service of heeding Levitt’s advice. Obama’s campaign didn’t care that Wagner’s résumé was devoid of political accomplishments; in fact, it was the experience Wagner described making economic-forecasting models that would help Obama get elected president.

Wagner was dispatched to Des Moines to serve as deputy manager of Obama’s Iowa voter file, at a salary of $2,500 per month. He did not know quite what to expect, and some of his first tasks demanded frustratingly little of his expertise. Because the campaign’s state office did not yet have any tech staff, responsibility for fixing colleagues’ sputtering Outlook software fell to the closest thing there was to a computer guy, which was Wagner. One day, Mitch Stewart, Obama’s Iowa caucus director, walked over to his desk and threw a stack of handwritten cards upon it. “Enter these into the VAN!” Stewart said.

Supporter cards, signed pledges to caucus for Obama the following January, were a long-standing feature of political life in Iowa. Perhaps because they would end up literally standing with their preferred candidate at their precinct caucus, Iowans had little expectation of privacy and were generally happy to commit their support in writing. Much of a campaign’s canvassing operation would be devoted to collecting the cards and using them to perform triage on the electorate: putting pledged supporters aside as eventual turnout targets (or cultivating them as volunteers) and identifying the undecided as persuasion targets, all while trying to discern which voters were committed to an opponent, so those could be cut out of future efforts. Every day for a month, Wagner would decipher the name and contact details scribbled on the cards, transcribe them into a computer, and try to match it to a record in the Iowa voter file, which contained richer information on the signer’s party affiliation and vote history.

The VAN made this easy. The Voter Activation Network was the Web interface that field organizers used to interact with the huge voter databases
maintained by the campaign. The software was developed for Iowa Democrats in 2001, shortly before the federal Help America Vote Act had been enacted to reconcile the patchwork of inconsistent local election laws that came to be viewed by many, especially on the left, as a national outrage. The law encouraged states to centralize their electoral data and organize their voter files in standard formats that for the first time made it easy to manipulate records across state lines. By the 2006 elections, Democrats had access to two competing national databases, one controlled by the national party and the other by Catalist, and the VAN emerged from a pack of state-specific interfaces to become the national standard for voter contact across the left.

By the time Wagner familiarized himself with its features, the VAN was nearly a full-fledged digital substitute for the clipboarded voter lists and large wall maps that were the familiar trappings of campaign fieldwork. The software assigned every individual a unique, seven-digit VAN identification code that was supposed to serve in essence as the political equivalent of a Social Security number—a durable marker that would stick with a voter throughout his or her lifetime. In a mobile country, voters would no longer be traceable only as a name at a fixed address but could be followed when they relocated, even across county or state lines, and their political behavior collected throughout. That individual record could be synced instantly across platforms, so that once Wagner entered a supporter’s name and address off a card into the VAN, any canvasser who called up the individual’s name on a Palm Pilot application would see that they had been marked, for instance, as a GOTV target with no need for further persuasion.

What Wagner didn’t know is that those supporter cards were also helping to make similar determinations about voters who had not pledged themselves to Obama and might never communicate with the campaign at all. The data Wagner entered—along with all the records of door knocks and phone calls made by Obama’s growing army of staff and volunteers across Iowa—was being fed into a database that linked up nightly with racks of computers that filled a small room in a converted Capitol Hill
apartment building just blocks from the United States Senate. Most days, the only noise that competed with the whirring of the fans tempering those computers’ processors was the sound of Obama himself asking for money, audible through a thin wall from the political office that the freshman senator used to make his fund-raising phone calls. Both would prove to be essential engines of his rise.

Sandwiched between the heroic presidential candidate who positioned himself as uniquely able to loosen a nation’s intellectually sclerotic politics, and the unrivaled hordes of volunteer activists and supporters who believed in him, sat one of the vastest data mining and processing operations that had ever been built in the United States for any purpose. Obama’s computers were collecting a staggering volume of information on 100 million Americans and sifting through it to discern patterns and relationships. Along the way, staffers stumbled onto insights about not only political methods but also marketing and race relations, scrubbing clean a landscape that had been defined by nineteenth-century political borders and twentieth-century media institutions and redrawing it according to twenty-first-century analytics that treated every individual voter as a distinct, and meaningful, unit. “It wasn’t something they were doing off on the side anymore; it was integral to how they did everything,” says Jeff Link, who oversaw Obama’s paid-media spending in southern and western battleground states. “That was the first campaign where you had that level of integration.”

The 2008 Obama campaign would become, in a sense, the perfect political corporation: a well-funded, data-driven, empirically rigorous institution that drew in unconventional talent ready to question some of the political industry’s standard assumptions and practices and emboldened with new tools to challenge them. “It was like the old Bell Labs,” Larry Grisolano, a senior Obama strategist, says of the analytics teams assembled at Chicago headquarters. “They had a lot of ability to create and innovate without being concerned what the outcome was. There was
a laboratory attitude with those guys. It was the overwhelming culture of the campaign.”