There has been a considerable amount of chatter over the past
three months about the GOP’s challenges and travails. Much of that
has focused on the perceived deficiency in the party’s technical
capability; some written by people with very little technology
experience at all outside of booting their computer.
So let me preface this by telling you three things about me.
First, I have been building and repairing PCs for almost thirty
years. I got my start in technology by jamming RAM chips into
motherboards as a teen and built every computer I owned from
scratch for almost twenty years. I have been doing tech since long
before tech was cool.
Second, I started in politics working for the New Mexico GOP. I
cut my teeth in political campaigns at all levels by volunteering
to do grunt work and climbed the ladder.
Finally, I was the eCampaign Director for George W. Bush’s
re-election and subsequently the RNC’s first eCampaign Director
under Chairman Ken Mehlman — the last Chairman to fully appreciate
the need to invest heavily in tech.
I have read the near-daily diatribes decrying our lack of
technologists and hand wringing over our inability to recruit
Silicon Valley talent to our team.
As a digital strategist and party activist, as someone who has
been involved in the field of digital politics since before people
even knew that was a thing, I have no concerns about our ability to
catch up on tech, on data, or on talented programmers. I do,
however, have a fear about the GOP that leaves me gravely
concerned.
For the last ten years, and even in the wake of Obama’s
election, I have heard countless members of the establishment
consultant class say, “but nobody has won because of the
Internet.”
In the case of Obama, that’s certainly true. Obama did not win
on Internet technology. Obama won on something much larger, much
more sophisticated, and much more frightening.
Some will tell you that Obama won on data. This, they claim, is
the insurmountable lead the left has. I heard the same thing about
data between 1994 and 2000 when the RNC invested heavily in a
nationwide voter file with deep profiles of every registered
American voter. The Democrats, we were told, could never catch up
to the RNC data operation.
Data, and the ability to catch up on data, is not at issue.
Significant investment in database technology, consumer data, and
polling can reverse that trend. Paying top dollar for people is how
you recruit the best talent. More than a few companies have found
they could take talent from their competitors by offering a sweeter
pie.
When the party makes data and technology a priority, and spends
appropriately, it can and will catch up. That needs to happen
sooner than later, to be sure. But tech, data, and developers are
not an insurmountable advantage, nor are they the sole purview of
either party. They are a prioritization problem.
That said, when tech becomes a priority, and the GOP spends big
to catch up, the infrastructure we build must allow every state
party, every campaign, and every cause to access and share that
data. An open platform will be critical to the party’s success.
That presents challenge number one.
The GOP needs fewer proprietary solutions and more sharing. The
party must break the habit of rewarding sole-source contracts for
privately owned technology platforms and adopt an open-source
approach.
Todd Herman (one of my successor’s at the RNC) was headed in
this direction — providing open APIs to RNC data and the ability
to develop applications for the RNC platform. That project was shut
down. It was a tragic miscalculation, but can be corrected.
More important than the open platform, however, is the second,
and the much more daunting challenge the GOP faces.
The GOP did extensive research in the last decade to identify
characteristics across voting blocs that would indicate a
propensity to vote Republican. The practice, popularly known as
microtargeting, assumes that people with similar patterns of
consumer behavior or attitudes will vote in similar ways.
In other words, if people who drive Nissans, people who drink
Evian, and people who watch Real Housewives of
Wherever-they-are-this-week all tend to vote heavily for Democrats,
then a voter whose profile indicates they do all of those is most
likely a safe vote for the left.
The Republicans did groundbreaking work in this area and the
Democrats invested heavily to catch up.
Now, much has been written about Obama’s data nerds, and I
suspect that comes from the nerds themselves tooting their own
horn. It’s a common problem with people involved in successful
campaigns. It’s also why I tend to look for the casual mentions of
things that don’t get wide coverage to identify where the real win
happened.
In the case of Obama, the frightening advantage the left has is
in a less touted entity known as
the Analyst Institute (AI) and a consortium of behavioral
scientists or
COBS. The combination should be truly terrifying for anyone on
the right.
To sum it up briefly, the AI and COBS combine to create an
academic approach to data that the right truly doesn’t have and may
well have difficulty matching. The AI works with many left-leaning
groups on an institutional level to test messaging components to
see what moves people. In many ways it is a matter of simple
multivariate testing to identify messages that move people —
present a number of different versions to subsets of your list and
see which performs best. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Where the AI becomes terrifying is when you mix it with COBS.
COBS, for its part, is a collective of behavioral scientists from
across academia who specialize in a much more advanced form of
microtargeting. These are people concerned not only with your
characteristics and voting behavior, but how they can manipulate
that behavior. They’ve united to form a behavioral brain trust for
the left.
It’s one thing to know that someone is a likely voter and test
messages to see what moves them. That would represent the
intersection of the AI and traditional microtargeting. You’re just
trying to trigger the characteristic that would cause them to act
on a latent behavior to which they are already inclined.
When behavioral psychologists, behavioral economists, and
behavioral political theorists unite to identify ways of shaping
behavior, you start to see possibilities the best propaganda
machines in history could not have imagined.
During World War I and World War II nations were experimenting
with art, songs, movies, books, and messages that could elicit a
patriotic response. They were so effective that this country
effectively prohibited the government from investing in the
practice.
Now consider the possibility of doing the same level of
experimentation with triggered emotional response but you have data
telling you what music the audience consumes, the movies they
watch, the TV shows they sit still for, and even the food and
drinks they buy.
For the academics part, it’s the perfect situation. The Stanford
Prisoner Experiment requires disclosure of testing parameters to
subjects of experimentation. Political communication has no such
restriction. If you want to get field knowledge of how to bend,
fold, and twist voter behavior — without having to tell voters
they’re being manipulated — who wouldn’t sign up?
That simple, frightening fact is why I, a dedicated
technologist, have no fear about the GOP’s deficiency in
technology, but instead stay awake at night terrified by our lack
of access to the academics studying these fields.
Our challenge is not in data or technologists. Our challenge is
competing in the realm of academic investigation and the brainpower
represented by professors with tenure who do nothing but come up
with ideas to explore. Now they have access to a free, unrestricted
laboratory to test their theories, and a party willing to foot the
bill. It is a perfect storm from which the GOP may truly be unable
to escape.
