The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

by Sasha Issenberg

The book Politico calls “ Moneyball for politics” shows how cutting-edge social science and analytics are reshaping the modern political campaign.

Renegade thinkers are crashing the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. We’ve seen it in sports, and now in The Victory Lab , journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the hidden story of the analytical revolution upending the way political campaigns are run in the 21st century.
     The Victory Lab follows the academics and maverick operatives rocking the war room and re-engineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions. Armed with research from behavioural psychology and randomized experiments that treat voters as unwitting guinea pigs, the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do.  Issenberg tracks these fascinating techniques—which include cutting edge persuasion experiments, innovative ways to mobilize voters, heavily researched electioneering methods—and shows how our most important figures, such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, are putting them to use with surprising skill and alacrity.
     Provocative, clear-eyed and energetically reported, The Victory Lab offers iconoclastic insights into political marketing, human decision-making, and the increasing power of analytics. 

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Political Science, History, Science, Technology, Business

321 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Sasha Issenberg is the author of three previous books, on topics ranging from the global sushi business to medical tourism and the science of political campaigns. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, the 2012 election for Slate, the 2016 election for Bloomberg Politics and Businessweek, and 2020 for The Recount. He is the Washington correspondent for Monocle, and has also written for New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. He teaches in the political science department at UCLA.

Reviews

[Carl · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book as part of a book discussion group with political activists and the book was unpopular for a number of reasons.

1. It doesn't have much of anything that's useful if you're in politics at the local level.

2. There are way too many "characters". People are introduced in every chapter and it's just too many to keep track of.

3. The author has an annoying way of describing people and places when there's no need to describe them. It's a stylistic thing that draws attention to itself.

4. There's an asymmetry in the information. Democrats provide information that is often objectively verifiable. Republican sources are taken at their word, even though Issenberg quotes one of his GOP sources as admitting he lied to media outlets about what the Republicans were really doing.

5. Issenberg slips into repeating conventional wisdom, like the sneering attitude he has toward Howard Dean, and doesn't seem all that interested in the nuts and bolts details as he is in telling a story.

The book reads like Issenberg is trying to position himself as a guest on media outlets when they do stories on the mechanics of campaigning. He's doing more to show he's friends with the right people than he's explaining what's really going on.

[Sébastien Belliveau · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting read. Even more so for people who have worked or are involved in politics, as it will certainly have them look back on their past work with a completely different point of view.

The basic premise of The Victory Lab rests on the calculation made to differentiate successful election practices from unsuccessful ones. Basically, the way many people currently make their evaluations is as such: did your candidate win? If so, whatever you did worked and should be repeated. Did your candidate lose? If so, whatever you did failed and should not be repeated.

Obviously, there is a severe flaw in this calculation. So if we can't judge how succesful a method ends up being by the overall success of a campaign, how can we?

Working in Canadian politics myself, this book has made me realize a few things which I want to apply in my own work and that I found extremely interesting:

1. Promoting the use of personalized data. I was already a proponent of collecting and using data to help identify voters and link them with the issues which interest them. The use of data Issenberg describes, however, makes an even bigger leap. Political Parties and groups in the USA make use of the data, combined with algorithms, to help predict not only how or if an individual is likely to vote, but how or if a person will be impacted by a certain type of messaging, policy decisions, etc. I know there are more books on this type of subject and I will undoubtedly look for them.

2. Empirical analysis and using these to have the best "bang for your buck" effect. Often, you hear political advisors state that a certain thing must be done, or that a certain event needs to be held, with anecdotal reasons as to why they work. However, we operate in a world of exhaustible resources, both in money and manpower. This is even more of a reality in Canada than in the United States. Every action needs to have a goal and you need to be able to evaluate if that goal has been accomplished or not. However, this opens up a pandora's box in terms of having to tell people who have taken decisions for years that their "methods" don't actually work or that we need to find a more efficient way to achieve similar goals.

3. Experiencing with different material. Sending different formats of mailouts and comparing which has a better effect. Sending different wording on an identical subject and determining which had a better success rate. We are all filled with our biases and pre-determined opinions, which are often based on faulty assumptions. This book has definitely shown me a few things which work, but which also seemed to me to be completely counter-intuitive.

4. How to encourage people to go out to vote. If there is one thing this book has taught me, is that most people know they should go vote during elections, even if they don't necessarily do so. So how do get the people to make that extra leap? There is one method explained early in the book which talks of using public voting records to encourage (or shame) people into voting which increases the turnout by as much as 20%! How can political parties harness this potential? How can society itself better encourage voter turnout with this information? Consider my interest extremely piqued.

Many people call this book a "must read" for politicos. I don't know if I would go that far. However, there are many people operating in politics who I know need to read something like this, if only to come to the realization that their opinions are extremely flawed and cannot be backed up by any kind of empirical data. We need to exit this logic that unsuccessful election bids mean unsuccesful methods were used and vice-versa.

To everyone interested in "renewal" and a "new approach" in politics and all that jazz, this book is for you.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't care for this book at all. Was frequently impatient with the writing style. Felt his propensity for describing his character's hair style in the first 2/3s of the book to be a little off-putting; after he got past the two women operatives he talked about (one Dem, one Rep) he stopped the practice. Uh-Huh. Also some detailed descriptions of campuses I could have lived without. And a random description of a bus route in Akron Ohio that was meant to be emblematic but was ... dull. Perhaps because I take city buses occasionally myself and don't need the full description of what it's like to sit on a bus ...

Very general history of early political science, and some discussion of modern large-scale political campaigns ... with some heavy questions on the reliability of the sources. I felt like the Dem campaigns/campaign operatives were much more transparent, whereas the Rep campaigns were much more opaque in their results. Did the techniques described in the book really work? well, no idea: on the Rep side, he mostly talked about the experiments and not the results -- so who knows? And who knows if what worked for the Reps was really the methods described in the book, or if it was some combination of those turn-out methods AND voter suppression/chaos generation ... which seem to be their main tactics these days.

So, a somewhat interesting read, if read with a touch of skepticism, and a dollop of patience. Could have used a more critical editor to cut it down a bit, as it felt long and a bit jumpy. He'd talk about someone he was clearly intending to focus on, and suddenly the next chapter would be somewhere/someone else ... and it would ended up tying back, but in fairly convoluted ways.

As for reading it to gain useful knowledge: well, not so much. Did reinforce my belief that the Obama campaigns were pretty amazing and well-managed: but for campaigns not quite on that scale, the useful information was pretty sparse.

[Mickey Hoffman · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book turned out to be as much a collection of biographies as an explanation of research and practices that lead to winning campaigns. And I'm not that interested in the lives of the various political scientists and politicians.

[Sheris225 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book. It is filled with amazing insider details about every big campaign in the last forty years. It will have you grinning and shaking your head at some of the strategy that various campaign analysts came up with.The author has obtained amazing access. This history familiarizes the reader with the thought process behind the decisions that campaigns make to identify & motivate likely voters.
The second half of the book lays out in detail the sophisticatted data analysis employed to great success in 2008 & 2012. It is not just a book about numbers. It is a book about social history, changing demograpgics and the choices made by human beings hoping to influnce other human beings. I am a campaign veteran and learned much. Fun absorbing read.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This blows my mind.

When an election is close, the race has very little to do with issues. You win with two strategies: convert swing voters to your side, and get your likely voters to the polls. But those two simple strategies lead to some fascinating conclusions.

One, is that there is no such thing as privacy, and the campaigns know everything about you already. They probably can tell who you're going to vote for before you've even decided. Scared yet?

I live in the reddest of red states, so the campaigns don't pay attention to me. But if Texas ever turns purple, then I've got facebook, google pages, and book reviews that the campaigns will use to determine if I should receive negative ad campaigns or Get Out The Vote literature. And that's unsettling.

Essentially, this is the story of how campaigns figured out how to target each individual voter, instead of relying solely on mass market advertising. If you have paid attention to elections in the past, get ready to unlearn everything you thought you knew. Was George W. Bush's reelection successful only because he mobilized his base? That's what the pundits said. Turns out, that's just not true.

This is not a partisan book at all. It doesn't talk about which side is better than the other. It simply documents the battles in the war. There were two sides, each learning how to use new technology. The two sides were not equal in their knowledge, but developed their tactics differently based on their own unique strengths and needs. The book gives the inside story of both sides.

This was a very thought-provoking read.

[Rob Kitchin · Rating 4 out of 5]

In The Victory Lab, Issenberg charts the use of scientific methods in the practice of electioneering in US politics. What’s fascinating about his account is that up until very recently there was very little science behind how elections were conducted, and there’s been a noticeable disconnect between political science and the electioneers. The strategy was simply one of blanket advertising across different media, mail shots, debates, mudslinging and rallies. There was little attempt to scientifically measure and evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches, or to segment and target populations. Drawing on his own experience of a journalist covering elections and interviews with a number of key players, Issenberg provides an account of the rise of data and statistically-driven campaigning in the US, culminating in Obama’s election in 2008. Because the chapters are arranged by chronology and by particular groups/campaigns, the structure tends to move to-and-fro a little. That said, the narrative it easy enough to follow, and the text is lively, engaging and informative. Somewhat oddly, there seems to have been no attempt to learn anything from elections outside of the US, and Issenberg’s narrative barely strays beyond US shores. Overall, what the book demonstrates is the US elections are now being run like lab-experiments, underpinned by big data and statistical algorithms, and they’re set to follow this approach for the foreseeable future.

[Kate McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than a campaign handbook that tells you the best practices for campaigning, the Victory Lab takes you on a narrative journey of market testing and behavioral studies to inform campaign strategy, ultimately multi-channel micro-targeting.

I love learning the narrative of how and why different campaign strategies emerged, and the stories of the wins and losses. While the level of detail is rich and interesting, I was still taken aback in Chapter 3 when we started our third new course of history being told--this time on the scientific method-- in as many chapters.

And there are great morsels for the campaign/nonprofit marketer to grab immediately for their personal toolkit, from efficacy of various marketing channels to using data to inspire volunteers.

It was inspiring, too--about data, the value of micro-targeting our marketing messages, how what we know about human behavior can incite action, and that the good old grassroots strategies of yesteryear still matter.

I highly recommend The Victory Lab to those working in political science and nonprofit marketing.

[Josh Lindner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading for anyone who works in politics.

[Griff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Victory Lab could have been a successful book and more enjoyable read if it had only tweaked its subtitle and branding. This book could be much better described as an anthology of political science biographies or case studies, not as a guide to winning campaigns, or even a complete narrative of how campaigning tactics have evolved in the modern era.

I have not read much on the history of political science, so Victory Lab became my unsuspecting intro to this topic. The scope and focus of this book was a little confounding throughout; the author dispassionately (and sometimes, poetically) describes the efforts of liberal professors and hardcore right wing consultants alike, and zeroes in on specific efforts and experiments conducted on both sides of the aisle across campaigns spanning back decades. The irony is that just as Issenberg convinces the reader of the difficulty early political scientists faced ascribing outcomes or impacts to individual tactics, he does just that with the latter half of the book, eschewing any sensible disclaimers that at the scale of national presidential politics, there are literally thousands of competing and contributing factors for any shift in performance.

There are literally dozens of named characters who make up the core narrative of Victory Lab, and the kaleidoscopic view of experiments on campaigns loses its allure with story after story through the years and through the pages never really coalescing on specific trend lines or takeaways that were most pertinent to a given era of campaigning. The timing of the publishing is also a shame - in the postscript, the world of the book leaves us with Republicans wondering how they could possibly replicate Obama's 'microtargeting' supercomputing apparatus, and even suggesting that reverse-engineering the algorithms for their team's benefit would be an unworthy endeavor. Flash forward to 2021, where we know now that Trump's use of consumer data and microtargeting at scale in 2016 dwarfed any previous implementation, and we saw Biden defeat Trump in 2020 with a ‘style’ of campaigning that runs counter to conventional logic (in myriad ways that I will decline to comment on here).

tl;dr - If you are looking for a slow rolling pop non-fiction look at how creative ideas in political campaigning have evolved over the years without a particular lens for party or ideology, I think this is the book for you. As a progressive campaign practitioner, I would point readers like me to books referenced in this title: Robert Cialdini's Influence, Green and Gerber's Get Out the Vote!, or a much more comprehensive look at actionable ways to actually run and *win* a campaign of your own, Jeff Blodgett's Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way.

[Andrew Breza · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pop overview of data-driven political campaigning. The central argument is that campaigns should use individual-level data and A/B tests to drive strategy. That argument is undoubtedly powerful. I only give The Victory Lab three stars because it focuses more on personalities rather than specific models that have worked (or failed). There's a lot of hand waving and anecdote when it comes to the nuts and bolts of model building. If you want to understand the modeling process in a book that is still fun to read, I recommend Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't.

[Alex Gruenenfelder · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dense book, filled with data and political science studies. (It took me a bit to get through it, and this was with the assistance of the audiobook.) It goes in circles a lot, around the central question of why people vote. Is it a social decision, or a self-serving one, or a philanthropic one? It's a book that I recommend for campaign operatives, certainly, but it's a bit dry and cyclical for the general reader. If you want to get inside campaign strategy though, definitely consider it.

[AndrewMillerTheSecond · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stuck between 3 and 4 stars with this one. This is a great idea for a book and we need more like it, but the execution is left wanting.

If you made a "moneyball" for politics, turnout is pitching and persuasion is hitting--or vice versa. In any case, you evidently have to talk about both, yet Issenberg devotes much more ink to turnout studies. There's a mostly unspoken assumption here that in the era of polarized campaigns and less persuadable voters, turnout is more useful for campaigns. My response to that is the same response that any good statistician would have: how do we know that? That's never explained. It does get a bit tiring as well to hear small variations on the same method.

I found the most interesting part to be the inside look into the Obama campaign's advanced GOTV techniques, and that alone makes it worth the read (even if it's in the second half). Light on the polling side of things, yes, but the depths the campaign would go to find new voters--and not waste their time on the unpersuadable voters--is fascinating. The "would your neighbors vote for a black president?" question was genius, for one. Also very funny that the postscript expresses confidence that the 2016 Republican nominee will run plenty of RCTs and run a campaign with plenty of room for scientific experiment. Not the author's fault that it didn't happen...

This book is good. It could be better, and SORELY needs an update after the 3 Trump elections.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a research nerd like me this was a riveting read even though it did get bogged down a bit in the huge cast of characters and the minutia of nudges.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

While volunteering for the Obama campaign in 2008, I wondered where that seemingly endless stream of names and phone numbers of potential supporters was coming from. Issenberg's book partially answers my question, although the data-driven Obama campaign--quite obviously the culmination of the story--doesn't come up until nearly 250 pages into the work. My biggest complaint about the book is that its main characters--all of the behind-the-scenes political scientists and data people who have developed ways to microtarget voters--remain fairly faceless; there are lots of them, from both ends of the political spectrum, and it's very difficult to keep them straight, at least outside of the chapters where they are primarily discussed. There's also a bit of a chronology problem, as many of the developments seem to cluster around the 2000 and 2004 election seasons, but the author moves backward and forward in time while focusing on the stories of specific characters. If you can look past these narrative challenges, however, it's interesting to learn how little political campaigns knew about the effectiveness of specific outreach techniques until fairly recently. And it's fascinating to watch in the midst of another election cycle how the campaigns seem to be responding to what has been learned.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to admit that I do not follow the elections that closely. However, I do try to educate myself on the primary candidates and what they stand for, so that I can make my vote really count. This is what intrigued me about this book. I know that all of the candidates use some sort of tactic to win over the voters but I don’t really pay attention to what type.

Mr. Issenberg really takes the time to break down all the different ways that the candidates and not just the current ones but all the past ones as well have used different tactics to win over the voters. Either by social media or by phone calls, door to door soliciting or television. In this book, Mr. Issenberg dissects politics through out the course of history. You will learn way more then you ever wanted to from this book. I admit that this book was so detailed that after a while, I found myself kind of skimming over the last half of the book. After reading this book, I will take away a better understanding of the game of politics. As you are pondering over with candidate to cast your vote for this election, there is one choice you don’t have to think too hard about and that is picking up a copy of The Victory Lab to read.

[Ralphie Nader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this was a great and important subject to cover, but I left the book confused about how "the science" of winning of campaigns works today. Maybe this is just the reality of the subject, but I felt that while the author did a good job at covering individuals and their individual studies/tests, he didn't provide the reader with the broader trends and current best practices of today's cutting edge campaigns.

I would have liked to see a more general look on how science and data are used by the major parties, the future of this type of study, and what practices would smart candidates be sure to use. I felt like the reader was thrown a lot of numbers from anecdotes and narrow studies, and left to sort out their own conclusions.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once it gets past some overly long history of the political science in the field dating back to the early parts of the last century, it gets pretty interesting. The discussion of the randomized experiments does a nice job conveying goals and ideas in layman's terms. What's interesting though is so much of the book focuses on tricks used to get people to vote, almost none of which involve a specific candidate. That raises the question of how much does the candidate even matter? Or put another way, how much of a worse candidate does one need to be compared to another to have the turnout things not make a difference in making them competitive? Or is it just that those tricks help bolster already well regarded candidates?

[Julian Haigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very personal for me. I created a business focused on volunteer mobilization after reading Green and Gerber's "Get out the Vote!" (an absolute must if you're a campaigner) and have briefly connected with Hal Malchow. It's a frustrating industry, and to hear these brave souls fighting the good fight for more effective campaigns that reach out an connect with people... argghhh... why is it such a difficult message to get across?

Written by a journalist, it's a nice narrative account and introduction to the industry and trends but doesn't get into details for the more academic.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whelp, Obama is going to win, sorry for calling the race, but even before that last bit about Romney falling in the polls, and the first debate it would seem that with the data mining techniques described herein the Dems will get a Daly-esque turnout percentage and even if the Repubs had all the same techniques their people are already voting.

If you don't love the idea of politics this is three stars, and "Moneyball for Politics" is way to much hype, but I was entertained.

[Brigitta Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably only going to be interesting to people in politics - and I truly mean politics not policy. Messaging, strategy, emerging micro trends and he means we use to convey those messages etc. that being said I really appreciated their explanation of he scholarly works behind the decisions (or lack there of). Really outlines how were still going on our gut because it's virtually impossible to do in theater experiments.

[Siddharth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating: 2/5

Issenberg's book is a confused rendering of American political science history mixed with general theories about voting. The focus is heavily on the former, with strange interruptions by personal history lessons about the people who developed some campaign practices. I don't recommend this book unless you plan to work in Washington DC and talk to other campaign operatives about the people mentioned in this book and make statements like "ABC came up with the technique of sending non-partisan letters to people to get them to vote in an election. I met ABC last night at a fundraiser. You don't know about ABC? You should definitely pick up Issenberg's book, it is very informative."

Strangely, I felt like I learned more about politics and how to campaign from the TV shows, Veep and West Wing. I don't have a book that I can recommend instead of this one, so I don't know what else to say at the top here. Reading some articles on FiveThirtyEight and Politico is the best I can come up with.

The book is light on general theories about voting. At a few points throughout, there is a bolt of lightning and an epiphany. But the author doesn't spend much time on it and just moves on to the next point (or more commonly, the next person that whose background he is going to elaborate upon.) In this sense, the book is deeply disappointing. I expected to learn something about political campaigns and what they can do to win.

I saw this book compared to the movie Moneyball in its blurb. I think the comparison is inaccurate because when I watched Moneyball, I knew absolutely nothing about baseball, how it is played, or why drafting the correct people is important. Despite that lack of knowledge, the movie was an interesting, understandable tale of the fight between metrics and gut feelings.

If you are looking for answers, look elsewhere. Some things the book does say:

TV advertisements are useful in increasing a candidate's popularity only if they are aired constantly. Once you start buying TV ad time, you must buy it right until election day. If you stop advertising, then the electorate will simply forget about you. On the other hand, a candidate's visit to the elector's hometown has longer-lasting impact. It is covered by several media channels and the candidate manages to stay in the electorate's mind

This is one of the few conclusive things that the book really delves into the research for
This might not be true anymore though.

There is a discussion of Obama's 2008 campaign, which was superficial, but useful. The campaign took in data about the electorate on all the possible channels, and developed "models" to calculate 2 scores: the likelihood of turning out to vote and the likelihood of voting for Obama. Based on these scores, and the clustering of these scores geographically, the campaign was able to better spend their resources (volunteer's time, money)
Political campaigns don't know what to spend their money on. Campaign managers don't want to rock the boat by doing something radical, because they could be blamed for the failure of the radical approach. If they do the same thing that everyone else is doing, then the failure can't be blamed on them
Randomized control trials are good, but convincing politicians to use them in elections where races are won and lost by a few hundred votes is impossible. Politicians don't have any incentive to learn more about "how people vote," because most of their careers will end if they don't win the next election anyway. And if their careers will not end despite the loss, they probably won't be that serious about the campaign
Voters can be clustered and divided into segments. This might be useful. The book goes back and forth on which one among microtargeting and clustering is effective. I am not sure there is any conclusive answer to this.

Sidenote: My understanding of FiveThirtyEight and other polling is that every voter is unique and often, polls tell us something that we need to come up with hypotheses to explain. Treating segments as a single voting bloc and taking their votes for granted is dangerous, as Democrats found out in the 2020 House elections

There are some strange contradictions which mirror the contradictions of human nature: Electors appreciate it when volunteers call them to pitch a candidate because it feels more genuine and less like the candidate simply bought the volunteer. But electors are more honest with a caller who is getting paid to make the call because they can't bring themselves to hurt the feelings of a
volunteer who is working for free. Yeah, right.

[Dylan Berget · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this book provides some really interesting insights into the evolution of campaigning. Data-driven campaigns are the way of the future. Cambridge Analytica isn't the only group using people's data in order to micro-target voters. Fascinating read. Definitely worth checking out.

[Rick Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look inside elections and the analytics they used up until 2012.

Book felt disjointed, like several discrete books that were bundled together.

[Bruin Mccon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found a recommendation for The Victory Lab randomly and I’m so glad I did.

This non-fiction book is about deeply nerdy communication strategy. It goes in depth on the Obama campaign’s use of data. This book is not for everyone but I am for sure in the target audience.

In one section of the book, a person discussing mailers to union members explained that union mailers should be sent to arrive on Fridays because that was when members were reading mail. After being asked about where that info was gleaned, it of course turned out it was the speaker’s time to check mail. Oh my goodness wtf. This kinda sh!t happens so frequently and is so frustrating. The message in the book is to test and to stop doing things as they’ve always been done.

The end of the book goes into incredible detail on the Obama team’s data operation and complete overhaul of how to campaign. There was a very specific story about the “survivor” call vendor summer where ten vendors competed against each other for the campaign’s business. I do not envy those firms; apparently some of the call centers had staff who would get through part of their script with a caller who would then hang up and so they’d fudge the data on the unanswered questions. The O Team knew enough to suspect that so they added a question at the very end for age. They then checked those responses with the ones they got from the firms and those with too many inaccuracies were canned. I have so been those callers, making dozens of calls on a campaign and getting chewed up and spit out. I may have been campaign staff rather than vendor staff but lord is that a thankless job.

My favorite part of this anecdote was when a member of the campaign staff, married to one of my GoodReads friends, was on the list under an assumed name and would get all these calls and rate the caller’s performance. I do feel bad for the actual people doing the calls but always great to hear a familiar name dropped unexpectedly as I’m listening while driving home from work (on audiobook).

And really loved the mobile ads destroying the media budget for turning out young voters. Media was always such a racket and while I’m sure there is a time and a place for TV ads, this was not it.

Supremely interesting book for political/advocacy data nerds.

[Judd Street · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating topic and alright execution, though unfortunately the Coles Notes likely suffices: political campaigns have gotten more and more data driven, moving from a mentality of mass media to micro targeting to moneyball-style predictions.

"The Victory Lab" by Sasha Issenberg takes us from the advent of political campaigning in the early 1900s to the Obama re-election campaign exploring the ways in which parties target their potential voters. The story is somewhat predictable, with increasingly fine-grained data analytics being used to try to hone in on how to win votes. In the modern era, this is led by the Republicans with a highly effective shift into microtargeting in the GW Bush era, and then is followed by Obama's campaign diving even more deeply into predictive analytics that lead to surprising, but effective, media targeting strategies.

In some ways, the book is really illustrative. As an outsider, I tend to see modern American politics through a lens of quite large + crass power struggles, such as redistricting battles or, in the Trump era, efforts to explicitly overturn election results. "The Victory Lab" is a nice reminder of some of the more nuanced, nerdy, mobilization-based approaches that are still in play to trying to win the electoral battle. These may or may not be terribly ethical (e.g., think Sunstein 'nudges' but ultimately veering away from persuasion and education towards encouraging those who like you to come out and those who don't to stay home), but they do feel closer to the 'normal' terrain of electoral politics than, say, attempting to not count votes for your opponent, I guess?

At the same time, the book did move a little slowly and suffered a bit from a lack of consistent narrative arc (because of the nature of the story, it bounces from data geek to data geek as they successively contribute to the new way of doing political ads). And, it does read very Obama era: before we really had a grasp on the magnitude of mis and disinformation in the ecosystem, and before these craven and anti-democratic strategies fully came into their own. Indeed, the Bush v Gore case doesn't figure at all in the story, nor its more modern instantiations.

Overall, though, still a good read, even if a little disjunct in the storytelling.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Issenberg provides a survey of political campaigns and the science, or for most of the history, lack of scientific thinking behind them. I enjoyed the history aspect, how random controlled studies were not consistently used to estimate the impact of spending until recent decades, with the exception of an early 20th century political scientist in Chicago. As someone who is a fan of behavioral economics, I found the application of those ideas to politics very interesting and wondered, why don't Democrats or aligned groups take the gloves off and use some of the more questionable manipulations now that we are in such a dire situation? I'm sure Indivisible or Swing Left could send postcards with voting histories without too much blowback to Dems, the party could scold them with a wink and a nod.

But the book introduces too many characters to keep straight and it is unclear if they are all necessary to tell the story. As someone who works in data, I sometimes found it hard to parse the actual methods he described, I would have prefered a better description of the techniques (if a practitioner wants to learn about campaign techniques, this isn't your book). But the most fatal and ironic flaw for a book about distangling cause and effect, is the author's confidence that campaigns have cracked the code and are driving meaningful changes in elections. He breathlessly recounts Obama's first campaign as a transformation of politics with data, technology, and ruthless reliance of empirical evidence. Yet, if you remember, voters were choosing between an incumbent party with an unpopular war hanging around its neck and an economy in a free fall - Lehman Brothers went belly up two months before the election and the stock market lost almost 40% that year! And how to explain Trump in 2016 and 2024? Surely Clinton, the ultimate technocrat, employed the same data-driven techniques. And I doubt Trump had similar machinery, especially in 2016 and likely not 2024 either. Early in the book, someone asks "Do campaigns matter?" I do not think this book answers that question conclusively. If you need to spend billions of dollars to move the result of an election a point, I'm not sure you can claim you have an effective means to change the outcome of an election.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

Politics

In this book, Issenberg delves into the world of political campaigning and the strategies and tactics used to motivate voters.

While the book may be a bit long and dry for some readers, it is nonetheless an important and timely read, particularly for those interested in the political process.

Issenberg's research is extensive, and readers will undoubtedly learn a great deal about the inner workings of political campaigns. However, it should be noted that the book is primarily focused on US politics, which may limit its relevance for readers outside of the United States.

One of the book's strengths is its in-depth look at the science of campaigning. Issenberg explores the use of data, behavioral psychology, and other techniques to craft messages that resonate with voters and persuade them to support a particular candidate or issue. The author also examines the role of technology in modern campaigns, from social media to data analytics.

While the book's focus on US politics may be a drawback for some readers (like me, Canadian, which is what I picked the book up for), it nonetheless offers valuable insights into the strategies and tactics used to win elections. Whether you're a political junkie or just curious about how campaigns work, this is a worthwhile read.

Overall, I would recommend this to anyone interested in the political process, particularly those looking to learn more about the science behind winning campaigns. While the book may be a bit dry at times, the insights it offers make it well worth the read.

3.7/5

[Rob Burgess · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Victory Lab" is a compelling and well-crafted exploration into the data-driven tactics that have reshaped modern political campaigning, with a particular focus on the innovative strategies employed by Democratic campaigns.

The book is rich in detail, weaving together engaging narratives and case studies that highlight the power of analytics, micro-targeting, and behavioral science in politics.

While the emphasis is predominantly on Democratic successes, it's important to recognize that similar methodologies are now widely adopted across the political spectrum, including by conservative campaigns, as they seek to harness the potential of data in electioneering.

For anyone involved in the political arena, "Victory Lab" is an essential read, offering invaluable insights into the mechanics of contemporary campaigns. Its relevance extends beyond a single election cycle, making it a book that political operatives should revisit regularly to stay abreast of the evolving landscape of political strategy and technology.

[Chris Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't recall how this book came on my radar, probably just by my scanning shelves at our local library and my adding it to my list of books to pick up sometime. And sometime finally came and I at last checked out a book I ought to have read when it was first published five years ago.

I knew it would catch my interest, when on an initial scan, fanning through the pages, I happened to stop on a page where I was mentioned. When does that ever happen??!! I wasn't mentioned by name, but the reference is clearly to me (see if you can find it on page 162 for the curious).

My expectation of the book was that it was going to me something of a 'How-to' guide for best campaign practices, but it's really a history about the innovators and evolution of advanced voter targeting, and how to use it to win elections.

A great read that was enhanced by my knowing some of the players mentioned, and learning about the many more that I do not.