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    The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
    Unavailable
    The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
    Unavailable
    The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
    Audiobook13 hours

    The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

    Written by Sasha Issenberg

    Narrated by Michael Goldstrom

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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rocking the war room and re-engineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions.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 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 11, 2012
    ISBN9780449807002
    Unavailable
    The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns
    Author

    Sasha Issenberg

    Sasha Issenberg is a journalist and the author of four previous books, including The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns and, most recently, The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage. He is a correspondent for Monocle, and has written for New York, the New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek and Politico Magazine. He teaches in the UCLA Department of Political Science.

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    Reviews for The Victory Lab

    4/5

    49 ratings14 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I received this book just ahead of the 2012 election, and I was disappointed that I had such a hard time getting into it. Once I got about a third of the way, things kind of clicked and I was able to finish it in a few hours.The book is thankfully non-partisan account on the history of our campaign culture and everything that goes into an election campaign today. This is one of the books that makes you smarter; a definite must-read for anyone who cares about behind-the-scenes election machinations.
    • 5/5
      Simply, "wow". In "The Victory Lab", Mr. Issenberg tells the history of how political campaigns have adopted metrics and scientific methodology as tools with which to refine their craft. Drawing from academia and commercial marketing, the emerging study of behavioral psychology in politics is a new ground, and this book provides an exciting collection of campaign stories that traditionally never reach the public. This is a must-read for those interested in elections and campaigning.
    • 5/5
      I just got to this book after knocking out some other books on my reading list, and I have to say that I am absolutely loving it so far (about a third of the way through). The author (Sasha Issenberg) created an engaging narrative, livening up what can be a dull topic. Additionally, he writes in a very nonpartisan way (though I add the disclaimer that I haven't read all of it yet), simply describing what different political consultants have discovered with their research and not painting it with moral approval or approbation. I highly recommend this book to anyone with even an inkling of interest in politics or public opinion.One small note: the book does have a number of small typos. I feel like I need to say this, but I have no doubt that the final product corrected these mistakes (the cover of my review copy clearly states that it is an uncorrected proof).
    • 5/5
      This is an interesting, well-written book for those who are interested in the mechanics of politics and how campaigns have incorporated sociology and statistics into their decision-making. It is not an entry-level book, however. And as the narrative extends closer to the practices used in 2008 and 2010, the story gets less and less specific--understandable given that politics is much more secretive than science, but it makes the story much less satisfying for the 2008 and 2010 election than for prior elections. Regardless, though, the book highlights an underutilized and misunderstood part of politics.
    • 3/5
      Former Boston Globe (and now Monacle) journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the meagre history of the 'science' part of Political Science (taken to mean the science of winning elections), concentrating on the period after the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, when things really got going. Acknowledging Bush's thin victory in that election, political operatives began to understand the importance of marginal voters and began to target smaller and smaller demographic groups with tailored messages, this 'microtargeting' replacing the precinct-focused campaigining once standard in the business. This change in tactics coincided with the decreasing costs of computation and the increasing mass of available voter data and improved data-mining methods that made targeting those small groups both possible and worthwhile. Issenberg's narrative includes the personalities who brought about this 'tactical revolution' as well as the science they invented while trying to get their guys elected -- an effort, Issenberg points out, that is a $6 billion/year industry in the U.S. -- and, using the characters to drive the story in textbook narrative-non-fiction style, is well-paced and easy to read.Easier to read than to understand, however. There are lots of names and they enter and exit the narrative a lot, making it difficult to follow the development of an idea ot technique. I found myself wishing for more exposition and less action. I'm still not clear what a "randomized-control experiment" is, though I am certain that it's proving very valuable in our currently-underway 2012 national election.Read the book, and hope for a follow-up.
    • 4/5
      If you've ever wondered about those super-personalized emails you get from political campaigns, or been intrigued about just how those pollsters know which demographics are "breaking" for one candidate or the other, you may want to pick up journalist Sasha Issenberg's new book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (Crown, 2012). By reading and exploring decades worth of research in political science, behavorial analysis, sociology and other fields, and by interviewing the men and women behind the experiments, Issenberg digs deep into the tactics now used to run political campaigns.For a political junkie, this makes for absolutely riveting reading. Those with a more casual interest in such things may easily get bogged down in numbers and minutiae, but I loved every page. Issenberg discusses the real-time experiments campaign consultants run to figure out exactly which mailers or emails or phone calls are working best, and the demographic slicing and dicing campaigns can now deploy in order to get the most bang for their buck. He even shares what studies have revealed to be the most effective "get out the vote" technique yet discovered: sending lists of peoples' own voting records along with those of their neighbors and suggesting that an updated list will be sent after the election (most campaigns don't use this one, since people don't actually seem to like it very much at all, for some reason ... ).If you haven't had enough of politics yet this year, and want a crash course in how the game is played these days, grab this book and settle down.
    • 4/5
      Really peels back the curtain on some of the statistical and data techniques modern campaigns use to isolate voters — as well as some of the historical battles data-minded politicos waged to win acceptance for their methods. (In Issenberg's book, first published in 2012, the apotheosis of the data-driven campaign is Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 efforts, but his book makes it clear that each new development in tactics or methodology never remains cutting edge for more than one or two election cycles.) Lots of interviews with people in both parties who have pushed these methods, most of them obscure. Pretty well-written and a fast read. My highest tribute: reading about this stuff makes me want to run some regressions myself.
    • 5/5
      Great story of the work of political campaigns and political participation generally. Someone interested in applying the methods in another context, such as another country, must keep in mind how much they rely on the public voting files that give information of whether someone voted. Without these, the microtargeting made possible by matching the voter records with consumer databases and census information would not be feasible, and it would make experimentation much more difficult. One thing that bothers me: The actual politics is often lost sight of. It would be great if these advances also could contribute to improving policy.
    • 3/5
      The reason that I have always been interested in politics is because of the ideas behind the political contests. I want to ensure that the person who is elected to whatever position they are running for holds the same values and concerns that I do. Such idealism is not what this book is about. It is, as one of the back of the book blurbs says, Moneyball for politics. The author examines the various techniques that both Democrats and Republicans have come up with, based on social science and economic models, to determine who they can persuade to vote for their candidate and how to persuade people to actually get to the polls on election day once they are registered.
      For the most part I enjoyed following the trail of a new innovation to learn how a hunch that a certain method would work turned into an experiment and then turned into a standard campaigning practice. My only complaint was that it is a little heavy on the nitty-gritty details of the economic and mathematical models being used. However, I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in politics or anyone who is interested in how mathematical and statistical models can have an impact on our government.
    • 4/5
      Very detailed history of the modern data-focused campaign, using microtargeting to make sure each potential voter is “touched” in just the right way, and yes it is in some sense that creepy. The detailed portrait of entrenched resistance to better means of finding relevant voters is useful in showing yet again that even a committed partisan can have trouble accepting new facts if those facts will threaten his (essentially always his) income stream, since it’s the consultants here who array themselves against innovation (in the form of other consultants). Issenberg tracks the Republican data/mobilization advantage of 2004 and its dissipation in 2008; much of this story has been told in the popular press, but Issenberg at least contextualizes it. One takeaway is that you can’t work miracles with data alone—though consultants are looking for the best way to phrase appeals for funds, they are also working off a support score (how likely you are to support a particular candidate) that is responsive to changes in the salience of public issues. People will still vote differently in a recession than in good times; targeting is mostly about making the most of your possible universe of voters. Issenberg leaves to others the rest of the story: the way in which issues and rhetoric are shaped by electoral demands.
    • 5/5
      Simply, "wow". In "The Victory Lab", Mr. Issenberg tells the history of how political campaigns have adopted metrics and scientific methodology as tools with which to refine their craft. Drawing from academia and commercial marketing, the emerging study of behavioral psychology in politics is a new ground, and this book provides an exciting collection of campaign stories that traditionally never reach the public. This is a must-read for those interested in elections and campaigning.
    • 4/5
      The Victory Lab will appeal to political types.  Sasha Issenberg's book traces the intersection of digital technology and behavioral science as they apply to elections and the marketing of candidates.  There are interesting profiles of some of the many behind-the-scenes players in our political landscape, and perspectives on how current pols like Rick Perry embrace the scientific approach to a segmented electorate.  The most significant finding, perhaps, is that people are motivated more by negative than positive appeals: publicizing your voting record is more apt to get you to vote next time than asking you to do your civic duty.  This has some disturbing implications for those who think negativity in campaigns affects the potential for bipartisanship in government.  Keep an eye on your mailbox and listen for your telephone for the next salvo.
    • 5/5
      My wife is the neighborhood leader of the Obama For America Campaign so I've had a first-hand view of what goes on at the local level in order to get a President reelected –– phone banks and house canvassing and more phone banks and more house canvassing. And as a former mailmen, I am all too familiar with the many political mailers I delivered to my postal customers before each election. In his book, Issenberg gives a history of tried and true experiments conducted to sway people to either donate or vote for one's candidate or cause. He is correct in calling the practice a science. Political operatives know down to the penny how much each vote will cost, and can predict how a person is going to vote even before that person has made up his or her mind. It's scary, in a way.
    • 5/5
      Matt Reese, a JFK political operative and campaign consultant extraordinaire during the 60s and 70s said many times “In order to win elections you have to pick cherries where the cherries is.” What he was saying was identify your voters, register them, and get them to the polls on election day. Back then it was not very sophisticated - boxes of 3 x 5 cards, going through telephone directories and looking up phone numbers, and typed voter lists on election day. And if the precinct you were working in had a high ranking for being predominate your party, you would target that precinct for election day GOTV. Elections have come a long way. As Sasha Issenberg notes in “The Victory Lab,” today’s campaigns can often predict how a voter is going to vote before the voter does. While campaigns do matter, what matters a whole lot more is the so-called ground game in which programmers develop algorithms based on commercially available databases and updated voter information that does in fact back a good part of elections a science. We’ve gone from precinct targeting to microtargeting - the ability to identify specific voters within a precinct or census block and predict with some accuracy their voting preference. Sure, gaffes and external factors can change a voter’s mind but the key component of identifying your base and making sure they vote is highly managed by a new set of political operatives with backgrounds in behavioral psychology, computer programming, and social networking. For the political junkie, this is a fascinating look at how political campaigns have changed over the last 50 years. The book is subtitled “The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns” - Issenberg has pulled back the curtain for all to see. It is a must read for those interested in running and managing political campaigns.