Inside The Marketing Machine Of Billion-Dollar Presidential Campaigns

Episode 644: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to author and political campaign expert Sasha Issenberg ( https://x.com/sissenberg ) about the marketing machine behind presidential elections. — Show Notes: (0:00) The malarky factory and The Harm Index (18:55) Trump's 2016 playbook (28:18)Kamala's viral clip factory (32:35) Who’s running a better 2024 campaign? (35:04) What is Elon's role in Trump's campaign (38:31) The lopsided downside of doorknocks (42:25) Deepfakes and new tools in campaigning (45:58) "The podcast election" (50:00) The new playbook for winning in the age of meme wars (54:15) Most mis-priced opportunity in elections — Links: • Sasha Issenberg - https://www.sashaissenberg.com/ • The Victory Lap - https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Lab-Science-Winning-Campaigns/dp/0307954803 • The Lie Detectives - https://www.amazon.com/Lie-Detectives-Playbook-Elections-Disinformation/dp/B0CFN6WM3Y — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  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. And I wanted to understand the science, the tactics, and the persuasion techniques

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  that the different campaigns have used over the years, the best stories about what's actually going on under the hood. And so I invited on a guy named Sasha Eisenberg. He's 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.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  And 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 $6 billion a year goes to this group of people whose job is to be, you know, marketing machines for, for political purposes. And when something works, they, you know, the incentive is to go tell the world how genius you are and how it was your tactic that was the thing that worked. And when it doesn't work, it's like, politician had no charisma, nothing we could do there, right? They, they, they need to deflect in order for, to survive. When you were writing your book, which is called The Victory Lab, did you, I guess, like, how did you get around that bias? Like, how could you figure out, how open were these people in sharing what's

• 1:57Shaan Puri?

  actually working and not? And did you have to kind of like read between the lines to try to figure out where are they just sort of grabbing extra credit versus what actually happened?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's one of the most difficult things reporting in this area. So, you know, I, I was fortunate that I reported this book between election cycles. If you go in right now and you ask that Harris campaign, or the Trump campaign, or the super PACs working for them, you know, show me exactly how you're, you're testing your ads on, on online platforms. They are That maybe they will tell you some stuff, they very selectively will leak out stuff that they think will help them raise money usually. So you'll read a story in Wired, one story in Wired that's like inside Kamala Harris's 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

• 2:49Speaker 01

  they can send out when they go out, when she goes to do a fundraising tour in, you know, in Palo Alto, that can convince, you know, a bunch of, of tech executives that, 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, you know, give away any, anything to the competition.

• 3:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  After Election Day, the campaign basically ceases to exist. So everybody is on to another job. A lot of them are, you know, looking for work or be, or return to their consulting firms or starting new firms, develop some trick or tool during the campaign.

• 3:35Shaan Puri?

  Isn't there like some conference where they all go to, like some, uh, some beach resort area where they go and they all get drunk and start talking?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so there, there's like a post-election sort of conference circuit where Democrats or Republicans come together to, um, to kind of trade notes. But they, 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, 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, you know, fireable, immediately fireable expense, 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

• 4:23Speaker 01

  everything they did. So, you know, I, I remember in 2012, you had this, um, the Obama Analytics Department, which is really pioneering out that they had like 52, 54 people in this analytics program, which at the time was huge. They called it the cave and these guys, you know, I was reporting throughout the year for Slade 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 were some inquests to find out, like, it was pretty sad. And then the day after, you know, a whole bunch of them basically were getting Eric Schmidt

• 5:04Speaker 01

  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. And, and, and the issue with that campaign is it has a binary outcome, right? One candidate wins and the other one loses. And no one thing ever shapes that outcome. Not traditional things like, you know what, whatever happens on Tuesday, it did not happen because one of the candidates chose the right vice presidential nominee or not. It did not happen just because of the, just because, you know, Harris had a better debate performance than Trump. It did not happen just because turnout was up in Pennsylvania and down in Nevada. It was

• 5:45Speaker 01

  a confluence of dozens, hundreds of big and small things. And it's, it's a storytelling exercise to see who can basically tell the most convincing story about why the election turned out the way it did. And there are political actors who want to tell that story, right? Like moderates in the Democrat party of Kamala Harris will win, will say, because she took moderate positions on this and that. But there are people who from a sort of technical tactical perspective, want to, will want to say, it's because the TV ads were really persuasive, or it's because our social media strategy was so good. And you need a good bullshit meter and, you know, and then the best way to do that is just really be alert to everybody's incentives for telling certain types of stories and be skeptical of, of,

• 6:27Speaker 01

  of the times where people have a real, obviously transparent agenda. And I think, and I think, you know, from a reader's, viewer's perspective, Be wary of any sort of monocausal explanation for anything in electoral politics. No one thing did anything, right?

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Well, I do think it's fascinating that you, you know, when you're talking about the behavioral change aspect, one of the great things any entrepreneur could do is sort of learn from adjacencies. And so basically saying, hey, if we want to win in politics, we could do things that have worked in politics, but maybe there's things that have worked in the business world. Or, you know, Sheldon Denny wrote that book, you know, about persuasion, not for politics at all, but you could use things like that. I mean, it's like, the way you described that kind of like, hey, voter history is public, here's yours, and here's your neighbors, and we'll be sending an update later, that's elf on the shelf, right? That's, hey, the elf is watching and he's going to tell Santa if you've been naughty or nice. It's as simple as that. I don't need to explain the virtues and why you should be naughty. It's just very simple. Somebody's watching.

• 7:28Shaan Puri?

  And, and I think that that's a very powerful thing. I also found it interesting because what we traditionally hear, if you just go turn on the news, you turn on CNN, you're going to hear a talking head explaining, they're going to be talking about certain stories, and they're going to be, they're going to bring on some expert pundit who's going to tell you about how this thing that the vice president said during the, you know, convention, how that has this huge ripple effect, but it's actually just the most recent thing that happened.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  And one thing I found fascinating was the story that you wrote about Biden's 2020 campaign. And you talked, in the, in the article, you wrote about, they realized that they were flush with cash, they were going to have more funding than they, they were going to have more funding, not less funding than what they needed. And so I guess the campaign manager or somebody was, you know, asked somebody on their team, they go, if you had an extra 10 million to spend, to have the highest impact, where would you spend it? And there was this idea about misinformation, and as Biden called it, the malarkey factory. And I thought this was pretty fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about the malarkey factory and specifically this idea of the harm index? If you remember that, I can kind of prompt you, it's what I found fascinating there.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  So, you know, I think that in 2020, there was...

• 8:42Speaker 01

  The campaign called it disinformation, but I think really to step back like they were trying to understand this new viral media environment. So you know, if you go back just eight, 10 years in in politics, campaign operatives would track communication by you could get a record of all the TV ads that are bought by by cans. You could see all of them. There are services that will that will record and allow you to access them digitally. You can see all your opponents' campaign finance reports. You have a pretty good sense of where they're getting money and how they're spending it. But you can have a you and you can read the press coverage or see what's on the news. You had a pretty good idea of where voters were getting their information. What the internet had changed is now like

• 9:25Speaker 01

  basically anybody had the ability to launch a story. And some of these get called disinformation because they're they're clear they're transparently false. But for for political operatives, the real thing was like stuff's moving that we don't know where it came from or where it's going and and what the motives of the people behind it are, right? Because it's not coming from our opponent. Like, we know what our opponent's trying to accomplish. They have the same brain we do. But if this is like Macedonian teenagers who are trying to gain like, uh, online clicks for for ad revenue, or this is a foreign intelligence service, or this is somebody like in their basement doing it for for the laughs, like, we don't, we can't game out like what they're saying.

• 10:05Shaan Puri?

  Stories are going viral. It could have an impact, and we don't know who or why it's it's who's behind it.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so the initial impulse was, don't, you know, you'd have all these sort of lessons from the old world kind of media consultants, like, don't let it an attack go unanswered, right? Always be on all offense. And like, yeah, that makes sense if your opponent is attacking you on what you know is one of their big themes. But if like, somebody in in Saskatchewan is making something up about you to impress their friends, maybe you shouldn't respond. And maybe you can make the problem a whole lot worse by responding, right? You elevate it, you can, you can end up engagement.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Algorithms can end up, could end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it. And so the Biden campaign's mentality was let's shift from thinking about this as a supply side problem, which is thinking about individual bits of content that are coming out every day and deciding how and when to respond to them. And basically, as they said, playing whack a mole with like, whatever the new thing that was trending that day. And let's think of this more as a demand side problem. That, that, most of the stuff we probably don't need to respond to, it's not actually going to change voters' opinions. But the stuff that we do need to respond to, the campaign said, is the stuff that, that meets existing anxieties that voters have about Biden, or about Paris, or about certain issues. And so let's preemptively

• 11:34Speaker 01

  try to understand which viral narratives would be most damaging to the campaign, would do the most harm, so that when they pop up on a given day, we have a framework for not overreacting or reacting to the wrong one.

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  So this was the harm index? That was the, the idea there?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what we entered in this big survey over the course of the summer of, of, um, of 2020. And they, and they took a lot of storylines, some based in truth and, and a lot based in, in, uh, some version of lies, um, that, that targeted the ticket. So they, you know, and they would ask voters basically like three questions. One, are you familiar with this? Two, uh, does it, uh, do you think it's true? And three, do you, um, would it make you less likely to vote for Joe Biden?

• 12:16Shaan Puri?

  That's, that's very simple, right? Three, three, three questions. And they're doing this in person? This is online? How'd they get this out?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Online. This was online panel testing, I think that they did.

• 12:25Shaan Puri?

  And they would just show them a headline, right? They'd be like, Hunter Biden's laptop, blah, blah, blah.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  corruption, right? So yes. So the Hunter Biden corruption stuff, this would be for the laptop, I think. But, you know, Trump had already been impeached about trying to draw attention to his Ukraine ties. A lot of people said that they were familiar with this Hunter Biden stuff. Not that many people said that it would actually make them less likely to to vote for Joe Biden. And then they did focus groups and it came out that people, people did not think that Biden was fundamentally driven by his personal financial pain. And so they might have thought it was, they might have been familiar with it. They might have even thought that there was some truth to it, but it didn't really change the way that they thought about Biden on the core issue. However, the stuff related to his age and his mental infirmity, that stuff, obviously, a lot of people knew about it.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  And at the same time, though, a lot of persuadable voters said it would make them less likely to vote for Biden. And the focus groups revealed that it wasn't that they were actually, this wasn't news to the campaign that Biden had an age problem in 2020. And the way that the communication staff on the campaign had dealt with this thus far was they would set up like photo ops of him, him bicycling or like tell him to jog up the stairs to his plane.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  And, and what came back from the focus groups was like, this was all wrong. Voters were not worried about his physical well being. They weren't concerned like that he wasn't going to get his steps in, in the White House. They were, they saw him as a fundamentally weak political figure. I think a lot of this had to do with being defined as vice president. He was like, he won the, he won the primaries, he's never the main character of that race. And there are a lot of voters who said, basically, like, I kind of like the guy, but I don't really know what he cares about or what he wants to do or who he's going to listen to.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  And that manifested, it wasn't, it was about his political weakness, but it manifests itself in being susceptible to questions being raised about his physical condition and mental condition. And so what the, the way the campaign responded to those was first they went out and they started buying ads in places where people who would be exposed to that type of content, persuadable voters who would be exposed to that type of content were. So there'd been this effort on the left for a while to, to boycott Fox News and Breitbart websites. The Biden campaign said, no, we're buying advertising there because we want to get next to the content that people are seeing.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Two, they bought like search terms. So if you typed in, you know, Biden and senile or something, you, you would probably get cookie'd and shown like a YouTube pre-roll ad. And they were things that if you were modeled as one of the persuadable voters who was sensitive on this age thing. You would get targeted, but you would not have any idea that it was about his age. The most successful ad that they tested to these people was 15 seconds of Biden to camera, just talking about like, I grew up in Scranton and I have middle-class values and that's why I want to, you know, cut taxes on middle-class people and raise them on the rich or something like really banal. Because all the research suggested that these people just wanted to hear him in his own voice,

• 15:34Speaker 01

  saying what he cared about and what he would do. That's the people who were, who could be turned off by the attack, by claims that he was senile, just wanted to hear that like he could articulate his basic, his basic worldview.

• 15:46Shaan Puri?

  Right, in a firm voice, direct to camera, not edited.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Like, you know, and they were suspicious of things that looked too glossy or too slick. And so there was a sort of push away from kind of the traditional aesthetics of political advertising. Right? Like a lot of like, here's a headline and here's a thing and here's a cut and here's some like, yeah, it's worse and here's, and here's some stock footage of farmers, you know, eating ice cream. And like, no, it's like really something that very clearly looked unedited. Cause the, cause the people who were sort of open to this were, were ones who were sort of innately suspicious of political communication.

• 16:26Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. And so this idea of they took the stories and they're like, you had the sleepy Joe stories, you got the creepy Joe stories, you got the Hunter Biden stories, tested on people, figure out three questions. Have you heard about this? Do you think it's true? And is this gonna like, you know, make you less likely to vote for, for Biden? Super simple. And then basically counter, figuring out what is the counter-programming message? At first they thought, hey, show them on a bike. That counters the sleepy Joe message. I think they had this score where on the X-axis, it was like number of people who are aware of it. On the Y-axis, it's like how much it's going to impact their vote. So they, they could just have a board that showed all the issues.

• 17:07Shaan Puri?

  It's like, oh, a lot of people are aware about this Hunter Biden thing, but it's not, not effective at all. Low harm score, a 25 harm score. And then.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I skipped that part, Sean, cause like, I think the first rule of podcasting is describe charts. People love that.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  The X-axis was the reach, so it's harm index. The X-axis was the reach, right? How many people had heard about it?

• 17:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And the Y-axis was. What the influence.

• 17:31Shaan Puri?

  Effect, yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  You know, impact. And so, you know, and basically the campaign's thinking tactically on this was,

• 17:39Speaker 01

  if it's in the bottom, if it's on the left of this thing, we don't need to worry about it. If it has high impact but low reach, let's keep an eye on it because if it spreads, if it makes the jump out of like some corner of 4chan to, to, you know, mass media or, you know, getting to normal people on Facebook, then we will have a problem. So let's be prepared. And then the stuff in the upper right hand corner, it's reaching the voters we care about and it'll change their opinions. Like that's where we need to act.

• 18:07Shaan Puri?

  Right, right.

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  What about Trump? So you wrote that book in 2012, I think, 2011, 2012 time.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  So then this guy who is, you know, this persona, this TV personality, comes from the business world, not a politician at all, runs this campaign. I think he even has admitted that like, it wasn't like, he didn't think he was going to win initially. And therefore he's talked about like, yeah, I didn't really have a plan because like, you know, nobody thought we would win. We just thought we were doing our best. And then when we got, when we won, I had to figure out the plan on day one. What do you, when, when you look at that, what do you see? Do you see this kind of like master marketer? Do you just see this anomaly? Do you, did he use the normal playbook? Was, did he throw out the normal playbook? What did, what did Trump do?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  So Trump in 2016, what he did in the conventional sense was the big, the big shift was he went from a TV dominated campaign for paid advertising. He obviously dominated TV almost every day of the year in terms of free media coverage. But his budget, um, which is much smaller than Hillary Clinton's was typically, there's a lopsided indifference between TV spending and digital spending and, and, and also by direct mail and some of the, the non-digital tools.

• 19:25Shaan Puri?

  And I think he had, he had like half the money.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Which is like unheard of. The only place where you might see that these days is like a city council candidate in a place where it's too expensive to buy television and all they can do is, is, you know, spend $40,000 on Facebook ads, right? You never see high level campaigns of any size that are, that are at parity of those two. And the reason Trump. Spent was ready to spend money online, starting in real way, starting in the spring of 2016 was that Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that this Trump doesn't like spending money. He's, you know, hates.

• 20:00Shaan Puri?

  He also doesn't use a computer.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:04Shaan Puri?

  So this is kind of amazing. Like, did you see this clip that's going viral right now of him sitting there watching Kamala's speech? Have you seen this clip?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  No, I haven't.

• 20:13Shaan Puri?

  So it's from some, I think there's like a documentary, I guess. This is like a clip from it. And so it's called The Art of the Surge. I'm not sure if it's.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:22Shaan Puri?

  And so he's sitting next to this blonde woman. I don't know who she is. And he's literally like orating his tweets. So he sees Kamala say something on TV. And then he goes, no way, we're gonna let that happen, exclamation point, not on my watch, send. And then she's typing and she says, and he just does like 16 of those in like this like clip. Because people never knew, like, wait, this guy doesn't use a computer. Is he even behind his social? And they showed him doing that, which is hilarious.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  At that point, he'd had a Twitter account for five years. And he understood that to be a big part of his celebrity and ability to drive traditional news coverage. But spending real money on Facebook ads, not just on, you know, self made content and hoping it it spreads organically, that came because because Jared Kushner came to him and convinced him that instead of all the other things in the campaign where consultants are begging you to spend money, and it goes out the door, that you can make this a revenue center by fund by through for fundraising. So typically, TV ads, you pay the money to try and change people's opinion, and you hope you get votes afterwards. If you buy ads, you can you target them well, and you have people who want to give you money, you can obviously, this is

• 21:32Speaker 01

  why charities do online fundraising and stuff. And so Trump started spending real money on Facebook because he was seeing a return on it. And that resonated to him. It was the you know, it was economic motive fundamentally, more than it was a part of a political strategy. And what he ended up doing. By the combination of his organic ability to draw attention online in ways that traditional politicians couldn't, and the fact that they were amplifying and catalyzing it through what ends up being eventually some real paid spending, mostly on Facebook advertising, but also a little bit on other platforms.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  He was able to create a community online that was, you know, really deep and meaningful to the people who were part of it. And, you know, I think that we thought at the time, you know, the idea was that Obama was the great digital era politician, because he had developed the best, you know, the best and biggest lists. That was the measure. In 2016, the measure of a successful online politician was how many signups? How many email addresses do you have? How many people have given you their cell phone number and opted into letting you text them? How many people followed you on platforms? And that basically was supporters that you can now communicate with for free. Right? That's all that represents is you no longer have to pay to advertise to them.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  They have given you the information and authorization to talk to them. And but what did Obama do with that? These tens of millions of supporters who had chosen to sign on in some way? Well, he basically asked them to give money and occasionally to volunteer or take some action. Um, but it was very transactional. It was very one-sided. And what we realize in retrospect, and that was true of basically every politician in the United States till Trump came along. What Trump did, mostly by instinct, not by any strategy or, I think, great abstract conception of like how to communicate digitally, because just because he gets it in a animalistic way,

• 23:45Speaker 01

  was that you should engage like a poster does, right? And that means Obama never like amplified his.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Retweeted or shared his supporters' content. Why? Because if you're the Obama campaign in 2012, you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on opinion research, polling, focus groups, other qualitative research, testing your ads and your mail. You have come down, at that point, you have come to the syllable on what you want to say, on which issues, when, to whom, how. And the whole campaign is this command and control exercise to make sure that you're saying the exact right thing at the exact same time, at the right time to all the right people. So the idea that you would take your most enthusiastic supporter who's tweeting at you all day and just like share with your followers

• 24:39Speaker 01

  is so antithetical to the way that political professionals think about the best way to communicate. And Trump does it because he does it impulsively. Ha ha, that's funny, let's share it, right? And what he did was he created

• 24:52Speaker 01

  a community of people who were invested, who felt like they were part of the campaign. And they ended up, you know, the whole meme culture around him, the online MAGA community is, is, is a, I think, a far more satisfying, satisfying place for its members to reside online because they get all this reinforcement from like-minded people that Obama or Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden never gave, even if they collected a lot of names of people who ended up giving them money online.

• 25:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  And that is, that is a gift that I have not seen. We've seen politicians get some part of that for some period of time. Bernie Sanders had some of that, whatever else. But there's, you know, still the idea, you have to relinquish a certain amount of control over your communications. And there are very few politicians who, who are willing to do that.

• 25:41Shaan Puri?

  That is fascinating to me. I did not know the, the story there of Kushner coming in and basically like changing the frame from we spend money to try to buy votes versus we spend money to rake in more money. And then that $1 becomes 2, that 2 becomes 3, and 3 becomes 4, that we can just continue to fundraise this way. And then, and ultimately, if somebody's giving you their money, they're probably also going to give you their vote, right? So it's not like you're only doing one versus the other.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  The campaigns have always had a very clear divide, both in terms of like the org chart within the headquarters, in terms of the budget and in terms of what you say and where. And some of it's because of regulations around, around political spending. But like, Fundraising communication is a very different beast inside a campaign than persuasion or or get out the vote communication.

• 26:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  And totally different offices in the campaign. But like what Trump, I think, sort of just naturally found out was if you're spending a lot of money prospecting on Facebook, telling people why you're great, um, some of that will go to people who will end up chipping in 10 bucks and signing up for a recurring payment, right? Some of it will also will go in front of people whose opinions you are helping to shape. Some of it will go help turn people already support you into volunteers by getting them. And that campaigns did not typically think that they thought of it as we're having, we have our fundraising targets. We have our, who almost by definition are not your persuasion targets because your persuasion targets are people whose minds aren't made up. Your fundraising targets are people who already support you and you're trying to get them to give more.

• 27:12Shaan Puri?

  Yes, yes. Okay, so I like that. And it seems like, you know, Trump is this kind of blend of celebrities, like an influencer brand, right? And the same with it.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  Kylie Jenner, Kylie Jenner can sell, you know, makeup better than than than a makeup brand that doesn't have an influencer or that, you know, George Clooney can sell alcohol or, you know, Ryan Reynolds can go sell cellphone service through Mint Mobile. It seems like the ads using Trump worked. And it sounds like you've also kind of pointed out that he created a bit of a community. Whereas like, I can't even really tell you what is Kamala. Like, I could tell you Trump's community, which is the MAGA movement. I kind of know who they are, what they look like, what they, what they stand for and what they're all about. I don't even know what the name of the community would be for Kamala. Like, it would only be people who hate Trump, I think, is the only answer.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Even there was a little bit of, they call themselves the K-Hive, um, uh, of like a little cluster of Kamala supporters. But that campaign did not last long for a reason, which is I don't think the tourism particularly broad based enthusiasm for her.

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  Never met a lot of K-Hivers.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And she has been at some disadvantage and there've been advantages to starting a campaign. In July, but a lot of disadvantages and a lot of it is that, you know, audience, online audience takes a long time to build and, you know, I, I think that she, I think there'll be an interesting conversation to have after this election as to whether she will have had the shortest presidential campaign in modern American history by far, right? I mean, that the general tendency has been towards these two-year campaigns and she's going to have a four-month

• 28:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  campaign.

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  Well, she's done a couple of things as well, right? She raised a lot of money very quickly. She's, she's outraised Trump. She's also, I've, you know, her TikTok when she started, she, you know, picked a medium and it seems like they were picking alternative mediums. So, you know, Trump has done a lot of podcasts. She's done a couple, but podcast seems to be a bigger part of the equation this, this time. She went super viral on TikTok right away and they had a bunch of songs and little earworms like, you know, JD Vance is, you know, I'm a never Trump guy song that, that, that was great. You know, they've done a bunch of things like that. Um, you know, when he said the thing about eating the dogs, eating the cats, you know, within minutes, it's viral on TikTok as a song that somebody remixed.

• 29:32Shaan Puri?

  And so I think they've done a lot of interesting things there. Does any of that stand out to you? Do you have opinions on any of that? I'm curious how you look at that.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I think one, one other thing that they did, which is pretty novel, is that they have gotten into the like clipping and amplifying little bits of every crazy little thing that Trump says. I mean, there was this school of thought among Democrats. It was pretty prevailing, I think, for, for, uh, most of Trump's, which is don't give him oxygen. Don't give him exposure. You're only feeding the whatever. And, uh, they would scold journalists who are like, why are you taking his speeches live? And why are you guys sharing every clips of everything he says? And now go to the Kamala HQ account and it will be, it's like those guys, you know, the media matters guys or whatever else were just clipping like all these wild things that, that, that go on Fox News, just these

• 30:19Speaker 01

  seven seconds he sent that, you know, you can electrocute yourself with a, with a car on the moon or something. And like, look at this crazy old guy. And that's a very different mentality about how to go with Trump in particular. Then Democrats had, and so, you know, I think that they, they feel like they've, that the digital team. In in the campaign, which is basically inherited entirely from the Biden campaign. They feel a little unshackled. They have much more to work with. I think that there was, you know,

• 30:47Speaker 01

  obviously, they have a candidate who's more dynamic and him closer to pop culture. They have more celebrities who are eager to be associated with the campaign. They also, you know, I think that there was a sense that Biden so emphasized like the dignity of the office and Trump is beneath this, that there was a sense of like, let's not get down in the mud and and play Trump's game. And and I think that there's a real freedom to do kind of name calling and stuff that that the Biden people would have thought is sort of pettier than their brand, you know. And so, so, yeah, I think that they've been far more willing to mix it up in online. I I do think, though, this is an area where she probably, you

• 31:31Speaker 01

  know, and engage with influencers and such. But if she'd had an extra year to cultivate those relationships online, some of that would be showing through now in a way that they've just been, you know, scrambling to. I mean, they were doing things in August that campaigns are usually doing the previous March, like, you know, designing a logo, right? I mean, like, really, like, day one type type things.

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  You've studied and covered elections for like, more than 15 years, I think. Who do you think is running the better campaign right now? Not who's going to win, but who's running a better campaign?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I thought Trump, for most of the year, was running as good a campaign as he could run. Now I start to see a real mismatch between what they claim is their strategy and

• 32:18Speaker 01

  and the organization that they have been building for it, which is, you know, in short, so much of the Trump plan seems to be based on mobilizing young men, especially young men of color. And there's reasons in polling to suggest that there's real room for for him to gain in a way that that few Republicans have there. But the, you know, that's, that's this job of basically going to people who are not voters and turning them into voters. And all the research I've written about suggests that, you know, the best way to do that is high-quality, face-to-face interactions from a volunteer,

• 32:59Speaker 01

  you should volunteer from a voters' community and them to have these sort of socially meaningful interactions, to give them really practical advice, like, you know, where's your polling place and, and, and all of that stuff. And the campaign has made a decision to effectively outsource a lot of that, you know, what people call ground game or field organization, but the real boots-on-the-ground part of campaigning to America PAC, which is the Elon Musk-funded super PAC. And typically, the division of labor on campaigns has been that that sort of nuts and bolts, labor-intensive work that does not scale up easily, right? You know, going from 100 people in West Philadelphia knocking on doors to 200 people knocking

• 33:41Speaker 01

  on doors in West Philadelphia takes twice as much work and capital. Going from 100 ads on TV in Pennsylvania to the same ads running twice as often takes basically no more effort. And so, the way that, there's been this big question for about 15 years about how do you divide responsibilities between campaigns and the super PACs outside? Different sets of rules, different advantages for each of them. And typically, the way it's broken down is that campaigns and the party committees will do that labor-intensive work that doesn't scale up, and the money on the outside will basically buy ads, mostly TV, some digital, to amplify the message because they can't coordinate with one another directly. The, the Trump people have blown up that model. And they're now trusting this

• 34:25Speaker 01

  outside group that Musk runs to do this door-knocking thing.

• 34:30Shaan Puri?

  What is he doing? Because I actually haven't followed it fully. I saw, he's going Mr. Beast, he's giving away a million dollars a day. I don't even understand what that is. Can you explain that? What is Elon doing?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  So he's paying people to get their friends to sign petitions. So you can get, like, get a $47 bounty or something if you can get your friend to sign a petition that says, like, "I believe in the First and Second Amendment," and give your information.

• 34:52Shaan Puri?

  And what is that? Why, why that?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  I can come up with a few theories of what they could do with that information, but it seems like a pretty roundabout way to get information that's already available. Like, there's already a database of every voter in the state. And if I wanted to know people in Pennsylvania who care about... You know, who are conservative or MAGA or own a gun like that's a combination of publicly available or viable information. I shouldn't have to pay people to go collect it from their neighbors. And so it seems like a tactic you would use that's far better if you're trying to have a long-term movement organization building thing, which doesn't, I haven't seen

• 35:36Speaker 01

  any indication that Elon Musk is trying to build a generational movement here. It does not seem like a particularly effective way to get people to vote for the first time or the second time in their lives. So that's one big part of what they're doing. Then they're doing just a lot of basically hiring day laborers to go knock on doors. And there's been a bunch of reporting, Wired has some good reporting, Daily Beast, I think, on, it's like it is in any industry, hiring people off the street and paying them by the hour or or or public contacts leads to a lot of bad work. And you have a lot of really poor incentives for people to either be inefficient or or give you bad data if you're if you're

• 36:20Speaker 01

  if you're paying them per complete. So I I've sort of shifted my view on the competence of the the Trump Organization over the course of years. It seems like they've they've they haven't aligned their strategy with their their tactics and organization. And I think Kamala Harris is running a far more traditional Democratic campaign. And there's a kind of sensible logic to it, even if she's made a few mistakes along the way.

• 36:44Shaan Puri?

  It sounded like the thing Elon's doing, you know, he's trying to sign, you can't pay people to vote. That's illegal. So it's kind of like, I'll pay you to sign the petition. And the petition says something that sounds very like agreeable, like I support free speech. Yeah, who doesn't, right? Like, that sounds pretty reasonable. But like, it seems like there must be some some 3D chess going on that I'm not, I don't fully understand, which is what do you do after that? What's the point of that?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you use that information, and then you have a really good operation to call those people, maybe target them with digital advertising, call them and knock on their door and say, I know you're a First and Second Amendment voter, and you signed a petition devoting yourself to the cause, now do this and this. Like, there's actually a reason to think that works. But that's just then one step. That's just the first step in a three or four step process. And you need to be really Good and targeted at the next few steps because you know, one real difference that's important, I think for for your audience, keep in mind when you learning from adjacent fields is is great and important. A lot of the breakthroughs I've written about have come from people in politics looking to to business or elsewhere. But there are some really different, really important differences between business marketing and political marketing. And one of them is that the cost of a

• 37:54Speaker 01

  of mis-targeting of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics. Right? So if you are if you have a consumer product and you're Coke and you put a Coke ad in front of somebody who's on a diet or doesn't like sugar, has diabetes or like whatever. Okay, you wasted 10 cents for that person. Big deal. If you are the Trump campaign and you send a door knocker to do a get out the vote reminder to somebody who is your data tells you is should be a Trump supporter, but they're not. Um, or there's one Trump supporter in that house, but you remind three other people, the three women living with that one Trump supporter

• 38:38Speaker 01

  that it's election day on Tuesday too, and it makes them more likely to vote. Or your person's just kind of inefficient, you know, like lazy and they knock on the wrong door in the apartment complex and they end up going to the to the Harris supporter and reminding them. You've not only, you haven't just wasted that interaction. You've created a vote for your opponent. There is nothing, the only thing like that in the marketing world where there's that cost to misidentifying your targets is maybe an insurance or or or credit cards where if if a company thinks that they can extend you a $10,000 credit limit and you're not good for it, they made a big mistake. Right? If an if an insurer decides that you that you're, you know, should be a $500 premium and it turns out that you cost them a lot more, they've really screwed

• 39:22Speaker 01

  screwed up. But most consumer marketing like There's not a huge downside to getting your message in front of the wrong people, but politics, there is. And I think that's the big mistake that a lot of people, and perhaps Elon or the people around him make, is they move from business to politics, they say, "Let's just throw resources at it. When I needed to, when I needed to build, you know, create interest in Tesla, I just bombarded all these people at digital advertising about Tesla, or offered them all a free test drive and, you know, a cocktail at our, at our, at our cool, um, uh, showrooms." Like, that probably works to start building interest in Tesla. It's a terrible way to, to, to try to turn out voters for your candidate.

• 40:09Shaan Puri?

  And when you've been looking into a space like this, like, how disillusioned do you get? And really, I guess the question is, you've now studied multiple election cycles, you've heard, you've talked to the teams behind this, and then the different subsections of this industry. What's, like, you know, when I clean my house and I move the couch and I'm like, "Oh, my God, there's 10 years of my kid's snacks under here." Like, what's the thing where you're like, "I wish I didn't see that. I wish I didn't know that." What, what is the ugliest part of this that, that really has, you know, you, you saw or turns you off?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the disinformation stuff is, is, you know, I generally was encouraged in the early years of writing about this, because the people who are at the cutting edge of using this data and experiments, were generally in the business of trying to get more people to vote, or giving voters information that was more relevant to them. And that struck me as like, democracy was, was improving because of technology and innovation. Um, uh, if I use, campaigns have a lot of data about individual voters, that doesn't really scare me. A lot of people have a lot of data about voters, and they're usually, instead of giving you some vague thing about, you know, America, morning in America, if I, if I think that you're likely to care a lot about, about, um, you know...

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Cancer research and I give you a turn in message about what I my campaign would do for cancer research. Like, I think that that's generally good for the country. What has changed is I think you have so many people have the ability to reach large numbers of voters now who are just not constrained by a lot of the expectations about honesty and can't be held accountable for what they say. And, and I think that that, that is, is scary to me.

• 41:45Shaan Puri?

  What's going on now? Because AI has now made it easy to do deep fake audio. I can make, I can make it, I can make Donald Trump say anything for like, you know, 30 cents on my computer right now. I can make a video that shows, you know, something that I want happening. I could have, hey, if, if phone banking works, why can't I just spin up an army of AI phone agents to just call everybody? What is, what have you seen as the new tools? And is that, has that happened this cycle? Or you think it's next cycle?

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Relatively, maybe less the cycle than I would have thought if we'd had this conversation a year ago. Um, you know, I think that campaigns, this is a place, there were some campaigns that wanted to be first because they realized they'd get a lot of attention and, and, um, and wanted that. But I think most campaigns are afraid of the backlash of, of, um, of being associated with, with AI even for, not necessarily even from, for manipulation, but just like, you know, on non-live callers. And, and so I think that there's a hurdle that, that campaigns have from a kind of brand image perspective about being associated with, with new or potentially sort of invasive

• 42:55Speaker 01

  feeling technologies. Um, and so there's been less of that. Where people are using AI the most in this campaign is like, sort of the same way we all might use it, which is like brainstorming first drafts of fundraising emails, you know, like most fundraising emails, they need to come up with new ones every day to send to people. They'll basically use the same types of, of themes and, and, and messages. You're probably going to EBT test them anyway. So instead of having a bunch of, you know, 23 year olds who just, you know, graduated from liberal arts colleges, like typing out your first drafts and trying to see whether the, the one that scares people into thinking you're losing is going to do better than the one that has like J Lo's

• 43:37Speaker 01

  signature under it. Why not have the machine come up with 10 different J Lo ones and test those? And that's, I think, like, probably the, the, the most we're seeing AI or automation being used in this campaign. But I think obviously that'll change over the next few years.

• 43:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. Why are, why is Kamala doing like a Fortnite map? They just released like, they're basically like advertising in video games, which I think others have done in the past, but I mean, those people aren't even old enough to vote. I think the average Fortnite player, what's the psychology around that?

• 44:06Speaker 01

  So it starts from the position of having more money than they know what to do with. And there being an unusual scarcity issue for political marketers, which is like one, you have one day by which all your sales have to be completed. I don't think there's another industry, I mean, there's seasonal industries, I guess.

• 44:23Shaan Puri?

  Like a July 4th fireworks store.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Right. So like Halloween stores probably make some interesting pricing decisions on November 1st. Right. Um, so one thing is that they like have a lot of money, they have to get out the door. And all of the TV is bought up in, you know, we're down to seven battleground states. The TV markets are saturated. There's a point at which you can no longer send out new direct mail. If you wanted to get more volunteers knocking on doors, you probably had to start building offices and having staff to train them months ago. And so at the end of the campaign, you start to see, uh, the end of this, you know, right before election day, you start to see campaigns making decisions that are driven less by efficient, like overall efficiency and more by basically where can we very quickly park some money?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  And, and I think that that, um, you know, that that's when you start to see like sound trunks and stuff like that, because there's just nowhere else to put it.

• 45:19Shaan Puri?

  So some people have called this election, uh, the sort of the, the podcast election, because you have, podcasts have become this huge medium. You have unedited, unfiltered conversations, kind of one of the only ways you can actually see what a candidate is really like. I was joking with my buddy, I said, I think going on Theo Von's podcast should be a new federal standard for presidents. I just need to know if my president's a good hang or not.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:44Shaan Puri?

  And Theo Von might be the only guy who could save us there. You know, Trump did Rogan, JD Vance just did a three hour thing with Rogan and famously Kamala. And, you know, Rogan said, hey, you can come out to Austin and let's do, you know, two, three hours unedited in my studio. She said, no, um, there's. Two reactions to that. One was, wow, what a dropped ball. You could have got in front of 30 million people in a like, super meaningful way. Another was, how dare you, Joe? She's the vice president and there's a few days left before the election. How dare you have demands? You should be, you know, crawling to her to do this. And other people would say, you're not going to convince anybody who listens to Rogan to vote for Kamala anyways.

• 46:24Shaan Puri?

  What do you think about the role of podcasts? And was it a mistake for Kamala to not go on Rogan?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  I think that her campaign

• 46:35Speaker 01

  was slow to put her out in a lot of different venues. You know, there's that week where she did

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Call Her Daddy and The View and it was like, oh, and then maybe she did Colbert or Kimmel or something. It was like, oh, she's doing media now. And part of what was shocking about that was that she was doing so little of it early on. And like, again, they had to build a campaign from scratch really quickly at an inopportune point. She had to pick a VP. She had to get ready for, you know, a nomination, speech, debates, all this stuff that she did not expect she was going to have to do a few weeks earlier. So, but also, you know, one of the advantages that Democrats had in dumping Biden from the ticket and getting her was you had somebody who, first of all, to send more energy. In theory, she can like, work a full day and do a bunch of things that Biden isn't expected to do. The other thing is she's more dynamic and she's, you know,

• 47:30Speaker 01

  more in tune with pop culture. And I think there was some sense that, wow, Democrats are going to go from somebody who does like, three rallies a week and his staff is afraid to put in, you know, I'm like, face the nation, not even feel on, like, to somebody who can do five events a day and interviews nonstop and she's charismatic and, and, and telegenic and all these things. And that never really came to fruition. And I don't know how much this, I think, might be one of the things we start to learn after the election, when, when some journalists or book authors get a little access into what they were thinking. I think one of the questions is, how much of that was just that they didn't have the time to do as much of it? That would be, could be sensible to me.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  On the other, or was it that the staff is fundamentally afraid that the downside of going into an unstructured two hours with Joe Rogan offsets the, the upside of, of, of getting in front of that audience?

• 48:28Shaan Puri?

  Could you give me a couple of minutes on your new book? So you got this new book out. What's the, what's the premise? And then can you give me maybe one of the juicy findings or learnings or stories that you had from it?

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's about this sort of new era we've, we've, we've bounced in and out of this, but the new asymmetry that's created when in this digital environment where campaigns realize that their opposition is, is not their opponent. It's not another candidate or party. It, it, it could be, you know, the Foreign Intelligence Service or somebody who's, you know, attacking you for shits and giggles or, or, or who knows what? And, and how sort of what the, the search for a playbook for, for learning how to communicate in that environment, because it blows up so many of the expectations about, about campaign strategies. And I write a bit about that Biden example in there, which I think was really, a really important shift in starting to think about the recipients of disinformation more than

• 49:21Speaker 01

  the producers of disinformation, which has been, I think, a big mistake that, that not just campaigns and people in the media make in trying to understand what impacts something will have. But I also worry about a really interesting group called We Defend Truth that this, this, it's a progressive group that has been trying to fight basically conspiracy theories around the 2020 election and around, around COVID vaccines. They basically have gone out and hired some of the more successful like Jif and meme makers online.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  You know, a guy who had like the most likes on him there and stuff. And their, their theory of the case is that you need to be engaging in the, in the.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  In the vernacular of the internet.

• 50:05Shaan Puri?

  Meme warfare. You have to, you have to fight memes with memes.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  You have to fight memes with, and you need to be communicating in the way that, that online audiences expect to be communicated to, which means be coarse and be, and be funny and, you know, be kind of in the pop culture conversation. Do not feel like political communication. Do not feel like marketing. Um, and, you know, I, I quote one of their, um, the sort of head guy there. He says, like, you need to earn the right to communicate with people. And to do that, you have to usually entertain or inform them first. And I think it's a really interesting way of starting to think about how traditional political communication has to fundamentally rethink itself from the one-way broadcast dynamic that a lot of the modern, um, uh, thinking about campaigning was shaped into

• 50:52Speaker 01

  the kind of, you know, two-way or, or multi-linear sort of environment that, of, of social media.

• 50:58Shaan Puri?

  It reminds me of like, when you had TV and movies were like the dominant video, like media. And if you were making a TV show, you could afford to spend the first few minutes, if you watch the first couple of minutes of a TV show, it'll be like, the scene starts in New York. A guy's walking. We don't know who he is, what he's doing. And then there's like this harmless scene. And then it finally, like, you get to the characters and the story. If you ever watch a TikTok or a YouTube video, like, in the first five seconds, they're doing something to tell you, do not click away. Stay on this video. You gotta watch this video. Like, I hang out with Mr. Beast and he's like, he could recite to me the first 40 seconds of, of script from a video he did three years ago,

• 51:41Shaan Puri?

  because he drilled it so many times and every word was chosen of like, I cannot like leave this first minute up for grabs. And what he talks about, because I asked him, I said, you know, do you ever look at TV and what you could learn from them? And he goes, yeah, but what they could learn from us, I mean, he's like, dude, TV would never survive, uh, on YouTube. Right? You, you, he's like, people would click away and have terrible retention rates, terrible click-through rates. They couldn't survive in our world. And so similarly, what you're talking about is, In the old world where it's my message versus the other candidate's message, and it's just those two, it's a one V one, you know, there's one playbook. And now you're saying you're just playing the field. There's the field of the internet where there's stories and information coming from all kinds

• 52:23Shaan Puri?

  of different people with all levels of accuracy and different levels of impact. How are you going to respond to not a one V one, but sort of you versus the entire field of content that's out there right now? And what's your playbook to win there?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're only now starting to get, you know,

• 52:41Speaker 01

  people, campaigns having a more instinctual understanding. It used to be so much of online campaigning, you know, in the 2000s, 2010 was basically, let's take things we're already doing offline and figure out how to move them online, right? Okay, so we know how to make 30 second videos and put them on TV. Let's just turn them into, you know, maybe we have to go from vertical, horizontal to vertical or whatever, but let's just figure out how to get them onto, onto social media platforms. Can we, can we do something online that looks, can we basically take our direct mail program out of the, the USPS and put it into email? And now I think we're starting to get people in politics, some of it's a generational shift, some of it's Democrats realizing how poorly they've been outfoxed on, online during the

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Trump era to start it like, we need to really step back and rethink some of these foundational questions of how and why you communicate to certain people.

• 53:33Shaan Puri?

  I want to, I want to leave with one last question, which is, what do you think is the most mispriced or misunderstood opportunity in elections? Meaning if somebody hired you and they're like, all right, you're gonna, you're our consultant.

• 53:47Shaan Puri?

  And you got to give them input to do something that maybe they're not already doing, or maybe they're doing, but not enough of. Where would you place a bet that you think has sort of more upside than people are currently, you know, taking advantage of?

• 54:00Speaker 01

  So less, maybe not economic upside, but sort of political entrepreneurial upside would be in communicating with the voters outside of election cycles. And, you know, I think there's a great example now, like, the best, I think we're gonna, if Trump wins this election, we're gonna look back and say arguably his best period was a period in 2021, 2022, when he was largely out of the news, Republicans were distancing themselves, the media wasn't covering him, Democrats had hoped he was gone and stopped attacking him. And he was able to start to build up some sense of nostalgia for the Trump years, a lot of it, like, not based

• 54:43Speaker 01

  in a real understanding of what 2020 was like when he was president, but distance helped him. And if Democrats had kept like a foot on his neck through advertising, reminding people, yes, the reason, you know, wherever unemployment was and inflation were in 2021 was because of the guy who was just there, reminding people about some of the COVID dynamics, but like, they pulled away from him at just the moment that they prop, they could have continued to define him. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Political money disappears out of cycle. You only get the surge of interest in cycle. But there's sure people starting to talk about party-based branding, right? So like, so much of our political, our political

• 55:28Speaker 01

  communication, paid TV ads are almost entirely about candidates. And yet, like, when we started this conversation, was that basically 45% of the country are Democrats, and 45% are Republicans, and they'll always vote for their party. And yet, no political advertising is spent branding the parties. And I think there are advantages to doing that in a counter cyclical way, when people are not being bombarded by tons of TV ads, but be reminding people, the Republican Party stands for this and this, here's how the Democrats screwed up last time, or vice versa, and try to think about not just winning votes in an election, but, but sort of long-term audience building for a party.

• 56:09Shaan Puri?

  I like it. Maybe you could also be one of these, these political consultant shops that are making bank. What's, what is the, what is the business that stunned you with how much it makes in the, in this sort of election? In this election marketing business, is there any, whether it's a polling company or a research company that like, is there any like multi hundred million dollar companies out there that do this?

• 56:30Speaker 01

  The business model that's still most astounding is, is media buyers who get paid a commission off of, off of the ads they place.

• 56:38Shaan Puri?

  Percent of ad?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Percent of, of ad spend and you know, digital advertising is more labor intensive for them, but buying TV is, you know, there are only so many stations in, in Wisconsin that you can put ads on and you know, it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a, a commission off of them there. You know, that, that, that's in this been that way for decades and this is.

• 57:03Shaan Puri?

  Is it, is there one like dominant ad buyer that, that like?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  No, I mean, there are a handful on, in each party, but, um, and you know, they're, they're probably having revenue in the, some of them also make ads and so they're part of a bigger media business. They're probably, you know, probably in, on the high end in the, in hundred million dollar revenue range. We're not talking about, you know, huge companies, but, um, but it really does not require at this point, a lot of savvy or, or.

• 57:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  Or, or, or labor.

• 57:35Shaan Puri?

  Ad buyers, one, give me one more. Is there any other cool business that, uh, that is, maybe it's like a one man shop that makes, you know, 10 million a year just doing a specific thing, or is there any other interesting business niche that, that you just stumbled into?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  There's still some interesting stuff to be done with data and modeling, um, especially, you know, there are a lot of sort of boutique firms that will do campaign specific modeling, but what's happening now is that the things that presidential campaigns were able to do, only presidential campaigns were able to do maybe 12 years ago. Now somebody running for county executive can use. And I'm not sure that there are, this is more an opportunity that people have mastered, but I think that there are probably opportunities to figure out how to package and translate that for small scale campaigns that do not have professionals always working on them. The person running for state rep in your neighborhood. Her brother might be like the effect de facto campaign manager and whatever else.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  And often the the delta between what what a sort of engaged layperson trying to run a campaign can do and the sophistication of the tools and data available is just too much to bridge and they don't do it, but there probably is a way to to price those and create tools that are more accessible. That that's where I think that's a place that if people were looking to try to get into the sort of tech end of the political business, there's there's probably some opportunity.

• 58:54Shaan Puri?

  Very cool. Sasha, I appreciate you coming on and giving us the extra time, man. This is fascinating. Thank you so much. Where should people find you? Send them to your book. Tell them what tell them what they need to know.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, my new book's called The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age. And I have a website, Sasha Eisenberg, so it's my first name and last name dot com. You can find all my books there. My my first one's about the global sushi business, which may be of interest to to to you, too. So it's been really fun. I love talking about politics from an angle that's different than what people are saying on CNN on any given day. So thank you.

• 59:30Shaan Puri?

  All right. Thanks so much, man. That was great.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Appreciate it.