The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns [Hardcover]

I basically agree with previous reviewers Paul Tognetti and Dan Bobinski that this book presents some interesting research but is too long and repetitious. However my main complaint is different. This book does not reveal, as the subtitle claims, "The secret science of winning campaigns." The author appears to have had a preconceived storyline, the Moneyball of politics, which doesn't fit the facts. Unfortunately, this framing causes the author to miss a much more interesting and important story contained in this material.

The Victory Lab traces a nearly century-long academic quest that began with a simple question: Why do some people not vote? Extensive laboratory and field research has thrown some fascinating light on this question, which goes to the heart of what democracy means. Which people vote affects more than the result of an election, it affects group identities and how people feel about the result and how the elected officials act, which in turn set the political environment for the next election, and thereby is an essential determinant of the nature of civil society. The most interesting thinkers profiled in the book deal with these issues in their full complexity.

Some of the theory and experimental data developed in this quest might be useful for influencing close elections. This is the main focus of the book, which leads the author to spend too much time on shallow thinkers with narrow partisan (or in some cases merely financial) goals. Yes, it's impressive how much you can influence people's decision whether to vote through simple micro-targeted threats, bribes and even mere contacts. But it's not clear that these are cost-effective ways to influence elections.

One crucial assumption is the extra votes you shake out of the tree fall to candidates in the same proportion as voluntary voters in the same subgroup. There could be differences in voting patterns between eager and reluctant voters, and the means for stimulating voting may influence the vote as well. Moreover, the absolute numbers are so small, a few percent of the microtargeted population, that even a small effect on the rest might overwhelm the change due to the additional voters. There are no barriers to entry in this business, so any advantage the techniques confer could be quickly erased by the other side. Some of the techniques may work in small academic or pilot studies because they are unusual, but might fail when applied on a meaningful scale. Perhaps most important, the election has to be almost a dead heat before these tricks can make any difference so at most they are the final crack of the whip that sends one racehorse a nose ahead of another rather than the secret to winning elections.

Behavioral psychology and quantitative methods may someday become a secret science of winning elections, but the author wildly oversells his evidence by claiming that day has already arrived. It seems more likely to me that these ideas will refine the idea of democracy and help public-spirited people build better elections, that lead to a better society. Anyway, I hope that's true.

Sasha Issenberg's book The Victory Lab is well written and, for the most part, quite interesting. It is, however, a good deal longer than need be to tell its story. This is due to the author's interest in not only explaining recent developments in mounting effective political campaigns, but also giving a good deal of attention to the history of such efforts, including background on the principal participants over the last forty years. I had not expected the historical material in a book subtitled "The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns," and it sometimes gets in the way of a streamlined presentation of technical issues. The book presupposes little or no knowledge of research design, statistics, or measurement theory. That's all to the good, but if the text included less chatty historical coverage and more discussion of the fundamentals of pertinent quantitative techniques, The Victory Lab would be a more satisfying read.

The two basic themes that undergird Issenberg's account are micro-targeting of prospective voters and random assignment of treatment and control status to permit interpretable comparisons. Micro-targeting means gaining access to individuals and small, homogeneous groups rather than using data aggregated to the precinct, county, or other geographical level. Micro-targeting enables political analysts and operatives to identify conveniently small groups that do not correspond to pre-drawn geographical or administrative boundaries and to use their peculiar characteristics to focus get-out-the-vote campaigns and messages tailored to enhance the appeal of a specific candidate. The shopworn,conventional, broad-brush alternative is to use existing data sets that aggregate measures to a higher level, such as the county.

As an example, after the 2004 presidential election that pitted George W. Bush against John Kerry, I had a data set consisting of all 3140 counties in the u.S. Using a variation on conventional multiple regression analysis, I was able to determine that the most powerful county-level predictor of the percentage voting for Bush was a fairly crude measure of "traditional family values." It was easy to identify the counties that were unusually high on the "traditional family values" measure, and in subsequent elections candidates might have reasoned that these counties would be favorably disposed to Republicans generally, not just to Bush, and they might have targeted their get-out-the-vote efforts accordingly. Sounds plausible, but the "traditional family values" variable had a very strong positive correlation with income, which could mean that many of the families were wealthy enough to employ live-in help. The impact of a get-out-the-vote drive, as a result, might be diminished for Republicans because it would also energize the low-income, perhaps Black or Latino, cooks, housekeepers, gardeners, and handymen, who were more likely to vote for a Democrat.

Similarly, the "traditional family values" variable had a strong positive correlation with voter turnout. This might lead one to the conclusion that resources devoted to increasing voter turnout would be wasted if they were expended on Republican voters who would turn out anyway. Instead, the prospective voters actually affected might be the hired help, perhaps low-income minorities who, again, would vote for Democrats.

However, micro-targeting of smaller, homogeneous aggregates or individuals themselves provides a way around this broad-brush difficulty, enabling us to concentrate on just those citizens we actually want to reach. As Issenberg makes clear, however, assembling data adequate to this task is time-consuming and very expensive, and it requires a long-term commitment to maintaining and updating data files, as well as employing analysts with the statistical and measurement skills needed to put it to good use. Nevertheless, micro-targeting -- reaching out and touching individuals and small groups -- is now a staple technique used by both parties.

Issenberg's second basic theme, use of randomized experiments, makes micro-targeting, as well as more conventional approaches, much more effective. For example, suppose we had used micro-targeting to identify clusters of affluent "traditional family values" voters who, contrary to convention, cannot be relied on to turn out on election day. Randomization assures that any treatments, such as mailings to non-voters that include a call to vote, will not be confounded with other variables, and we can vary the wording of the message, compare results of different messages from one cluster to another, and decide which is most effective. Subsequent work can then incorporate these insights.

It remains true, however, that micro-targeting and random assignment as used in The Victory Lab, are, for the most part, exercises in naked empiricism and guess work. Methodologically they may be exemplary, but substantively and theoretically they tend to be quite thin, relying heavily on expensive trial and error and indiscriminate data dredging. This may help to explain Democrats' disastrous performance in the 2010 midterm elections. Issenberg very briefly mentions 2010, but he does not begin to do it justice as a challenge to the efficacy of micro-targeting and random assignment. I think that a great deal of theoretical work, such as that reported by Robert Entman (2012) in Scandal and Silence, needs to be done to take more uncertainty out of even the most methodologically rigorous political campaigns.

The Victory Lab does a good job of documenting the introduction of methodological precision into data-driven election campaigns. However, Issenberg leaves the reader with the impression that political science is nothing but more and better analyses of voting behavior, and that a rich substantive and theoretical literature is not necessary to guiding the efforts of those who collect and analyze data. Both impressions are wrong.

Issenberg obliquely acknowledges that contemporary developments aimed at more effectively influencing voting behavior may be rightly interpreted as manipulation, unscrupulously useful to anyone with the resources to employ them, whatever their political objectives. I find this "value free" framework unsettling, hardly the stuff of democracy as most of us conceive it.

The Victory Lab is an interesting, even if unduly long and philosophically short-sighted book. I benefited from reading it and would recommend it to others.

My, how times have changed! In years gone by political campaigns hoped to drum up support utilizing the traditional methods of radio and television ads, direct mail and polling. This was the approach favored by those whom author Sasha Issenberg dubs "the gurus". According to Issenberg "the gurus were the celebrated political wise men whose practices had become the political default, thanks to their success serving up a cocktail of lore and myth, anecdote and inertia that could so thoroughly intoxicate the candidates who paid their bills." But in the view of a growing number of political scientists these methods were rapidly becoming outdated due to the advent of an array of exciting new technologies. All of a sudden it was possible to identify "undecided" voters who might be sympathetic to your candidate and to "nudge" non-voters as well. These innovative new get-out-the vote (GOTV)strategies being championed by the so-called "geeks" who worked quietly behind the scenes would pose a direct threat to the entrenched and high-profile political consultants. This ongoing battle between the "geeks" and the "gurus" is the story Sasha Issenberg tells in "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns". I had very high hopes for this book when I plucked it off the Amazon Vine. But for reasons that I will discuss shortly I came away a bit disappointed.

Perhaps the most important lesson that campaigns have learned from the political scientists is that finding small, refined batches of voters really matters. This is a strategy that is very cost effective and runs counter to the traditional radio and television buys and newspaper ads favored by the consultants. Making this a part of the overall game plan proved to be one of the keys to the success of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. I learned that it is now possible to create mailings aimed at small clusters of voters that have been "micro-targeted" by the campaign. Researchers have discovered that targeted mailings with themes emphasizing civic duty, community solidarity and touting the idea that "your vote could make the difference" can be surprisingly effective. Likewise ongoing research has uncovered the fact that personal contact with the voter in the days leading up to an election can yield impressive results in increasing turnout for your candidate or cause. Sasha Issenberg chronicles how several of these campaign tactics turned the tide in favor of the Democrats in a pair of key U.S. Senate races in 2010. Issenberg also introduces his readers to a number of the key players who were responsible for formulating these innovative and highly successful techniques.

While the subject matter is indeed quite interesting I have a couple of major problems with "The Victory Lab". First and foremost I believe that this book is much too long. In my view Sasha Issenberg could have effectively made his case in about 50-75 fewer pages. Frankly, I began to lose interest about two-thirds of the way through the book. In addition the author's frequent use of insider jargon proved to be a real obstacle for me. It appears that the target audience for "The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns" are those in academia, political operatives and bloggers who are deeply immersed in this stuff. This is not a particularly easy read for general audiences. In my view this was a good idea for a book that just misses the mark. As such I am only able to muster a lukewarm recommendation.