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Well, Trump is a multi-millionaire, perhaps a billionaire. His level of spending may not be remarkable by American standards, but it is by the standards of most

Well, Trump is a multi-millionaire, perhaps a billionaire. His level of spending may not be remarkable by American standards, but it is by the standards of most other countries. It still means that to get into power in America you either have to be an extremely wealthy businessman, or you have to be supported by big-business.

KirinDave 10y ago
We see hints in the Trump campaign (and concrete evidence in the Obama campaign) that a lot of the cost for running is interfacing with entities that expect a lot of money to play ball. It may be that a canny candidate with a good but small PR department can do just as well. Certainly Twitter, YouTube and Facebook seem to be having outsized impact and they're relatively inexpensive.
- guildwriter 10y ago
  It's worth noting that Trump's campaign was also deeply invested in using data to drive campaign strategy. Here's a relevant excerpt from an interview with Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law, who apparently masterminded the campaign strategy. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#1137f0472f50 http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi... "This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface. Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.” For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors."
  - r_smart 10y ago
    Holy shit. I just made a peer comment to yours talking about how I think Trump's campaign used technology really effectively, but I had no idea about any of this. Any sense for how Clinton's campaign compared on a tech front? I get the sense that similar to the article's description of Trump, she's...uh...not too tech savvy. Was her campaign similarly data driven as his?
    - guildwriter 10y ago
      My general impression from reading on the subject is that most of the other political campaigns were not nearly as tech savvy as Trump's was. Generally speaking Clinton seemed to rely mostly on the traditional approach to election strategy that would have guaranteed victory in the 90s and early 2000s. It seems that political operatives in general have been much slower to adapt to the new generation of tools that have been made available to them or just don't understand the implications. This does not come as a huge surprise. Unless you grew up interacting with technology in the same way as the younger generation has, it's harder to digest, envision, and utilize new tech. Even my stepfather who coded with punch cards and builds old motherboards for fun struggles a bit with his smartphone. I think this election has been a good demonstration of how rapidly tech is changing the world and how asymmetric the adaptation has been. The ground is shifting so fast that it's much harder to predict and imagine the myriad of implications and the way they will feedback into systems.
- r_smart 10y ago
  I've been saying that had Clinton run her campaign the way Trump did, she would have been lauded as being a political genius who had learned to embrace being a political candidate in the age of the internet. I've run into some good analysis talking about how this election was a technology shift election in the same way Nixon v. Kennedy was. Just as Nixon didn't play well to television audiences, Clinton doesn't play well to internet audiences, particularly due to the persistence of information. There was a moment in the VP debate where Pence said something like: "This isn't the old days anymore, you can't just say whatever you want without repercussion." (that's a paraphrase). I think people overlook how effectively Trump uses Twitter. To this day. He drove a ton of outreach and messaging even when he couldn't get it framed the way he wanted in the news, and twice in the last couple weeks he's done some pretty interesting stuff where he represents a position his opponents hold, then watches as the press attacks him for it. He relies on the fact that the internet will get the truth out.
  - KirinDave 10y ago
    > I think people overlook how effectively Trump uses Twitter. It's difficult to be enthusiastic about the propagation of outrageous lies as a communication revolution. Say what you will about effectiveness, he's said things he can't back up and it's hard to laud that.

KirinDave 10y ago

We see hints in the Trump campaign (and concrete evidence in the Obama campaign) that a lot of the cost for running is interfacing with entities that expect a lot of money to play ball. It may be that a canny candidate with a good but small PR department can do just as well. Certainly Twitter, YouTube and Facebook seem to be having outsized impact and they're relatively inexpensive.

guildwriter 10y ago
It's worth noting that Trump's campaign was also deeply invested in using data to drive campaign strategy. Here's a relevant excerpt from an interview with Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law, who apparently masterminded the campaign strategy. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#1137f0472f50 http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi... "This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface. Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.” For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors."
- r_smart 10y ago
  Holy shit. I just made a peer comment to yours talking about how I think Trump's campaign used technology really effectively, but I had no idea about any of this. Any sense for how Clinton's campaign compared on a tech front? I get the sense that similar to the article's description of Trump, she's...uh...not too tech savvy. Was her campaign similarly data driven as his?
  - guildwriter 10y ago
    My general impression from reading on the subject is that most of the other political campaigns were not nearly as tech savvy as Trump's was. Generally speaking Clinton seemed to rely mostly on the traditional approach to election strategy that would have guaranteed victory in the 90s and early 2000s. It seems that political operatives in general have been much slower to adapt to the new generation of tools that have been made available to them or just don't understand the implications. This does not come as a huge surprise. Unless you grew up interacting with technology in the same way as the younger generation has, it's harder to digest, envision, and utilize new tech. Even my stepfather who coded with punch cards and builds old motherboards for fun struggles a bit with his smartphone. I think this election has been a good demonstration of how rapidly tech is changing the world and how asymmetric the adaptation has been. The ground is shifting so fast that it's much harder to predict and imagine the myriad of implications and the way they will feedback into systems.
r_smart 10y ago
I've been saying that had Clinton run her campaign the way Trump did, she would have been lauded as being a political genius who had learned to embrace being a political candidate in the age of the internet. I've run into some good analysis talking about how this election was a technology shift election in the same way Nixon v. Kennedy was. Just as Nixon didn't play well to television audiences, Clinton doesn't play well to internet audiences, particularly due to the persistence of information. There was a moment in the VP debate where Pence said something like: "This isn't the old days anymore, you can't just say whatever you want without repercussion." (that's a paraphrase). I think people overlook how effectively Trump uses Twitter. To this day. He drove a ton of outreach and messaging even when he couldn't get it framed the way he wanted in the news, and twice in the last couple weeks he's done some pretty interesting stuff where he represents a position his opponents hold, then watches as the press attacks him for it. He relies on the fact that the internet will get the truth out.
- KirinDave 10y ago
  > I think people overlook how effectively Trump uses Twitter. It's difficult to be enthusiastic about the propagation of outrageous lies as a communication revolution. Say what you will about effectiveness, he's said things he can't back up and it's hard to laud that.