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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 Jar

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

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.