Media Superfluity: Campaigns Don’t Need It

Fifth in a series 

Self Awareness

In the previous installments of we’ve considered various components of today’s practical politics, including election legitimacy, campaign inefficiency, voter uncertainty.  But there’s one element that’s barely come up: the media.  And there’s a reason for that: Namely, that the media don’t have that much to do with actually winning or losing elections.  Don’t get me wrong: I fully understand that the media drenches everything, that this is the information age, and that everyone in politics is obsessed with spin, narrative, news cycle, and so on.   

And yet as we can demonstrate, the media don’t really help win election campaigns.  So by this reckoning, the media are superfluous.  To which the immediate response could be, Of course the media don’t help win election campaigns.  That’s not its job! And that’s a fair enough point, but it is our job win campaigns.  So let’s pursue the point: Why shouldn’t the media helped us win?  And if the current media don’t wish to help, okay.  In which case, we probably need new media. 

That is, a media that is consciously aware of the need to help our campaign.  And if that’s not “media” as we think of it now—if it seems more like advertising, or p.r.—so be it.  Our goal is to win, not to bow down to old visions and modes.  So if we need some sort of new start-up, so be it.  Yes, it’s the information age, but nobody said what kind of information it has to be, or who has to produce it.  Campaigns can put forth their own information, aiming to help their candidate(s) win. 

In the meantime, the extant media is perfectly free to do what it does.   Even as, of course, the business model for much of it is faltering, amidst the glut of information in this, yes, information age.   

The key point here is for campaigns to realize that the media are superfluous, and, in fact, often harmful.  How so?  Because the media tend to accentuate the negative.  That is, reporters and pundits and social-media mavens are, more often than not, critics.  Some might think of themselves as friendly critics—and a very few might even define themselves as cheerleaders—and yet very of them see themselves as actually part of any campaign.   Indeed, on the right, the negativity is especially noticeable; the cutting edge of conservative media is, for the most part, profoundly hostile to Republican leadership.  There’s simply not much media space for a right-wing journalist who says, “Go, Republicans!”  Not much space and, in fact, much derision.  

And of course, there’s no great need for a campaign to have them around, because the campaign is about winning elections, not about spewing content.  That’s right: campaigns are about getting the most votes.  That’s what’s intrinsic to a campaign, or at least it should be.  By contrast, media coverage is extrinsic (even if the egos of the candidates and campaign domos thrill to coverage).  

In the meantime, the sooner campaigns and parties wake up, the better.   And one can, in fact, see stirrings.  For instance, after a Fox News-hosted debate among the Republican presidential hopefuls, veteran anti-tax activist Grover Norquist wrote for The Daily Caller on August 27, “The debate ill-served the Republican party (and the nation) by failing to focus like a laser on the one important question: Which candidate is most likely to win a general election against Joe Biden or whoever the central committee of the Democrat party chooses when/if polls show Biden cannot win.”  In a later comment to me, he added that the media—at least the media that purports to speak for and to the right “needs to be a self-aware participant in politics.” 

There’s a phrase to ponder: self-aware.  As in, consciously seek out the advancement of the Republican Party and conservative goals overall.  But is that journalism?  It would depend on who you ask.  Most “journalists” would probably say “no.”  Okay, fine, then they have made themselves extrinsic to the functioning of campaigns.   So long as campaigns understand that, everyone can be happy.   (Although again, the business model of most journalism is failing.) 

In the meantime, others in the media are starting to fill the void.   For instance, on October 4, The New York Times considered the impact of Steven Bannon and his “War Room” internet show: “He is a vital part of a feedback loop of red-meat media hits and social media posts, online fund-raising and unfettered preaching.”  There we have it: Bannon as an activist, helping Republicans—at least the ones he likes.  But is Bannon a journalist?  Not by most people’s definition, that’s for sure.  For those who like him, Bannon might be called an “activist,” or an “advocate,” or perhaps even a “player.” Or if they don’t like him, they might call Bannon a “rabble rouser,” a “demagogue”—and it gets worse from there.  And yet it seems fair to say that if Bannon visibly sets out to move the needle on intra-Republican politics, he can.  (Whether he can actually help Republicans defeat Democrats is iffier.) 

The Old Models

Interestingly, the roots of political journalism in America are, well, Bannon-esque.  That is, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most journalistic outlets (newspapers) were frankly partisan in their outlook, oftentimes subsidized by one kind of partisan or another.  That is, they came into existence as pamphlets of a kind; pushing a party line or label.  (Former NBC News and Fox News reporter-anchor Eric Burns ably chronicled this history in his 2007 book, Infamous Scribblers:  The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism.)  

Yet by the end of the 19th century, newspapers had mostly changed.  They might still have favored one party or the other, but their business model shifted to mass circulation, often in hot competition with other newspapers.  In this environment, what mattered was being entertaining, informing—and, one way or another, compelling.   In the 20th century, these changing news values were augmented by two new factors; first, the progressive era, which put a new and high-minded premium on information and uplift; and second, with the coming of electronic media, the federal government stepped in to assure some sort of fair and careful take on the news (the FCC’s “fairness doctrine” began to take shape in 1941). 

So as TV came to dominate media, these newer values came to dominate as well.  The media might have been left-of-center, and yet it was for the most part at least somewhat veiled and subtle.   Instead, what was most obvious was the growing “glamour” of TV news.  That is, the news was made flashy and the reporters, at least some of them, became stars, big-name celebrities.  This was a point made by Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic Ron Powers in his well-titled book from 1978, The Newscasters: The News Business as Show Business.  As he wrote, “Anchormen, weathermen, and reporters all, each represented a radical discontinuity with journalistic tradition. Each was a curious hybrid of personal magnetism, looks, showmanship and—in some cases—newsman. Each, to the degree that he was successful, was a bigger audience ‘draw’ than the news he reported or read.” 

To anyone of a certain age, this is familiar: National TV anchors such as Diane Sawyer, Jessica Savitch, and Arthur Kent became, well, sex symbols.   And the same was true for local TV news, where hotties came to abound.  In his book, Powers continued, “But the usurpation of television news reached a far deeper level than that of anchormen's personalities. It attained the status of a covert and insidious reversal of the very journalistic process itself. Instead of striving to impart information to the viewers, the salesmen-managers of television stations were engaged in a tacit conspiracy to extract information from the viewers—information that would serve the managers in their efforts to maximize audience size and thereby establish their respective newscasts as the top-dollar advertising draw in the market.”

We’re starting to see, here, that the news—including news-as-entertainment and news-as-titillation—was becoming a profit center.  And the pursuit of profitability further mutated the news, as the quest for ratings resulted in bidding wars for talent.  More from Powers: “What did people want (not need, but want) under the rubric of ‘news’?  What pleased them most? Amused them? Gratified them, charmed them, or provided them with the sort of vicarious cheap thrills that kept them mesmerized during prime-time entertainment? What colors did they like?  What faces, voices?  Conversely, what did viewers not want to know? What sort of news displeased them, threatened them, bored them, impelled them to switch away from a disturbing confrontation with harsh reality and into the lulling glades of television torpor?” 

Was the news still liberal?  Sure.  But idea that the news should be entertaining came first.   So even after the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the news stayed focused on entertainment, including star power.   

So can see: The media had come a long way since the time when newspaper were seen as arguments for, even propaganda for, one party or the other.  That is, by the late 20th century, the media had become its own power center, and a huge power center at that—some would say, in fact, that media was as powerful, or even more powerful, than anything else.  Perhaps so, and yet whatever its power rating, that’s not the same thing as aiding campaigns. 

The coming of cable news changed this dynamic somewhat.  That is, Fox went right and MSNBC went left, each taking a piece of the increasingly fragmented media market.  And yet neither Fox nor MSNBC saw itself as a mouthpiece for the Republican or Democratic parties.  In fact, the anchors were more typically ideological than the parties and the party leadership; talking heads preferred to make sharper and edgier points than the mainstreams of either party.   Once again, the press/media should be free to conduct itself any way it wishes, but we’re seeing that the Fourth Estate isn’t necessarily helping candidates and their campaigns.  Different function, different missions, different impacts.  

Indeed, it can be argued that cable news, and niched ideological media overall, actually hurts the parties.  That is, mainlining cable news makes most elections—that is, elections other than the presidency—boring.  If the big contest, the one that gets the national attention, is the presidential election, then elections for lesser offices must matte less.  Even an attuned voter might not know the names of the candidates, especially as one moves down the ballot. 

Even worse, national campaigns, including media razzle-dazzle, might generate more heat that is actually needed.  That is, to turn a turbine, water must rise to 212 degrees Fahrenheit to make steam—and then it’s best to stop there, heat-wise.  Any more heat doesn’t turn the turbine any faster, it just causes trouble for the system.  This, by the way, is a big problem with nuclear reactors; the temperature of the radioactive core is a couple thousand degrees, and so disposing of that excess heat is a systemic challenge that can break down and melt down.  In political terms, too much heat can distort party primaries, rewarding extremists who are less likely to be electable in a general election.  And our goal, of course, is to win the election with a rational, or at least amenable, pro-Framework candidate.  For all these reasons, it behooves us to disintermediate the media from our GOTV operation.  People, journalists, and pundits can do as they please, but our campaign wishes to build a tight relationship with actual voters; voters are the signal, the media are the noise.  The pursuit of that clear-channel signal means direct candidate-to-voter contact. Which, of course, is cheaper than TV advertising. 

OODA 

Lots of things seem like good ideas in one era and like not-such-good-ideas in another era.   And yet it’s oftentimes hard to see when some idea or practice or machine passes from optimum to sub-optimum.  After all, the wave of the future doesn’t come with a label. 

The challenge, in assessing events, is to achieve some degree of ecstasis.  That’s the ancient Greek word that refers to the capacity to stand outside oneself.  (And yes, ecstasis is the root of the word “ecstasy,” which has taken on different meanings than what Plato or Aristotle had in mind.) 

So as a healthy exercise in self-assessment, one needs to step outside oneself.  We might think on the question posed by Peter Drucker in his book from seven decades ago, The Effective Executive: “If we weren’t doing this now, would we start?”  That is, is what we’re doing, whatever it is, such a good idea that we should keep doing it?   To apply this Druckerian wisdom, we could ask ourselves: “If the media as it is today didn’t exist, would campaigns want to invent it?”  More likely, campaigns would say to themselves, “Surely there’s a better way!”   And so let’s start thinking of that better way.  

To further illustrate the point about thinking anew, we might follow the mental tactic developed by the U.S. Air Force to help pilots decide on a course of action in real time: The OODA Loop.  That is, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.  The idea being that each new moment in flying forces the pilot to consider the situation in the air, especially if it involves aerial combat.  Am I in the right place?  Am I at a disadvantage?  Is my opponent at a disadvantage.  Only a constant process of evaluation can maximize the pilot’s chances of survival, let alone victory.   To be sure, it’s exhausting to be looking around all the time, questioning everything, but it’s the only way to survive. 

So with Drucker and OODA in mind—and we considered Ockham’s Razor in the previous installment—let’s consider campaigns’ relationship with the media.  What’s the goal here?  The media, including the news media, have its goal: To entertain, including making the news entertaining.  That’s all fine and good, but the goal of the campaign is different: The campaign wants to win elections.  If the media can help that goal, fine.  If the media can’t help, or if it hurts, then campaigns need to keep thinking.    

This is not a slap at our friends in the Fourth Estate.  It’s just an observation that as we focus on the core transaction of a campaign—the fundamental unit is the vote—we realize that we don’t need to focus on non-core transitions.  The voter’s relationship with our candidate matters to us.  The voter’s relationship to the media does not matter.

To restate that a bit, we can say that the voter’s non-granular relationship to the media does not matter.   Pols can win an election without media, but they can’t win it without the most votes. If pols have the votes, they don’t need the media.  Of course, some will insist that the media are vital to the electoral process.  After all, they are delivering news, affecting opinion, carrying advertising.  And yes, the media do all those gerunding things—delivering, affecting, carrying—and yet that doesn’t make them vital to a campaign.  After all, it’s perfectly possibly to consume a lot of media and not vote—or to vote for the wrong party or candidate. You don’t need media any more to win elections. You just need to win elections.  

So what if the media did want to help?  Then it would be, as Grover Norquist suggests, a self-aware media.  And that would be great for campaigns.  A media that actually helps candidates win.  

Next: Politicians' Unaccountability

Voter Uncertainty, and How to Fix It

Fourth in a series 

Show Me the Voting! 

Okay, so we’ve critiqued the current way of campaigning. We’ve emphasized that the real issue is getting people to vote.   But then there’s still the question: Even if we know they voted, do we know how they voted?   Can we be absolutely, positively sure that they voted the way that they said they did?  The citizen is under no obligation to reveal, of course, but if they don’t, then we can’t know.  And if we can’t know, then a more efficient political machine is not possible. 

There’s one way to make sure, of course: take a picture of the ballot.  And, further, record the process in which the ballot goes into the slot.   Now of course, that doesn’t guarantee that the ballot has been faithfully counted, and yet at least it demonstrates the input.  And as we saw in Part One, verifying the input is at least a first step in verifying the throughput and then, most importantly, the output.  That is, the actual counted ballot.  But again, if the ballot can’t be verified in the first place, then there’s not much hope of verifying it has moves through the process.  Nailing down accurate and honest elections might be a long process, but we have to start somewhere.  

And so we could start by verifying the ballot as the voter meant to mark it.  To that end, it certainly does seem reasonable to produce a photo of one’s own ballot. Perhaps with one’s own face in the same frame: The voter holding his or her ballot.  That is, a “ballot selfie.”  As The New York Times put it in 2016, “To many, there’s no better celebration of democracy than a voting booth photograph. It’s the moment political talk turns to political action, one younger voters are especially eager to record and share with friends.” 

But there’s a question: Is this act legal?  Intuitively, it would seem that free speech, and free expression, should prevail, especially concerning political speech and expression.  And in fact, there’s no federal law against photographing a ballot.  However, the states are a curious patchwork.  and the states are a patchwork. According to Vox, in 14 states it’s not legal, and in another 10 states, the law is unclear.  The thinking behind the ban on photographing ballots is it discourages vote-buying, and that might be true, although the laws seem more aimed at voting machine companies, as opposed to individual voters.  In any case, few, if any, individual voters have been prosecuted for photographing (an antique term in the age of cell phone cameras) their own ballot, and yet the overhang of illegality is enough to discourage larger organizations from doing it.

Still, it seems likely that the general tendency in American society today—people taking selfies of themselves doing just about everything—is going to prevail.  That is, oneself photographing oneself and one’s ballot will be okay.

The Great Separation: The Public Act and the Secret Ballot

But if we’re on the subject of voter certainty, here’s a question: Why are ballots secret, anyway?  Any way you slice it, the secret ballot makes it harder to verify the balloting, so why are we making it hard on ourselves?   And come to think of it, even the notion of a ballot is potentially troublesome, as the ballot is a different thing than the person.  So even to add the concept of “ballot” is to create complexity beyond the person—the complexity of two, as opposed to one.  If John Smith wishes to vote Republican, or Democrat, that’s simple enough.  So why not simply count John Smith, as opposed to his ballot?   Why not keep it unitary, as opposed to making it binary?  Why secret, as opposed to open?    

We should keep in mind that the whole essence of our Constitution and our government is the republic, an English word derived from the Latin res publica, the public thing.  The acts of politicians are mostly public—people would be horrified if legislatures voted in secret and are always demanding more “sunshine”—so why is the citizen’s act of voting private?  Especially when that makes the voting process vulnerable to fraud?  

In fact, through most of the history of democracy, citizen voting was public.  In ancient Greece, or in the Italian republics of the Renaissance era, voting was public: a show of hands, or a voice vote.  Simple and clear.   In early America, voting was similar public: a show of hands, or dropping pebbles, or tokens, in a bowl.  In his classic work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the New England town meeting for its openness, which we would now call transparency.  In the town meeting, citizens could speak openly, and vote openly, witnessed, of course, by their fellow citizens: “Township institutions . . . give the people the taste for freedom and the art of being free.” Does that sound so bad?  Tocqueville continued: local control, expressed publicly, was the key to a strong civic spirit: 

Patriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance.  In this manner the activity of the township is continually perceptible; it is daily manifested in the fulfillment of a duty or the exercise of a right; and a constant though gentle motion is thus kept up in society.

Yet with the coming of mass suffrage in the late 19th century, including from new immigrants from non-English-speaking countries, concerns arose about the ability of political bosses in cities to coerce voters.  This was undoubtedly a legitimate concern, and yet perhaps, over the long run, the solution was worse than the original problem.  And back then, the shift from public to private voting was laden with controversy.  

For instance, the British reformer John Stuart Mill, a liberal in his day, opposed the shift to secret balloting.  In 1869 he declared, “It appears to me that secret suffrage . . . would at present, and still more in time to come, produce far greater evil than good.”  To Mill’s reckoning, voting was a trust more than a right; after all, it were a right, then it could be bought or sold.  But a trust must be held to a higher standard.  And yet, in Mills view, the secret ballot was a selfish act.   Reacting to the argument that secret balloting was needed to counteract duress, Mill declared, “A base and mischievous vote is now, I am convinced, much oftener given from the voter's personal interest, or class interest, or some mean feeling in his own mind, than from any fear of consequences at the hands of others.”  And so Mill continued, the voters own baseness and mischievousness, combined with the secret ballot, “would enable him to yield himself up free from all sense of shame or responsibility.”  The right thing to do was the public vote, “under the eye and criticism of the public.”  If democracy is going to work, there must be accountability, and that applies to everyone: We all, in our way, must stand up and be counted.   Yet Mill’s view, of course, was defeated.  

In the 1880s and 1890s, the U.S. began to switch from open balloting to the so-called "Australian," or secret, ballot.  The argument that prevailed was that the secret ballot would be more orderly, would prevent coercion, leaving voters “alone with their conscience.”  

Once again, maybe the secret ballot was right solution for that era.  But now we live in a different era, and so maybe a different approach is needed.  Today, as a function of red-blue polarization, just about everyone is only too happy to tell you who they voted for—and who they voted against.  As noted, open balloting, with a visible chain of custody—me, the citizen, and my vote, to be counted, and, if need be, recounted—would all but eliminate vote fraud. 

So while there’s no need to rehash the electoral history of the last 150 years, we can say that,, a century-and-a-half later, the issue is being revisited.  Being revisited already, in fact.

The GameStop Lesson

In this era of secret ballots, the only way to verify a voter’s intention is to see what he or she says.  And so external tests help, even if they aren’t conclusive.  Still, the external tests, made all the more visible  These can be quite visible.  In fact, we’ve already seen something of a dry run for this.  In 2021, an army of activist investors, informed by free-for-all platforms such as Reddit, and powered by low-cost or no-cost trading platforms such as Robin Hood, chose to drive up the stock price of video game retailer GameStop. The stock was worth less than a dollar in 2019, and yet the activists thought it was undervalued, so they bid it up to as high as $347 in January 2021.  Some will ask: Was this truly an investment play—including a squeeze on short sellers—or was this some aspect of herd mentality and general rowdiness?  the madness of crowds?  Nearly three years later, GameStop stock had settled into the  $15 range, which, while down enormously from its peak, is still a multiple higher than its earlier price before the run-up.    That suggests that, yes, group psychology had driven speculative excess on GameStop, a 21st-century tulip mania.  And yet still, the proverbial “army of Davids” had proven a point; they had self-organized online, and made an impact, and discovered at least some latent value in the stock.  Wall Street had had the edge over small traders, using high frequency trading and algorithms, and reaching into “dark pools,” private exchangers were big traders can trade without moving the market.  (In other words, it’s a kind of institutionalized insider trading.)   It’s a safe bet that this sort of self-organization will occur again.   In fact, along the way, GameStoppers blitzed help on a charity for gorillas, so who knows where all this will end, if it ever ends.  

We can see that the same elements of the GameStop—individuals acting as a peaceful flash mob, operating outside of traditional structures—could be applied to politics.  That is, an army of voters wash over the balloting.  Quick action, profound results; now that’s leverage.  Unlike investments, the voter flash mob can come and go--so long as it alights on Election Day, or, nowadays, Election Season.  The goal is to make sure that the votes are cast and counted, and group enthusiasm can drive that.  

If a citizen is vocally, demonstrably, in favor of something, that’s a pretty good clue that he or she will vote for it.  And for a political campaign, that sense, while not ironclad, is worth a lot.  However, to make it worth more, the optimizing campaign must drive up turnout for its vote as close to 100 percent as possible.  So that suggests further steps to verify the commitment.  And that takes us back to photographing ballots.  Or, if they can’t be photographed, then we go to some sort of verifying procedure, such as another person eyeballing the vote.   So now we come to ideas such as parties, in which everybody brings their ballot to show it off, allowing for some campaign official(s) to verity it.  And yes, it might be hard to get people to resist taking pictures of such festivities, but then, as we have noted, nobody gets prosecuted for exuberant selfie-ing. 

Furthermore, without a doubt, new technology will enter in.  For instance, the non-fungible tokens (NFT).  These were a tulip-like craze in about 2021, and yet it seems that since then, their value has fallen to pretty much zero.  Zero might be the appropriate monetary valuation, but as a token of political solidarity—as in, you get one of you’re on the voting team—they could be worth a lot to campaigns.   If voters can be convinced to publicly stand by their candidate, and let their vote be measured in the meantime, well, the whole nature of campaigns changes, as the focus shifts from advertising to vote-counting.  

Indeed, whether it’s selfies, parties, or NFTs, we can see that a public expression of a ballot is worth a lot.  

And there’s more coming. We can see that bots and AI could play a role in tending to the candidates, making sure they feel connected.  And some have gone further.  For instance, Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, sees potential in a tech-oriented Proof of Personhood, which, he explains, could have political potential.  Indeed it could.  But it could also be a case of overengineering.  That is, we don’t need to know everything about everyone, down to a retina scan.  We just need to know that they are an eligible citizen, that they intend to vote for our candidate, and that they are willing to verify their vote.  That’s all we need to win elections.

Next: The Superfluity of the Media  

  

The Inefficiency of Campaigns

Third of a series

If We Weren’t Doing This Now, Would We Start? 

In part one of this series, we considered some of the key issues of vote fraud, and vote counting, in the U.S.  In part two, we looked at the resulting problem of the legitimacy of American elections.  Now, in part three, let’s look at some of the challenges facing candidates and campaigns, starting with the inefficiency of the current campaign system.    

To be sure, at the end of every election, somebody wins, so the system might seem to be at least somewhat efficient.  Yet still, some spectacular examples of inefficiency leap to mind.  For instance, in his 2020 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Michael Bloomberg spent some $1.25 billion, all in, and got of course, bupkis.  And in 2022, Citadel’s Ken Griffin donated $50 million to an Illinois Republican gubernatorial hopeful, Richard Irvin, who did all the usual candidate-y things, such as making speeches and running TV ads, and yet he lost badly, coming in third in the GOP primary, garnering a meager 119,000 votes.  Which means that Griffin’s $50 million “investment” worked out to $420 a vote.  

And of course, the real test of the current campaign system will come when something better comes along—as, for example, described here.  Only with competition and the resulting gains in perspective do we really see what works best—and what works worst.  

We can pause to wonder as to what’s going on.  After all, these and other fatcats in and around politics have typically proven that they know how to run operations.  And yet even so, they make spectacularly bad political investments.  Could it be that they are being outfoxed by the campaign consultants?  Or is it that the system just doesn’t work well?   Either way, the industry seems ripe for reinvention and/or disruption. 

When confronted with an issue of the status quo, we can ask the piercing question which Peter Drucker, writing seven decades ago in The Effective Executive, suggested every firm ask of itself: “If we did not already do this, would we go into it now?” And if the answer is “no,” Drucker continued, then the company should start thinking if maybe it, whatever it is, might not be such a good idea.  Indeed, perhaps exit the activity altogether and seek something better.  

According to Open Secrets, total campaign spending, nationwide in the U.S. in 2020, totaled $14.4 billion. Although surely, the amount spent to influence voting is vastly greater than that.  How would, for example, one count all the money spent, directly and indirectly, on political persuasion, be it via organizations or by the media—including social media?  It’s easy to conclude that the true number, if it could ever quantified, is a vast multiple of $14.4 billion.   So there’s a lot of money in politics.  Yet whatever the total, the only thing we know for sure is that the leverage of politics—political influence on the economy—extends to every penny of the $26 trillion or so of U.S. GDP.   So it’s worth figuring out how to do this right.

Craft Businesses

Yet despite all the money and tech—well-funded digital strategists and data-crunchers abound now in political campaigns as budgets for a mere House race swell into the tens of millions—the business itself is still a “craft” business.  That is, there are probably hundreds of thousands Americans who call themselves “campaign consultants,” or professional political operatives of one stripe or another.  They aim to serve the estimated 519,000 elected officials in the U.S.  And yet even the largest campaign campaign operations have but a small market share.  

We can note the enormous churn of creative destruction in the process; campaigns and consultancies come and go with rapidity.   As a result, theres’s a lot of friction in the basic meat of campaigns which is, increasingly, data: the names and addresses of voters and donors.  The national Republican and Democratic parties have their treasured lists, as do the campaign arms of U.S. Senate and House members in both parties: The NRSC, DSCC, NRCC, and DCCC.   And there are similar operations for governors, state attorneys general, state legislatures, and so on. 

In addition, thousands of firms and political action committees have their own proprietary lists.  So we’re already up to thousands of data siloes.  To which we can add the uncounted number of campaigns that pull together at least some data, and do at least something with it, win or lose.  These entities come and go, and their data are often lost, like tears in rain.  We can quickly see that data quality, data security—even basic data retention—is an important issue.  

Truly effective data operations—from Google to the credit card companies to the Social Security Administration—don’t operate this way.  They, and their industries, long ago realized that consolidation into the data equivalent of fortresses was the only way to go, data-sanctity-wise.  In a world of hackers and other kinds of fraudsters, there’s simply no way to avoid a heavy investment in cyber-security. And so those operations that aren’t investing heavily are likely porous.  The wide-open pores are, in fact, legion. 

We can’t say that the status quo is catastrophic; we can merely say that it is suboptimal.  And the lack of privacy and security for personal data is probably destined to collide with some pretty heavy and costly lawsuits and other legal interventions.  This likely future litigation will probably force a roll up—the concentration of the industry in fewer, more defensible forms.  Such concentration is also in keeping with the general tendency of firms to scale up their data operations into larger realms that better capture economies of scale.  

The Roll Up  

To cite a past industry analogy, we might claim that the state of the politics biz today to that of the car industry 100 or more years ago.  Amidst the Cambrian Explosion of auto innovation at the beginning of the 20th century, it’s been estimated that some 2,000 U.S. car companies came into existence in the first two decades of the last century.  And yet by mid-century those U.S. companies were rolled up (willingly or unwillingly) into the Big Three, as well as just a handful of tiny-niche survivors.  Today, there are more big companies than just three, including foreign makers, and yet the top ten brands control more than 90 percent of the market.  

We can see this phenomenon elsewhere. Just a few decades ago, there were thousands of internet service providers, each striving to serve some local market.  Today, there are still thousands, and yet just a handful of “phone” and/or “cable” companies dominate the ISP market.  

It would seem that there’s an inevitability to this process of consolidation, and so it’s likely to come to politics.  In a way, of course, it already has. The two parties, Republican and Democratic, control, between them, 99 percent or more of all partisan political offices. 

Boutique Politics   

The duopoly of politics itself makes the cacophony of political operations all the more interesting—and all the more looking like a lagging indicator.  For the most part, campaign firms style themselves on the persona of the person, or persons, who originate the firm.  Back in 1934, California politicos Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter started Campaign, Inc.; they are remembered as the first campaign consultants.  

The history of campaign consultancy since abounds with famous people, from Tony Schwartz to Stu Spencer to David Garth to Roger Ailes to Lee Atwater to Bob Squier to Bob Shrum to James Carville to Mandy Grunwald to Jeff Roe.  The commonality of all these trailblazers is that while they and their firms can be hugely profitable in their moment, the companies tend to dissolve quickly.  It’s not that they go bankrupt or cease to exist, it’s that their partners have a way of cashing out or otherwise leaving the scene, while the entities are bought up and and reshuffled. To be sure, sometimes these campaign firms are bought up and rolled up into giant firms.  For instance, in 2010, WPP bought Blue State Digital, bringing the Democratic consultancy into a global multination boasting revenues of $17 billion. There have been hundreds of huge deals, because a hot shop is, indeed, profitable. 

Yet still, there’s the challenge of what the German sociologist Max Weber’s called “the rationalization of charisma.”  That is, the process by which an institution outlasts its founder, if it does.  The charismatic hero will not last forever, and so the company must rationalize his or her charisma, turning it into a system or, if you will, a bureaucracy. It’s the only way something can survive; although, of course, with AI, who knows what new longevity tool will emerge.

Yet we can further add that if a company if depersonalized, it becomes all the more clear that underlying product—the ultimate real currency of campaigning— is data.  That is, data, as expressed in big data, structured in algorithms and interface with CRM, and so on, wins.  

To be sure, there will always be great TV ads—moving, funny, memorable, effective—and there will be internet cognate of this creativity, in the form of videos, animation, AI-ification, gamification, who knows.  But in the end, politics is a numbers game.

Thus the issue of data optimization, even survival, once again rears its head.  With every campaign or corporate move, there’s friction. And that’s trouble, including potential legal liability for data gone wrong. 

The point here is not to argue that a few giant search engines, or phone companies, should be running campaigns. Quite possibly, it’s important, even vital, that campaign creativity and political freedom necessitates continued decentralization.  And yet even if the industry remains decentralized, it will still likely benefit from some sort of consortium element on data, some common repository, the cloud equivalent of a stock exchange, or farmers’ coops, or deposit-insured banks, or reinsurance.   If not a roll up, then a rationalization is coming.

The Fundament Unit is the Vote

And as we think about what might come next, we can learn from the data-driven transformation of another field, which is also a numbers game: baseball.  Perhaps more than any other sport, baseball has always been nerds; if one sits in the stands, one might see someone barely watching the game, but rather, poring over stats, for purposes of betting or perhaps just geekery. 

Seventy years ago, the statistician for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Allan Roth, had a simple-but-profound insight: The fundamental unit in baseball is the run.  That is, stats such as batting average, earned run average, etc. all sounded good—and fans loved them--and yet they weren’t necessarily translating into runs, and thus wins.  And winning is the point of the game, at least to managers and their teams.  What matters is on-base percentage, more than homers and stolen bases and then, of course, a million more stats, such as hits and homers when men are on base.  

There was nothing complicated about Roth’s basic insight, and yet it was profound; even as the complexity  Indeed, the application of his insight mostly consisted of chopping away extraneous statistics—what a scientist would call epiphenomena—focusing on those stats that were actually causally linked to whether or not the team won.  Isn’t that so often the case: One must reduce clutter to actually see what needs to be seen.  In more recent decades, Bill James turned Roth’s simplicity into a new kind of complexity, as he started developing statistics that more closely correlated with runs, such as whether or not a batter hits with men on base.  And then, Billy Beane synthesized Roth and James and created a new style of baseball managing/general managing.  The rules didn’t change, at least not much (the designated hitter being one big change).  But what did change was the evaluation of the data.  (Beane was made famous, of course, in Michael Lewis’ book, Moneyball, and then further immortalized by Brad Pitt in the 2011 Hollywood movie.) 

Ockham’s Election

What Roth did was wield Ockham’s Razor.  Back in the 13th century, William of Ockham said famously, “eliminate unnecessary complexity.”   As with Roth and the run, Ockham’s statement was profound its simplicity.  Ever since, Ockham’s Razor—everything else being equal, choose the simplest possibility—has been the standard for science and logic.  (And as such, it was loathed by others of a different turn of mind; the conservative Richard Waver, author of the 1947 book, Ideas Have Consequences, argued that Ockham was when the world took a decisive  turn for the worse because the Razor began chipping way at faith.) 

In subsequent centuries, figures such as Sir Francis Bacon further clarified the scientific method, so that discoveries resulted from an organized systematic process, as well as individual brilliance.  One needs both, of course, and yet anything worth knowing in science and technology needs to be written down and quantified, so that it can be further understood and improved. In thew words of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, “When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”  That’s the point: If you want anything to last, it has to expressed in a way that others can understand; and math is the most universal of languages. 

Shifting disciplines again, we can look to the Yale historian Edmund S. Morgan, who said that good scholar needed the “courage to simplify.”  Echoing Ockham, Morgan continued,“To simplify where you know little is easy.  To simplify where you know a great deal requires gifts of a different order: unusual penetration of mind and, above all, sheer nerve.”

We might begin a deeper analysis by making an Allan Rothian point: In politics, the fundamental unit is the vote.  Indeed, as we shall see, if the focus is kept on votes, then we need to question everything that is not voting.  By putting the focus on the fundamental unit in baseball, Beane & Co. changed the baseball; by putting the focus on the fundamental unit in politics, maybe  we can change politics.

And in politics, if one thinks about how campaigns judge themselves, one might think about the numbers being tossed around to show that the campaign is doing well—money raised, social media impressions delivered, contacts made, money raised, etc.  And, of course, polls, even if hey are only are, as is said, snapshot of the moment.  Of course, what really matters to a campaign, in the end, is votes.  That is, Did your candidate get more votes than the other candidate?  Did the campaign win?  

Let’s drill down, imagining it’s our campaign.  Let’s start with the realization that most voters, in both parties, have already resolved how they’re going to vote.  This is the base we hear so much about: those voters who vote in every election, or almost every election, always, or almost always, for the same party.  Probably 80 percent of voters count as base voters, roughly split between the two parties.  So if a base voter is one of “ours,” here’s our opportunity to insert some Moneyball-type thinking, by working to push the probability that he or she actually votes for our candidate to the highest possible level—ideally, of course, to the certainty of 100 percent.  Just as winning baseball teams strive to clear the bases by getting all their on-base players to home plate for the runs, so, too, we wish to “clear the bases” by getting all our voters to the voting booth (including, of course, mailboxes and any other place that receives ballots) for the election.  By this reckoning, politics, like baseball, is a numbers game: Get more runs to win; get more votes to win. 

So how, exactly, to get all our peeps to the polls?  This effort might entail any degree of of “white glove” treatment for the voter: nudges, reminders, peer pressure, made all the easier by big data and AI—imagine every vote-intending voter with a chatbot nearby.  Some might say that this is just good ol’ GOTV—Get Out The Vote—updated with new technology.  And in a way, that’s true: It is GOTV, made all the more granular with digital tools.  And for sure, there’s nothing devious or corrupt about it; our campaign is just applying the time-tested wisdom: Get there firstest with the mostest.  Yet of course, if this were easy, everyone would be doing it. 

Two Inefficiencies to be Ironed Out 

One inefficiency is on the vote side, the other on the elected official/party side.  As we think about this, we can keep this thought in the back of our minds: We can see that the costly superstructure of political campaigning is extrinsic.  What’s intrinsic, and needs to homed in on, is the actual process of getting voters to the voting booth—or, of course, these days, with absentee and mail-in voting, getting the voting booth to the voter.  Just as Roth wanted more runs, we want more votes.  Let’s keep it that simple.  Let’s talk about the voter first.

The Two-Screen Dilemma for Voters

Right now, the voter has to deal with two screens. 

The first screen is the one by which he or she sees the world of political news: typically either a TV screen or a computer screen, including the screen on a smart phone.  This is typically a news portal of some kind, be it cable news or a a news or commentary site.   This site, or sites, might be entertaining, but in general it is not politically interactive.  That  is, one can absorb information—video/audio, print—and yet one can’t typically take action on that site.  They are, in this sense, passively nontransactinal. 

The second screen is the one in which he or she takes action.  This would be more like a party website, or a donor platform such as Act Blue or WinRed. These are plenty interactive, but they aren’t, as a rule, entertaining,  That’s not their purpose: The purpose is to facilitate an action.  They are actively transactional.  Come here, give money, and perhaps do other things, such as apply for an absentee ballot.  And likely some day soon, vote.  

But here’s the question: Why are there two screens?   Everything in our world of consumer convenience says, unify, simplify.  That’s why we can put just about everything on our smart phone or tablet, from communication to premises security to tax payments.  The two-screen status quo flunks the Drucker Test: If we weren’t doing this now, would we start?  

So the voter is ill-served by this inefficiency.  But the politician, too, is ill-served.

The Opaque Screen for Politicians 

As a general rule, politicians like to talk.  But as a matter of campaign efficiency, their political advisers  should wish to talk first about their own election or re-election.  And here’s where we say where the media aren’t aligned.  After all, reporters and other kinds of journos want to talk about all the issues of the day, whatever they might be.  And so they will inevitably drag the pol into discussions of anything and everything.  The talented pol might well seek to steer the discussion to some stronger ground or safer harbor, but that’s not always possible.   It’s the rare pol who has the clout to demand that the topics raised on the segment or show stick to an approved menu.  

Moreover, to no small extent, cable news encourages a kind of circus-like atmosphere, since TV news is designed to entertain, as well as inform.  The pol might not be mind being an entertainer, but at some point, entertainment values get in the way of message-delivering.  There’s a reason why brands are careful about where their brand finds itself; pols, too, are a brand, and so they must be careful—even if they aren’t always so careful.  

Moreover, because the pol is talking on someone else’s platform, the audience is probably not legible to the pol.  Suppose a pol goes on Fox News, thereby speaking to a few million folks.  That’s all great, but the pol doesn’t know exactly who he (or she) is talking to.  All the pol knows is that he was on for three minutes.  Even Fox doesn’t know exactly who was watching, because TV ratings measure households and their general demographics, not the exact name and details.  Moreover, the pol-on-Fox will quickly realize that a repeat performance—and the repeat after that, and after that—most likely means that he is talking to pretty much the same people.  So not only does he not know the identities, but it’s likely that the unknowns are themselves, reruns.  So a rerun pol talking to a rerun audience.  That’s inefficient.  To put that another way, the signal-to-noise ratio isn’t so favorable.  This issue becomes all the more acute if the pol is focused on a critical election in his home state or district, as by definition, the vast majority of the audience will be outside of the needed jurisdiction.   (There’s a reason why the most common figures on cable news either have national ambitions or safe districts; if so, then they’re happy to play the cable game.) 

However, if the inefficiency of campaigns is a problem, the uncertainty of the voters is another problem.  And we’ll turn to that next.