1/27/2017

How a Silicon Valley Campaign Strategy Won Trump the Electionprocess.st/campaign-strategy/

Adam Henshall

January 27, 2017

According to the Laboratory for Social Machines from MIT Media Lab, Donald Trump was the most influentialforce on the 2016 election.

More than any television news stations, newspapers, or other public bodies. Donald J Trump, as an individual, wasthe most powerful influencer on the nation.

This influence was driven by his huge social media following. In March 2016 he had 6.8m Twitter followers, 6.3mFacebook likes, and 4.1m views on his YouTube channel. Now, he has over 22m Twitter followers.

But his eventual success lay deeper than just finely crafted tweet storms.

In 2016, with the election of Donald Trump and the successful Brexit vote, major campaigns had been won onemerging political battlegrounds.

Through social media, pop-up phonebanking platforms, independent new media, and email security issues, we’veseen a broadened scope for ways campaigns can succeed or fail.

Obama’s ‘08 campaign and re-election were fought heavily on social media, and Trump has mirrored some of thatsuccess. But his campaign wasn’t solely a media triumph.

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Much has been written about what Trump has said and done with little focus on his team behind the scenes.Recognizing the work of his campaign team helps us see the increasing importance of tech in the shaping of ourpolitical landscape.

These are the alternative facts of the US election. How an understanding of technological change put Trump in theWhite House.

Utilizing tech is not a silver bullet

It is important to recognize that these campaigns were not won by innovative practices alone. The two examplesgiven above both represent a change from the norm in an election where the opposing side symbolized acontinuation of a status quo.

Donald Trump may have won the presidency, but he didn’t single-handedly win a majority in the US Senate or theHouse of Representatives. The candidates standing in those elections shouldn’t be discounted, and possibly theoverwhelming republican victory across all three branches shows us something about the political will of the nation.

Plus, votes were close, with Trump relying on the Electoral College to confirm his victory.

And before we get carried away with the power of tech-driven campaigns, they haven’t all won. Bernie Sanders’campaign for the Democratic primaries seemed one of the closest situations we’ve seen to a political startup.Crowdfunding its way from obscurity against a guaranteed victor, Sanders’ campaign created phonebankingplatforms and organizing channels rapidly to disseminate his message and put up a real fight against the Party’scandidate. It also used other communication startups like Hustle to try to connect his young tech-literate followersand lauded a massive Facebook presence over his competitor, Clinton.

However, despite his tech-driven campaign startup, Sanders was unsuccessful in achieving victory.2/9

Trump’s Media Strategy has Been Considered Key

The Trump campaign notably took a savvy media approach.

It appears, at first, difficult to say how much within Trump’s media strategy was by design and how much washappenstance. Joel Simon writing for the Columbia Journalism Review in March 2016 foreshadowed Trump’s mediaapproach in the run in to the election, concluding:

“The media relationship is defined by power, and as the power of traditional media ebbs, therelationship between journalists and those they cover is redefined. Trump’s media strategy isconfirmation that the most effective way to get media attention today is to engage in shockingbehavior, use social media to control your message, and rely on traditional media to amplify yourvoice. As long as that strategy works, it will be used.”

Simon’s core argument was that Trump understood the 24-hour news cycle we live in and exploited both it andonline news media’s need for clicks. Trump was able to place himself in the middle of the spotlight whenever hechose by saying something provocative.

Simon goes on to suggest that this outspoken and brazen expression of opinions helped not just awaken hissupporters, but make his supporters more aware of each other. In turn, this spurred the creation of onlinecommunities committed to Trump’s cause. This phenomenon was dubbed the Meme Wars by many of hisadherents. Comical as it may be, the groundswell of collective political action online added extra high energy to theTrump campaign and may well have contributed to his overall victory.

The Google Trends analysis below shows the online dominance of Trump vs Clinton over the course of 2016 interms of prominence in conversations.

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This media strategy of Trump’s may have been understood early by those within the industry, but they still followedalong with others in providing Trump with the coverage he aimed for. Jim Rutenberg, writing for the New York Timeson January 12th 2017, identifies:

“The news media remains an unwitting accomplice in its own diminishment as it fails to get a handleon how to cover this new and wholly unprecedented president.”

The theme identified by Simon was that traditional media outlets were losing relevance against the power of socialmedia for information dissemination, and Trump exploited these technological shifts.

However, it seems this conclusion shouldn’t be seen separately from the rise of new independent mediaorganizations – most notably Breitbart, whose former chairman Steve Bannon now sits as chief strategist andSenior Counsellor to President Trump.

These organizations allowed for Trump to gain positive media coverage even when the mainstream wouldn’t give itto him. These opposing-view articles could then be trotted out to counter the coverage given by established mediaoutlets.

Trump’s media strategy was highly successful even if it could be argued it wasn’t core to his victory. Yet, not onlywas it intelligent strategy, it was also founded on a smart and slick technological infrastructure. There was moremethod behind the madness than self-critical journalists are giving him credit for.

How Trump employed software and its practices

Steven Bertoni, writing for Forbes, gives us a sneak peek into the inner workings of the Trump campaign and whatprinciples its success had been based on.

Trump’s original campaign strategy, carried out alongside Corey Lewandowski, was more lean than it was leanstartup. There were hardly any staffers, very little infrastructure, and an intention of seeing how far they could getwithout spending too much money.

Grab headlines and hold rallies . That’s what it boiled down to.

Then, an unlikely hero stepped up and began to oversee a change in focus and direction. It wasn’t Steve Bannonnor Paypal mafioso Peter Thiel. It was Ivanka Trump’s husband Jared Kushner.

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Kushner was a co-investor in online marketplace Cadre with Peter Thiel and Alibaba’s Jack Ma, while his brother isa venture capitalist who co-founded the unicorn startup Oscar Health. From this base, Kushner took over Trump’ssocial media strategy and brought Silicon Valley to Trump Tower.

Peter Thiel remarked:

“It’s hard to overstate and hard to summarize Jared’s role in the campaign. If Trump was the CEO,Jared was effectively the chief operating officer.”

While Google’s Eric Schmidt, who was helping the Clinton campaign, described:

“Jared Kushner is the biggest surprise of the 2016 election. Best I can tell, he actually ran thecampaign and did it with essentially no resources.”

Kushner reportedly leveraged his Silicon Valley connections and asked for the best digital marketers in the world.In an early test, he used Facebook’s micro-targeting and a stash of Trump merchandise to test the boundaries ofmoney-making. The campaign went from making $8,000 a day to $80,000.

Using this initial test as a base, Kushner spent $160,000 promoting a low-tech straight to camera video of Trump,which probably cost almost nothing to make.

The video received 74 million views .

Once the Republican nomination was nailed on, Kushner took over the campaign. His tests had been done and theirconcepts proven. Now he needed to find a way to scale these tests up to a nationally successful level.

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The campaign set up a 100 person office in San Antonio while keeping a low key presence.

This office was the data center.

“We played Moneyball, asking ourselves which states will get the best ROI for the electoral vote. Iasked, how can we get Trump’s message to that consumer for the least amount of cost?” – Kushner

This focus on customer acquisition cost and the lean principles Kushner instilled into the team drove the campaignforward. Every cent would be spent wisely; not just avoiding wastage, but focusing spending via strategy.

Bertoni writes:

“FEC filings through mid-October indicate the Trump campaign spent roughly half as much as theClinton campaign did.”

Kushner’s approach resembled the disruption of a traditional industry for which Silicon Valley has becomesynonymous with. They used outsourcing to data partners like Cambridge Analytica to map key policy issues bygeography, and Deep Root to only run TV adverts if the demographic for a particular show could be susceptible to acertain policy proposal.

They also employed unusual techniques. It was noted that they would employ multiple digital marketing firms andhave them compete against each other side by side to cut costs and inefficiencies – creating optimum processes.

Schmidt sums up the Kushner lead campaign:

“Jared understood the online world in a way the traditional media folks didn’t. He managed toassemble a presidential campaign on a shoestring using new technology and won. That’s a big deal.Remember all those articles about how they had no money, no people, organizational structure?Well, they won, and Jared ran it.”

Tech in political processes on both sides

Of course, it wasn’t just the Trump campaign who recognized the importance of big data and strong organizationalprocesses.

Wired, in June 2016, reported on how Dan Wagner and David Shor were going to push the most tech-drivenanalytics program politics has ever seen behind Hillary Clinton. The two have been involved in political analysis foryears; currently working under the banner of Civis Analytics.

They worked together primarily in Barack Obama’s re-election campaign. In his 2012 run, Obama established ahidden-away data center of his own, referred to as the Cave. The Cave was physically separated from the rest ofthe campaign team and served to deliver a secretive daily “Golden Report” to the head honchos.

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This Golden Report, prepared by Wagner and co (pictured above), was the result of 62,000 simulations of theelection outcome based on the data they were gathering. This informed the strategic decision-making of thecampaign. The prime example of which was when public polling was showing Obama had dropped 10 points inMichigan. This opened the state up for Romney to be competitive and the Republicans flooded it with people andcash. The Obama team didn’t react. The reports from the Cave showed Michigan was not in crisis and the publicpolls were wrong.

The amount of money saved by not panicking in reaction to those polls was $20m, paying for the entire cost ofthe data center.

In Wagners words, Civis Analytics can provide that same knowledge of voter sentiment:

“We offer an incredibly scarce resource: How do people really feel about the country?”

Civis weren’t alone in wanting to use technology to help spur a Clinton victory. Eric Schmidt of Google, whocoincidentally is the sole investor in Civis, had been assisting Clinton separately to establish a digital hub from whichto manage her technology.

Adam Pasick and Tim Fernholz, writing for Quartz, describe the shadowy Groundwork project backed by Schmidt,which would supposedly give Clinton the edge. It was described as bridging the gap between the technologyand the politics, allowing politicians and their staffers to understand what’s going on within their campaigns.

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It is no longer so shadowy after the election. TheGroundwork.com appears to be a political SaaS product whichcombines analytics, data management, task management, and other such duties. Simple to use and geared for“powering the next generation of social impact websites and apps.”

Trump and Kushner’s processes won the day

I’m not qualified to say for certain why one side won and one side didn’t, but there are a few trends we can pullout.

1. Trump’s media strategy was based around his personal social media influence and brand, his populistmessage and its ability to motivate highly vocal online supporters, and his omnipresence in traditional mediacoverage.

2. Kushner’s data-driven warehouse was twice the size of Obama’s 2012 Cave, with approximately 100employees against 54. The reported activities of Kushner’s data center are also more aggressive andcompetitive in nature.

We don’t know the figures for Clinton’s operation exactly, but if winning with data was her key strategy it looks as ifshe didn’t hit it hard enough.

It’s impossible to make a definitive statement on what caused the outcome in a world where we can’t control for thePodesta emails case being reopened 11 days before the vote.

However, if Eric Schmidt had been backing the Clinton campaign with both know-how and capital and yet came outto say that Kushner’s work was the decisive key, then who am I to argue?

Kushner not only utilized lean practices and modern technologies, he optimized the campaign’s processes to thepoint where they won the 2016 US election spending half the opposition’s outlay. Yuge.

If this trend for typical startup practices continues then it might not be long until we see a child of Silicon Valley runfor office. The rumors of Mark Zuckerberg 2020 begun in August 2016 when he created a new class of non-votingshares for Facebook. These could allow him to run for office without having to give up control over his business.

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In 2017, Zuckerberg allegedly aims to visit all 50 states and talk to community leaders about the issues they’refacing. This has set the rumor mill running again.

PaddyPower betting currently has Kanye West on shorter odds than Zuckerberg to win the presidency in 2020(100/1 v 125/1), but if the Democrats want to challenge it seems clear that the role of data, lean principles, andoptimized processes would be crucial for success against another Kushner led campaign.

Who are you expecting to see run in 2020? Another politician or a candidate from outside Washington?

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