Politics over the last 20 years, starts eing in the middle of the 19 90s, up through the 2014 Midterm Election cycle to explain some of the differences between the republican and democratic parties when it came to taking up technology in the service of electoral goals. Host what do you mean by the term, prototype politics. Guest what i wanted to think about and think through where does innovation come from through political campaigning. How do campaigners invent new technologies and new tools. How do they take up new social media platforms to use them for new ways. How do they find new ways to engage the electorate whether on twit other or snapchat. What i wanted to think about reading the sociology literature and Political Science literature and communication literature why is it so important . In the book i talk about how campaigns become prototypes. Which is models for doing things differently in electoral politics and there is a couple of really key examples of that. Probably most famously obamas election in 2008 which was really the First Campaign to use social media like facebook effectively for the purposes of organizing and engaging the electorate and ultimately turning more people out on election day. In 2012 we saw another great example of a campaign that became a prototype which was sort of new ways to use data and analytics in service of election bowls, one that is widely copied on both sides of the aisle. The idea of a prototype is constructing a new way of doing things that becomes a model can for future campaigns to adapt and take up themselves in the service of trying to electing their candidates. Host professor kreiss does superior technology and data win elections . Guest no. Technology and Digital Media and social media platforms and Data Analytics work dont win elections for candidates. There are many other things that are more important. The electoral contest, who is incumbent, things like fundraising and which groups are more likely to turn out on election day and really important structural factors like the state of the economy. All those things provide really the backdrop. The hands that candidates are dealt so to speak that they have to navigate effectively. Where technology and Digital Media and Data Analytics come in providing real gains at the margins. Can we deploy resources better in terms of contacting the right voters to turn them out on election day . Can we use email in a really effective way, in a data tested way to raise even additional dollars or recruit additional volunteers for campaigns . Can we use data in effective way to figure out which states we need to contest . Which message will resonate with voters. How it will reach them, buying particular time on Cable Television or showing up at their door at an hour theyre likely to be home. Once theyre talking to voters what is the right message to say to make them care about the election and ultimately make them turn out on election day. When we talk about Campaign Strategy broadly and talk about Campaign Technologies and Digital Media and Data Analytics, what we are talking about ways figuring out ways to gain advantages on the margins. Cain a couple extra points, turning out right voters on election day. Raising a couple of Million Dollars that can then be poured into field offices or be used to run broadcast advertising. That is the sort of advantages were providing but at the end of the day i think, thats a question ultimately of efficiency and ultimately of question of margins that exist around these larger determining factors like the state of the economy and partisanship and incumbency. Host so who has done it well on the margin . Guest a couple of examples you look at in the course of history, here is where i really go back in time during the 2 00 cycle it was george w. Bushs campaign that really was heads and tails above what john kerry and Democratic Party was able to put together. During the 2004 tie kel the bush team and rnc had much more sophisticated National Voter database with members of the electorate. They had much more turnout operations in states of ohio. They had novel online policing programs title to field organizing putting people on line and making phone calls to targeted voters. At the end of the day what you really saw during the 04 cycle was a bush team and a Republican Party had much more Sophisticated Technology and data and analytics and digital operations than the Democratic Party. It was because of that the Democratic Party after 2004, particularly under chairman howard dean decided to take a step back, evaluate what they were doing and really build a modern technology and Data Infrastructure thats now provided the core for democratic campaigns during every president ial election since. A couple of other examples that i would point to really building off the work that dean and the democrats put in place after the 04 election was obamas campaign in 2008 which really harnessed the power of social media, particularly facebook, in the service of electoral organizing, mobilizing youth and young voters, turning them out on the polls, using social media effectively as a tool for fundraising and email, building massive email lists on the order of 13 million person email list for the purposes of fundraising, financing through small donors that subsequent democratic campaigns have taken advantage of. I would follow the Obama Campaign of 2012, of a campaign that harnessed data and analytics to give obama a margin of victory over his rival, mitt romney. When were talking about margins, obamas small dollar fundraising operation driven through email, help obama keep pace and rely on candidate centered fundraising that could be spent much more flexibly than the team of romney and the Republican Party as he well as outside groups that had more restrictions on how the money could be spent. I would really point to those three examples as being ones that really harnessed the power of technology on the margins to give the campaigns competitive electoral advantage. George w. Bush in 04, barack obama in 2008 and again barack obama in 2012. Host did the republicans not capitalize on their 2004 technological success . Guest i think what happens is, that the george w. Bush team in 04 and rnc in 04 really had every advantage in the world over the democrats at that point in time. There was less impetus after that election to rethink fundamentally what they were doing and make massive new investments in the party at that moment in time. The other thing that happened too are just the contingencies of history. George w. Bush had a very fraught second presidency with declining numbers in the polls. A lot of energy and momentum behind the Republican Party had dissipated by the 2006 midterms. Even more heading into the 2008 election, extraordinary financial crisis one where the Republicans Party nominee, john mccain, was sort of inheriting an incumbent presidency, one during extraordinary economic challenges. I think all of those things sort of combined to mean the Obama Campaign in 2008 and Democratic Party more broadly as well as a network of Democratic Party organizations founded after 2004 that remain among very prominent political consultancies today were really able to capitalize on energy and the money flowing into democratic covers at that moment in time to make new investments in technology, Data Infrastructure, in Digital Media and talent and expertise in ways that really paid dividend in 2008 and that is something i think the democrats were able to continue company tallizing on after 2008 as well. Ultimately heading into the 2012 Obama Reelection Campaign where the obama team really inherited a lot of this work, this network of staffers and network of organizations and the infrastructure that the democrats were able to build from 2004 and carry it forward to the president s reelection victory. Meanwhile on the republican side of the aisle, even coming after the 2008 campaign the Republican Party heading into 2012 suffered from significant debts. The troubled tenure of chairman michael steele, just had less money to able to invest in the areas, less infrastructure developed at that moment in time. During 2012 faced a very fractured field, where their ultimate nominee, mitt romney faced not only tougher, stiffer competition but had to spend more resources in areas like mass broadcasting and couldnt afford to build the Technology Infrastructure that the obama team in 2012 enjoying their technical advantage of incumbency could be building for entire year while romney ran in a contested primary. Host professor kreiss, in your book prototype politics you talks about this, investments in technology, is that pretty expensive stuff . Guest i think what happens you see ebbs and flows especially during president ial races where particularly wellfinanced president ial campaigns will invest order of millions of dollars in building out a Technology Infrastructure and what this really entails is first and foremost talent and expertise. One of the things i found in a lot of my Research Campaigns look to hire expertise from outside of the political field. Engineers and developers who can come into politics with specialized skills and use them to really bring them to bear in politics to solve political problems at that moment in time. Another area they look to spend money on is ongoing data maintenance and data management. This is something that gets carried across election cycles and really is built up by Political Parties themselves as well as outside party firms. What this means looking to provide basic Data Infrastructure, Cloud Platforms that will supply analytic services, database is as well as the real grunt work that it takes to perform hygiene on data to make sure it is uptodate over election cycles. This is where president ial campaigns become very important. During the course of president ial campaigns they make millions of voters contacts. When they send people out to knock on doors they get information on voters. They figure out what are active phone numbers for them . What are activee mail addresses . Whether they plan to vote in a Party Primary or general election. All the data makes its way back to the coffers and party databases maintain and parties maintain of the at the end of the day that is transferred across election cycles. It is really on going work of infrastructure building and infrastructure maintenance that parties spend millions of dollars on and campaigns invest millions of dollars in resources in to really build up their electoral operations that provide them with advantages on election day. Host how have digital campaigns evolved over the past 20 years . Guest yeah, so thats a great question. First and foremost one of the really interesting patterns that we see we live in a time of rapid technological change where cycle to cycle, entirely new platforms are cropping up that campaigns have to navigate and adapt to. As well as theres changes in social media plaid forms continually campaigns have to figure out how to navigate. One of the examples i really love, after i wrote my first book i interviewed a Campaign Staffers on the obama 2008 campaign and one of the things they told me was that in 2008, you know, twitter was an afterthought for the campaign, that they had an intern or somebody who basically ran the twitter feed because so few people were using it. It was really a marginal attraction in 2008. By 2012 twitter had become an absolute central way that campaigns were using technology to actually help set the agenda of the professional press. And you can actually look at this just in terms of massive growth of twitter usership just in the pan of those four years. That became an entirely new genre of Campaign Communication that campaigns had to figure out how to best use. What are the audiences there we need to apply, to appeal to. How do we use this in effective way to reach supporters and active supporters to fire them up and translate energy and enthusiasm into election resources such as volunteers and money. That is one great example after Campaign Platform in the short span of four years became absolutely central to modern Campaign Communication and provided significant advantages simply in terms of being able to set the agenda of professional press. Jump ahead to 2015, snapchat is increasingly important tool campaigns use to particularly connect with Younger Voters. Voters 18 to 24 years old who are interested in seeing behind the scenes to elections. Campaigns have had to figure out how do we see this in a new way . What sort of audiences are there . What sort of Communications Work . There is entirely new things that crop up like twitter and snapchat that campaigns have to figure out how to navigate in new ways. The other thing i would say is, that social media platforms in particular dont remain static. If you look at Television Advertising the 30 second spot remains largely the same over the course of 30 years, in terms of what the genre is, what it is designed to accomplish, people who produce it, the process way they produce it. There is greater targeting. You can use Cable Networks to more fine grady target your message. When you look at the 30second Campaign Advertisement is generally remained the same across election cycles from the 1960s on to today. However social media platforms and social media firms are changing and they change their platforms on an ongoing basis. So one of the things i found significantly in my research that platforms such as facebook, for instance, will change the algorithms that relate to the sorts of attention that Campaign Content received. So, any one election cycle facebook might change the cycle to award videos as opposed to static content. Links to facebooks content as opposed to links to outside content. Visual information opposed to textual information. Campaigns have to be very sensitive to looking at their analytics and the data that they have coming in about the reach and engagement that their content is receiving on a platform such as facebook, in order to figure out sort of what is going to be the most effective content we can use in that moment of time. They have to adapt to changes in things like facebooks underlying algorithm to reach enengagement on their platform. Host daniel crease, university of North Carolina at chapel hill. His first book, taking our country back from howard dean to barack obama. His newest book, prototype politics, technology, intensive campaigning and the data of democracy. Professor crease, has the digital portion of the campaign into the Larger Organization or still a separate unit . Guest this is something campaigns struggled with history, where does digital sit in a contrary campaign . I think one of the things you see when you look at history, a broader evolution of moving digital away from being a department, really in the service in Mass Media Communications to now being part of campaigns that really touch every other aspect of a campaigns operation. So, when you think about what digital does, digital plays a role in field campaigning. When you to to sign up to volunteer for a campaign online, one of the things you will want to do, figure out how do all the people signing up for campaign online, get to the Field Operation in a way theyre being useful for us, whether on the ground, connecting somebody to a local field office or helping them make phone calls through a web browser, going to voters targeted in terms of online to the electoral goals. Digital is in the service of field campaigning. When you think about fundraising you cant think about Digital Media apart from amount of resources things like email is able to bring in or online advertisements is able to bring in. So Digital Media is very much sort of used in the service of Online Fundraising in really effective and really important ways. Online advertising is something that supports every other aspect of a campaign. Whether it means Voter Registration or whether it means fundraising or message and persuasion advertising. So what i think you see over time is sort of increasing recognition on both sides of the aisle and in campaigns from both the lowest and highest levels that digital really has a hand in every conventional aspect of contemporary campaigning and needs to be integrated with all the other aspects of a campaign. To this end campaigns adopted various strategies. Some campaigns give digital a se