It seems to me the most relevant fiction book here is one that hasn’t yet been mentioned here: Interface.

@Sebastian H: I hope you’re being facetious. Every “anti-corruption” bill since Watergate, but in particular McCain-Feingold, is really an incumbent protection act. Getting the real corruption out of the system is simple — ban lobbying, or at least fund-raising for future elections by anyone currently in office — but very hard to enact because of raw self-interest. Honest people don’t tend to win office — and the few that do don’t tend to stay honest, and the few that do both don’t tend to win reelection.

@Alex: Has the Analyst Institute made its methods public? Because it sounds to me like the good guys had better adopt them too, and fast, before our country is ruined.

Okay, I saw PGD’s comment 1. PGD said this:

I think a lot of what the Obama campaign did was network mapping of peoples’ facebook connections to try to find voters who were likely to share ideological views with active supporters but were more apathetic. Then they would use the active supporters to prod their friends/acquaintances to vote.

Leaving aside that PGD provided no evidence for this, other than “I think”— at least, I don’t see any such thing in the linked article that we’re discussing— it makes no sense.
The idea is, I guess, that I am a committed supporter of the Obama campaign, the kind of person who will spend time talking individually to my friends and trying to get them to vote— i.e., I am not “a generic voting cheerleader” and anyone who knows me already knows this— but I am unable to figure out which of my friends are more apathetic than me, until the campaign does some Facebook data analysis and tells me the answer is Witt. So then I “prod” you— by saying things like “you really ought to vote”— but, apparently, I’m trying to fool you into thinking that that’s just my own idea that I came up with myself, and that I’m not actually a campaign volunteer. In that case, it seems to me that 1. the chance of this altering our “trusting relationship” is slim since we can’t have had one in the first place, 2. the campaign has wasted some time trying to get volunteers to do what they already do, and 3. neither of us is very smart.

But that’s just it — this isn’t simply about someone who knocks on your door wearing a campaign button and says they’re canvassing for Obama (or whoever). It’s also about people reaching out to their own existing networks of friends or acquaintances (see PGD’s comment 1, for example).

They may not be working from a script; they may not even see themselves as campaigning in any traditional sense of the word. But they’re definitely approaching the interaction differently than, say, a generic voting cheerleader like me who can be counted upon to send a mass “Please vote!” e-mail to her friends at every election.

You can’t capitalize on people’s social bonds and trusting relationships without inevitably altering the very relationships you value — often in unpredictable ways. This phenomenon is certainly not new to the Internet or social marketing of campaigns — but it is possible to achieve in a far different way than, say, 10 years ago.

I do not, in fact, expect that my interactions with political canvassers will be based on authenticity.

I do, however, hope that political parties that claim to represent the economic majority will choose competence rather than authenticity.

Isn’t persuasion by one-to-one contact, even if jumpstarted by a script, would be preferable to one-to-many tv advertising?

Sure, if advertising were the only variable we cared about.

But if you care about trusting that your individual interactions with other human beings are based on some degree of authenticity then it is a very big loss indeed.

I’ve been online since 1991; I admit to really not liking the way I now reflexively doubt product mentions in blog posts or Twitter streams. Constantly wondering whether a recommendation is genuine is not how I like to live my life, but I’ve gotten more and more gun-shy based on real-life experiences…so.

The Obama team found that voters between 45 and 65 were more likely to change their views about the candidates after hearing Obama’s Medicare arguments than those over 65, who were currently eligible for the program.

Well, of course, since those voters would be the ones affected by Ryan’s proposed changes. Those over 65 would continue under the old plan. That was how the Medicare “reformers” were trying to neutralize opposition of AARP.

I’m puzzled by this part:

Analysts identified their attributes and made them the core of a persuasion model that predicted, on a scale of 0 to 10, the likelihood that a voter could be pulled in Obama’s direction after a single volunteer interaction.

How did they test the model? And how would you know, for sure, whether the voter was actually pulled? Overall, though, the Issenberg piece is very good; it avoids the hype about these techniques.

One of the more disturbing aspects is the degree to which volunteering for a campaign has become, for the most part, nagging and surveilling your alleged supporters. Persuading from a script doesn’t sound like anything approaching democratic politics that we hope to have.

JWM, 17, I like a lot of your contributions but in this case one of us is missing the point. Political marketers don’t want to take over the brains of people who are determined to resist them. They want to take over enough other brains so that in a two-party system (or any other practically workable system of government), the opinions of those who resist takeover become irrelevant. They have been successful at this in the past and marketing experiments probably will make them even more successful at it in the future.

Simply put, they can a/b test over tens of thousands or even millions, and they can do it over and over again.

This makes it seem like it’s basically a matter of scale (as you mention) and resources. I’m more curious about whether the real problem—or maybe: the real problem Henry wants to highlight—is about the very possibility of this sort of large scale and sophisticated targeted advertising or whether its more about the particular political application of it. (I can see different sorts of reasonds to be worried about both, but importantly they are different sorts of reasons.)

You could make the case that only a political campaign could combine the scale and resources necessary for this sort of thing, but I don’t really see why that need be true.

I also don’t believe they can be “scientific” about anything. They can’t control selection bias or non-response bias, and they don’t have any way to see if changes in knowledge and attitude manifested at the polling booth (and anyone who works in health promotion knows that showing a change in attitudes is essentially meaningless). Furthermore, machine learning is not that good and these kinds of predictive models are notoriously poor at prediction. Good luck to the kids at this insight company if they can spin their findings into successful funding pitches to the Obama campaign, and good luck to Obama if he can do better from it than Romney did, but it’s not quite the stuff of sci-fi yet.

(I saw articles about how Romney had the most advanced database wranglers EVAH and his technological edge was unheard of in a conservative campaign. The same techy people on his side were spinning the same tall stories…)

CRMs have evolved by leaps and bounds in the last few years, as well. Now the campaign can model literally everyone it wants to, and not encounter technical problems because their database is 100 million people large.

The demographic targeting allowed by social media advertising is of a different sort from anything that came before.