The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

A look how social scientists and renegade thinkers are imposing a new data-driven order on the American political campaign--an industry previously run on gut instinct. Renegade thinkers are crashing the gates of a venerable American institution, shoving aside its so-called wise men and replacing them with a radical new data-driven order. We've seen it happen in sports, and now in The Victory Lab, journalist Sasha Issenberg tells the hidden story of the analytical revolution upending the way political campaigns are run in the twenty-first century. The Victory Lab follows the academics and maverick operatives rocking the war room and reengineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions. Armed with research from behavioral psychology and randomized experiments that treat voters as unwitting guinea pigs, the smartest campaigns now believe they know who you will vote for even before you do. Issenberg tracks these fascinating techniques--which include cutting-edge persuasion experiments, innovative ways to mobilize voters, and statistical models predicting the behavior of every voter in the country--and shows how our most important figures, such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, are putting these techniques to use with surprising skill and alacrity.