The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns - Hardcover

Issenberg, Sasha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 030795479X ISBN 13: 9780307954794

Publisher: Crown, 2012

Synopsis

The book Politico calls “Moneyball for politics” shows how cutting-edge social science and analytics are reshaping the modern political campaign.

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 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 21st century.
     The Victory Lab follows the academics and maverick operatives rocking the war room and re-engineering a high-stakes industry previously run on little more than gut instinct and outdated assumptions. Armed with research from behavioural 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, heavily researched electioneering methods—and shows how our most important figures, such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, are putting them to use with surprising skill and alacrity.
     Provocative, clear-eyed and energetically reported, The Victory Lab offers iconoclastic insights into political marketing, human decision-making, and the increasing power of analytics. 

About this title

About the Author

Sasha Issenberg is a columnist for Slate and the Washington correspondent for Monocle.  He covered the 2008 election as a national political correspondent for The Boston Globe, and his work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine and George, where he was a contributing editor.  His first book, The Sushi Economy, was published in 2007.

Reviews

From political reporter Issenberg comes this very interesting look at the way political consultants and professional vote-getters manipulate people into casting their votes for certain candidates. Although the field has seen some serious innovations over the years—computer models, highly detailed research tools, the use of cutting-edge behavioral psychology to predict how voters will mark their ballots, and more—it’s not a new endeavor. As far back as the 1920s, people like political scientist Harold Foote Gosnell, frustrated by his profession’s inability to explain why people voted the way they did, began looking for new tools to understand and predict voter behavior. By the mid–1940s, social psychologist Angus Campbell was developing “the first systematic effort to explain how presidential elections were decided,” including a massive survey that was the forerunner of the American National Election Studies, a key tool in a field that, today, is a $6 billion-a-year industry. Given its lively subject matter, its equally lively prose, and its timely release—it will hit the shelves two months before Americans go to the polls—this is pretty much guaranteed to generate high interest among readers. --David Pitt

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 030795479X
• ISBN 13: 9780307954794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368