Sasha Issenberg has apparently gotten inside the the Perry machine and describes its effectiveness in Rick Perry and His Eggheads
From the product description:
Despite his folksy personality and disdain for east coast "elitists," Texas governor Rick Perry helped spark a revolution in campaign politics. For his 2006 re-election effort, his campaign manager convinced him to allow four social scientists from Yale to come in and gauge the effectiveness of various campaign tools--candidate appearances, yard signs, television ads, etc.--by running real-time experiments in the heat of a campaign. No candidate had done this before and no one has done it since.
This was the first thing I read that started to get me really worried about Perry. And the book is the first thing we must read to beat him.
Much of social science is the study of persuasion, influence and motivation.The right application of social science can move mountains. The private sector has used its findings to get us to buy the most useless and dangerous products ever made for decades.
Now a political campaign team appears ready to use it to sell us another useless and dangerous product: Rick Perry.
How dangerous? If fellow Kossak clark101857's analysis in the post A Voice from Texas: Prepare for Perry Now! is right, we've got a serious problem. We must assume this guy has a chance, and we have to take away that chance pronto.
Here's the book's description of top Perry strategist Dave Carney'simmersion in the science of voting:
Carney tossed Get Out the Vote! into his briefcase as in-flight reading material.
The book’s authors were Alan Gerber and Don Green, Yale political scientists who in 1998 tried to measure the real-world effectiveness of basic campaign techniques, drawing inspiration from randomized drug trials. Unlike in other social sciences, those who studied politics rarely did field research, and there was little tradition of running experiments. But Gerber, a soft-spoken former economist, and Green, a loquacious theorist who designed abstract board games in his spare time, had each grown frustrated with what they considered political science’s basic inability to convincingly attribute real-world cause and effect. Working with the local League of Women Voters, Gerber and Green had selected the three most basic modes of political communication—a mailed postcard, a scripted from a call-center employee, and a doorstep visit from a canvasser—and randomly assigned them to New Haven voters before the November election, along with a control group that received no contact at all. Afterward, they went back and checked the voter rolls to see who had voted. It turned out that the in-person visit had been very effective at creating votes, the mail much less so, and phone calls not at all. Gerber and Green had not expected to find such a stark display of the relative effectiveness of basic campaign tools, and the New Haven study’s appearance in the American Political Science Review rippled through the political-consulting community with unusual force. The response encouraged the pair to plan more experiments, and by 2004 Gerber, Green, and similarly minded political scientists (many former graduate students of theirs) had conducted dozens of them. Get Out the Vote!, written for a nonacademic audience, compiled their findings….
Somewhere between Manchester and Austin, it became clear to Carney that the authors of Get Out the Vote! knew how to answer these questions better than anyone who worked in politics did. As soon as he arrived, Carney went onto the Yale website and searched for e-mail addresses for Gerber and Green. In their book, they lament that most of their field experiments up till that time had been of the same sort: working with nonpartisan institutions on further study of mail, phones, and canvassing. Gerber and Green considered their research nonideological, but nearly all their collaborators had emerged from the left—groups like ACORN and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which worked to register and turn out new minority voters. The few times that Gerber and Green had been invited into candidate campaigns had been for small-scale local races. The next campaign on Carney’s docket would be a Texas’s—would naturally go to television and radio. “Would you be interested in being in a real campaign?” Carney wrote to Gerber and Green.
Issenberg, Sasha (2011). Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America, A Sneak Preview from The Victory Lab (Kindle Locations 220-221). Crown. Kindle Edition.
From a NY Time Caucus interviewwith the author:
...Q: What makes Rick Perry’s approach to politics different from that of other candidates?
Mr. Issenberg: No candidate has ever presided over a political operation so skeptical about the effectiveness of basic campaign tools and so committed to using social-science methods to rigorously test them.
As the 2006 election season approached, the governor’s top strategist, Dave Carney, invited four political scientists into Perry’s war room and asked them to impose experimental controls on any aspect of the campaign budget that they could randomize and measure.Over the course of that year, the eggheads, as they were known within the campaign, ran experiments testing the effectiveness of all the things that political consultants do reflexively and we take for granted: candidate appearances, TV ads, robocalls, direct mail. These were basically the political world’s version of randomized drug trials, which had been used by academics but never from within a large-scale partisan campaign.
...Q: Part of what makes this fascinating is how much it calls to mind the 2008 Obama campaign. Some people referred to that as a Moneyball campaign, in which David Plouffe and others tried to use data to find new leverage points. The caucus-heavy strategy, which ultimately may have allowed Obama to beat Clinton, was one result. What are the differences between Obama’s approach and Perry’s?
Mr. Issenberg: I’ve been doing a bit of reporting on the ways Obama’s 2008 campaign used data for other parts of my book, “The Victory Lab.” Like Carney, Plouffe is a ruthless empiricist who helped instill an analytical culture that pervaded the Obama organization. Everything that could be measured was measured, and data was used to judge the relative effectiveness of campaign techniques, both old and new.
The big difference was in methodology. As best I can tell, the Obama campaign never used randomized trials to test its operations offline. (Basic experiments, comparing e-mail subject lines or Web-page layouts, are a staple of the online world.) That reflects the fact that most of the people doing analytics within the Obama campaign, unlike the eggheads, didn’t come out of the academic social sciences, where after 2000, randomized field experiments became an increasingly popular tool for measuring basic political communication techniques...
Here's the Texas observer on Dave Carney:
But anyone who studies Carney will find an innovative and nimble tactician. He’s spent much of the past 15 years experimenting with different approaches to campaigning, testing myriad strategies in state and local races nationwide. Though a Republican, he’s not ideological. His candidates have ranged from moderate to hard-core conservative. If there is a hallmark of a Carney race, it’s his creative strategies. He’s also dabbled with unscrupulous tactics, having once run a corporate-funded nonprofit that spent untold amounts of money criticizing certain candidates in the name of “voter education.” What’s clear is that he’ll try almost anything that will give him good odds to win. “If he can beat you, he will, and he’ll think of an imaginative way to do it,” says Carney’s friend, former New Hampshire GOP Chair Steve Duprey.
So we've got a campaign team here that might be as innovative as Obama's, informed by people who have studied the turnout efforts of liberals.
What to do? A quote from Patton, which I've used many times, is appropriate:
"Rommel, you magnificent bastard? I read your book!"
Start reading. Here's your list
Get out the vote: how to increase voter turnout, by Donald P. Green, Alan S. Gerber
Rick Perry and His Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America, A Sneak Preview from The Victory Lab, by Sasha Issenberg
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. by Robert Cialdini. This is the single most valuable book I have read on how to persuade and how to avoid being persuaded. Many of the most valuable keys to building effective messages are in this book. See also:
Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, by Noah J. Goldstein; Steve J. Martin; Robert B. Cialdini and subscribe to the free Inside Influence Report.
Working Psychology. The site of another great influence researcher, Kelton Rhoads. Worth visiting if only for the free and detailed online "Introduction to Social Influence."
Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives, by George Lakoff. Lakoff specializes in debate framing for progressives. The most important lesson you can pick up from this book is that the winning frame wins the debate. Republicans know this: that’s why they have their own language specialist, Frank Luntz , turn “oil drilling” into “energy exploration”. Lakoff is just as good, turning “higher taxes” into “paying your dues” examples abound. See also: Cognitive Policy Wonks and The Progressive Strategy Handbook Project .
Frank Luntz: everything he’s written. He's a conservative message master, and you have to know the enemy.
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Tavris and Aronson Key takeaway: Never attack a movement's members, always attack its leaders.
Cognitive dissonance (the academic theory, not the common usage) suggests that attacking the supporters may actually increase their level of commitment.
It works like this: Say someone has two contradictory ideas: "I smoke" and "Smoking is bad for me". This causes discomfort, which must be resolved. Unfortunately, it is usually resolved in an ego- protecting way, so you wind up with something like: "Smoking isn't bad for me" instead of "I'm stupid to be smoking and should quit".
If we make fun of a Tea Party supporters, they hold the following ideas": I like my candidate's ideas" and "All these people say the ideas are crazy". Well, no matter what the evidence for the lunacy, that's likely to resolve into "the ideas are right" instead of "I made a mistake". This is particularly true if they see criticisms as hostile.
On the other hand, if a supporter holds the following ideas "I like this candidate" and "this candidate just said that s/he is going to screw me personally ", the supporter is more likely to question the candidate.
The Social Animal, by Elliot Aronson. The introduction to social psychology, necessary for any real understanding of how groups of people (e.g. voters) act under different circumstances. Essential for any real understanding of the human nature that propels politics.