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Ask HN: Good books about modern political campaign strategy?

by cujic9 on 10/17/17, 9:18 PM with 11 comments

I'd like to get a better idea of why political campaigns do what they do, at a deep strategic level.

For example, I volunteered on a campaign a few years ago. I worked the phone bank. My task was to find other volunteers, just like myself, to work the phone bank. At no point did any of us talk with anybody other than registered party members.

From that, I realized that the underlying goal of the phone bank was not to actually call people from outside the party and convince them to change their views, as I had assumed.

Rather, the goal was to increase engagement among probable voters because -- statistically -- it meant they were more likely to show up on voting day.

Are there any books that explain political campaign strategy at this level?

  • by sfletcher28 on 10/18/17, 8:49 AM

    Think you should look at Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab. But - worth noting that you could write an convincing follow up book that Hillary for America and Robbie Mook probably overlearned the lesson of the book and that the 2020 Dem campaign will be run differently.

  • by bigsassy on 10/17/17, 10:36 PM

    First, I should note that political strategy varies depending on the office. A race for a single seat between a republican and a democrat is very different from a non-partisan city council race that has 5 seats, with two incumbents running leaving 3 open seats.

    Second, there's a book recently published that focuses on running for smaller offices and aimed at Millennials. You may find it interesting:

    https://www.runforsomething.net/book/

  • by banned1 on 10/18/17, 1:19 AM

    >> Are there any books that explain political campaign strategy at this level?

    Not sure, but I think the last campaign taught us that these books are super important:

    1) "What's Your Message?: Public Speaking with twice the impact, using half the effort" by Cam Barber

    2) "Make Your Point!:Speak clearly and concisely anyplace anytime" by Bob Elliott

    3) "The Twitter Book" by Tim O'Reilly

  • by noobhacker on 10/18/17, 2:48 AM

    The campaign doesn't call people outside of their base because it is extremely hard to convince people to change their mind. There are a lot of popular articles dedicated to this topic recently if you Google some variants of "difficult to change people's mind" [1]. The vast majority of people have a consistent voting behavior, i.e. voting Republican / Democrat all their lives.

    I know of these stylized facts because I'm a political scientist who talks shop with my colleagues frequently. Regrettably I can't recommend a good book, but hopefully this answers your particular question.

    [1]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-risky-is-it-really/...

  • by mhh__ on 10/17/17, 11:09 PM

    AFAIK There isn't a huge amount of literature on the subject, in part because of the lack of unification or underlying structure of the field. On the local level, there is very little expertise or time to fine tune strategy, so a plug-and-chug style of campaigning is used: In the UK this can mean - from my experience volunteering during an GE campaign - delivering letters to everyone in a constituency.

    Many people working for political campaigns have blogs, which could be useful for you.

    For more holistic treatments, one assumes that academic research (e.g. Papers analysing nationwide strategy) may be a good place to look: As to specific (say) Journals, I don't know.

  • by JSeymourATL on 10/20/17, 3:20 PM

    A classic, 'must read' book on this subject-- All Politics is Local: And Other Rules of the Game> https://www.amazon.com/All-Politics-Local-Other-Rules/dp/081...

  • by socalnate1 on 10/17/17, 9:48 PM

    This might be a little out of date now, but I read this book in college that covers some of that ground. (My professor was the author)

    The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns

    By: Samuel Popkin

  • by sunstone on 10/19/17, 7:26 AM

    In the book "The Signal And The Noise" Nate Silver talked about political campaigns quite a lot. Definitely worth a look.

  • by mogeb on 10/17/17, 11:52 PM

    Did you just read 'What Happened'?

  • by ObligatoryRef on 10/18/17, 12:33 AM

    Hardball by Chris Matthews delves into some of this.