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Masters in Public Affairs

Masters in Public Affairs

By: Joseph Lavoie
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Each episode goes deep on one book that belongs in a modern public affairs canon—extracting the core idea, the mental models, and how it connects to real wins and failures today. Built for practitioners who never stop working the fundamentals.Joseph Lavoie Economics
Episodes
  • Running for Office, by Ronald Faucheux

    Running for Office, by Ronald Faucheux
    Jul 1 2026
    The Permanent Campaign Across the Desk Masters in Public Affairs, Episode 12 You bring the official a clean brief and a sound argument. The meeting's warm. Nothing moves. Here's why: the elected official across your desk is a candidate — right now, every day until they leave the seat — and they're running your ask through one question. Does this help me, or hurt me, with the people who can take this seat away? Running for Office (Ronald Faucheux, 2002) is a candidate's field manual. Read from where we sit, it's the source code for the person across the desk. In this one: Why campaigning professionalized and what "strategy" actually means The three plays an official runs — the voter database, inoculation (FDR, Clinton, Dole), and the pincer (Gilmore's "no car tax" trap) Three portable models — the Message Box, the One-Third Rule, and the Allocation Where the book gets misread How to put all of it to work in public affairs, starting with the unglamorous advice I keep giving clients — build your own database. The professional prepares the contest. The amateur shows up to it. From the canon: How to Win Campaigns The Election Game Good Strategy Bad Strategy Positioning Public Opinion A five-star review and a word to a colleague go a long way. One follower at a time.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • How to Win Campaigns by Chris Rose

    How to Win Campaigns by Chris Rose
    Jun 17 2026
    Joseph Lavoie works through Chris Rose's How to Win Campaigns — the most practical book in the canon so far, and the one he's returned to more than almost any other in his own campaign work. It's a manual: checklists, tools, tests. Which makes it easy to skim and hard to read well. So instead of running the steps, this episode digs for the ideas underneath them — the ones that don't date. It's built around two real campaigns. Greenpeace's Brent Spar fight, which they won while being wrong on the central fact. And WWF's chemicals-and-health campaign, which helped shape EU law by turning a grey, technical issue into a single question a grandmother could put to a politician: are these chemicals in my blood — yes or no? In this episode: — Why being right is rarely what wins — Locating the decision, and the "photo test" for a real objective — The point of irreducibility: finding the black and white in the grey — Choosing an antagonist, and turning the question upside down — Sequencing a campaign backwards from the win — The speaking victim, and the manufactured antagonist — Where Rose gets misread, and what it takes to master his lessons "Pundits comment on change; campaigners make it happen." — Chris Rose 📚 How to Win Campaigns by Chris Rose (2nd edition, Earthscan, 2010) If the show's useful to you, a five-star rating helps new listeners find it. Subscribe so you don't miss the next book.
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    48 mins
  • Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg

    Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg
    Jun 3 2026
    Most of what a campaign does has never actually been tested. Sasha Issenberg is a journalist, not an operative — which is why he could follow the evidence instead of defending a tactic. His 2012 book, The Victory Lab, is an incredibly clear account of how campaigning became experimental: the moment a profession that had run for a century on folklore finally borrowed the clinical trial from medicine and started measuring what actually moves a voter. In this episode: Why two Yale professors knocking on New Haven doors in 1998 was the first field experiment of its kind in 70 years The door-knock that beat the phone bank by seven points — bigger than the margin in most races that matter Hal Malchow's polling flip: learning less about what voters think and more about who they are, to find your swing voters by name "You mean you don't do this in politics?" — how a venture capitalist exposed a field that had fallen behind the companies selling credit cards The single most effective piece of mail ever tested — and the reason no campaign can actually use it Why most public affairs dashboards count motion instead of movement, and the one cheap habit that tells you which tactics actually work The mastery lesson: why the best operators are the ones willing to be proven wrong Book: Sasha Issenberg, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (Crown, 2012). More: mastersinpublicaffairs.com
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    31 mins
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