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Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg

Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg

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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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