[shadowgovt]

Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.

Problem is, even if they are a free and independent thinker, voting populations are large enough that the "average is the outcome" phenomenon comes into play, and voters are on average demonstrably vulnerable to coercion. Not enough to flip people's opinions 180 degrees, but enough to, say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history (that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered).

[cm2012]

I'm a professional FB marketer and have managed both large budgets for private companies and also done political campaigns. I guarantee the trump campaign doesn't use the low quality Cambridge Analytica scraped data in their targeting. They either use voter file records or lookalikes (like everyone else does). All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff.

Think about where the data originally came from. People in 2015 downloaded an app, and the app scraped their friends lists. You know what's better than targeting 87 mil loosely connected people? Using the FB algorithm, which targets 330m much, much more accurately and with more connections!

[SeanAppleby]

My understanding is that the most significant nonconventional heuristic that Cambridge Analytica got from FB data and exploited was by using FB like data to approximate OCEAN personality scores for almost all voting Americans using this technique [1], and then targeting correlations between people's big five ratings and their succeptibility to differnet types of marketing, such as targetingpeople high in neuroticism with emotionally charged ads, generally meant to instill fear. Am I off base?

[1] https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/view/...

[cm2012]

I'm sure people claim you can find the best voters using their special astrology method also. The FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

[lmm]

Having worked in that industry, that's backwards. OCEAN is solid, well-understood science; we have decades of figures for test-retest reliability, we know what correlates and what doesn't. FB's black box factors are not public, not understood, and if they stopped working tomorrow no-one would be able to tell you why (or why they worked in the first place).

[wayoutthere]

It takes surprisingly few data points to draw small and detailed psychographic categories of people. This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s, we just didn't have the tools to make microtargeting practical at scale until recently.

[Bartweiss]

We can and do draw detailed psychographic categories with a few data points, but it's far from clear whether the results (and especially the details) are actually correct.

I think "since the 50s" should be taken as evidence against these models. Myers-Briggs first came into vogue in the late 1950s, and has been used for career counseling and hiring since despite being utterly unfit for purpose. Priming work dates to the 70s, and now it appears that many of the long-term uses advertising relies on don't replicate. The 'decoy effect' that drives many product strategies was formalized in the 1980s, and recent work suggests it exists only under very narrow conditions. Modern industry leaders like the Food and Brand Lab have apparently spent the last 20 years publishing absolute nonsense. Even results 'validated' with A/B testing are in many cases just noise from misusing statistics.

Precisely because we didn't have microtargeting or consumer-level feedback, all we've had since the 1950s is the belief that we can build and use these models. We know ads basically work, they improve brand recognition and reputation, but the Don Draper psychological rationales are essentially just-so stories written in the absence of data.

(As far as CA, no one seems to have dug up any seriously unusual patterns in 2016 voting. So unless they paired high-impact psychological targeting with an elaborate statistical coverup, what they actually did with the data wasn't exceptional.)

[hdrujvw-4579]

> This has been known in the advertising world since the 50s

Any reference from the 50s?

Also, anyone care to recommend modern references that go into these topics? (David Ogilvy comes to mind but that's from the 60s).

[wayoutthere]

Psychographic segmentation is an evolution of psychoanalysis; in particular Jaques Lacan, whose work in the 50s took the general ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis and applied them to larger phenomenon -- namely how language and symbolism can be used to pluck emotional strings and influence the minds of groups of like-minded people. An ad man in the 1950s would certainly have been aware of his work. The folks from CA have gone on record about the influence of Lacan, so it's not remotely a stretch.

Edit: For a reference, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/75bb/e8a5de1fef2b9da44ca1ed... (dense as heck, but imagine you're an ad man from the 50s when reading it)

[hdrujvw-4579]

this is a little dense, but the preface has a nice statement on neurobiology, and wikipedia has some interesting articles on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. I suppose I'm looking for a popsci book on how computer science, psychology, neuroscience, etc all came together in the last decade to become so effective in hacking our brains and influencing our decisions. Or perhaps it's been there all along just now it's getting more attention.

[elmomle]

The Facebook algorithm optimizes for Facebook's preferences, not yours as an advertiser. If your goal is to scare people then click-through is no longer your KPI, for example. I think you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the huge potential potential advantage, particularly when it comes to fear-based political advertising, of backing out psychological profiles of people to refine targeting.

[mbesto]

> And the FB algorithm already takes in 1000s of black box factors that are going to work better than some unproven personality score hogwash.

1. My understanding is that CA wasn't just executing FB ads. Is your assumption that this was their only technique?

2. Are you aware of the specific techniques CA used?

3. What would be the purpose of CA obtaining the data then?

[cm2012]

1) That kind of targeting is even less useful outside of FB. You can upload gmail addresses to Google to target, or use something like LiveRamp to target on display networks, but both options suck compared to FB.

2) Nothing beyond whats publically available.

3) It's not unusual to test different audiences, I've definitely tested all sorts. I'm sure thats how it started for Cambridge. Of course now, tin pot dictatorships hire them all around the world now to be basically a subpar FB agency, so they're happy with the PR.

[taurath]

> 1) That kind of targeting is even less useful outside of FB. You can upload gmail addresses to Google to target, or use something like LiveRamp to target on display networks, but both options suck compared to FB.

Both google and FB are financially incentivized to provide as much granularity in targeting as possible so they can charge more money to advertisers, who'll get a better return and get promoted. All up until the point that it becomes a liability. Thats the line they're walking - you can totally target quite a few things that end up correlating to say, neurotic people, if you know your audience is neurotic people. You have enough of the dataset at that point.

[mbesto]

So are you saying CA wasn't effective at all? Or just as effective as any other agency is/could have been. I'm confused...

[nooron]

I also work in this and strongly agree.

[james_s_tayler]

Doesn't that "unproven personality score hogwash" have something like 9 decades of research behind it and is considered the gold standard of personality testing by textbooks on the psychology of personality?

[larnmar]

Yes, which gives you an idea of what the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are like.

[james_s_tayler]

Does it?

Mostly the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are deemed flimsy and a lot of findings have failed to replicate.

It's my understanding that Big Five has been replicated consistently across different languages and cultures over the last 90 years and is one of the only things we're fairly sure of in psychology at this point.

The accusation was that it was "unproven hogwash". That doesn't check out.

[mumblemumble]

Is FB making their raw data public, though?

There's a strategy/tactics divide to consider. Relying on FB's targeting algorithms is tactical - that'll give you great targeting once the time comes to execute your campaign.

But CA data, even if noisy, has been exfiltrated out from under privacy controls, so that you can get a much more direct look at it. That allows an analyst to get a more detailed sense of what social networks actually look like. I imagine that is more useful for figuring out what kinds of people you should be targeting in the first place, in order to maximize the leverage of your campaign.

[paulddraper]

I'm skeptical of the superior use of that in practice.

[iamben]

But at that point couldn't you just upload an email list and target by that? I could be miles off the mark, but I assumed a lot of this came from getting people to take a "personality test" and then bucketing that person for particular ads.

Admittedly I based a bunch of this on Alexander Nix's utterly fascinating OMR presentation (https://youtu.be/6bG5ps5KdDo). As per the parent, it always amazes me at how easy it is to influence someone if you know the right levers to pull.

[cm2012]

You can still do that, but 1) much better email lists exist that the RNC was already sharing with the Trump campaign, 2) algorithmic targeting almost always beats uploaded lists nationally anyway.

[iamben]

I assumed email lists of people who'd taken the personality tests, then maybe LAL off the back of that. How was the algorithmic targeting back then? I know I wouldn't want to manually optimise against it now (with the right spend).

Just to caveat again - not my specialty, but very interesting all the same!

[cm2012]

It's even better now, but in 2016 it was still really good. in 2016 I was using FB targeting to find business owners who were in the market for loans, which is far more specific than democrat, independent, or republican!

[GreeniFi]

I’m really at a loss to understand how to judge between those who say it does and doesn’t work: but this is super helpful, don’t use CA’s crappy partial dataset, use FB’s!

But one question I wanted to ask is, which is very non-expert: was the value of the CA dataset that you can see how people are linked? I understand that you’re far more likely to believe a message if it comes from someone you know. So if CA could identify “sharers”, they could simply hit them again and again and again with information that would be forwarded. Or does FB give this functionality too?

[Scoundreller]

> You know what's better than targeting 87 mil loosely connected people? Using the FB algorithm, which targets 330m much, much more accurately and with more connections!

Depends on how much of a premium you pay for that precision.

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

> All CA data so released so far has been useless, untargeted stuff.

It’s well known that the data is crap, and much crappier than what both the DNC and RNC were using going into 2016.

So the question remains about why CA generates so much headlines? And is associated so strongly with something magical, nefarious... something that potentially transformed 2016?

The answer is simple, to fit a narrative that 2016 was something other than voters duly electing a legitimate president.

[cm2012]

The CA data is a BS story. But its also more or less definitive that Russia's slow leaking of otherwise innocuous emails really hurt Clinton's campaign. Its easy to get confused because there's so much going on.

[larnmar]

I still remain unconvinced that was really “Russia” (as opposed to, say, some bored Russian teens).

The reason for my skepticism is the crappy podunk nature of the leaked material. The FSB spends billions every year spying on US politicians, surely they’ve managed to find stuff a lot more embarrassing than the boring emails of some dude whose password was “passw0rd”?

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

I'm extremely interested in learning more about the crowdstrike arrangment. As someone who is interested in both politics and cybersecurity, it leaves a lot of open questions.

Here's some dangling questions brought out from the Mueller report:

* Mueller’s decision not to interview Assange – a central figure who claims Russia was not behind the hack – suggests an unwillingness to explore avenues of evidence on fundamental questions.

* U.S. intelligence officials cannot make definitive conclusions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computer servers because they did not analyze those servers themselves. Instead, they relied on the forensics of CrowdStrike, a private contractor for the DNC that was not a neutral party, much as “Russian dossier” compiler Christopher Steele, also a DNC contractor, was not a neutral party. This puts two Democrat-hired contractors squarely behind underlying allegations in the affair – a key circumstance that Mueller ignores.

* Lawyers for Stone discovered that CrowdStrike submitted three forensic reports to the FBI that were redacted and in draft form. When Stone asked to see CrowdStrike's un-redacted versions, prosecutors made the explosive admission that the U.S. government does not have them.

They never even turned over the servers to the FBI? They only submitted a draft report?

Also, why use a Ukrainian company for something so important, do we not have the expertise here in the US to do this? If there's anything we've learned about Ukraine in the last few months, it's that many politician children were making a lot of money there through... let's just say questionable arrangements.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/07/05/...

[extra88]

CrowdStrike is not a Ukrainian company, it is a U.S. company! Its founders are U.S. citizens and none are of Ukrainian descent.

When you get basic facts like this wrong, it makes me wonder what your interest really is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrowdStrike

[RandomTisk]

On top of all that, Obama's campaign had the same or better data directly supplied to them via facebook API's, with facebook's knowledge and approval.

CA 'outrage' stories are nothing more than the media wagging the dog.

[sillysaurusx]

If the data you're referring to didn't come from a company like CA, how did the campaign get access to it?

[cm2012]

Voter registration information is public, also both parties have huge, manually curated lists that they sell access to. But giving FB a seed audience of 10000 voters and asking them to find the 100mil most similar people works better a lot of the time. The effectiveness of FB's machine learning on this stuff would blow your mind.

[rumblerock]

I have some tangential experience here in analytics and advertising, including non-ad social campaigns, and from what I've seen the reporting in the press is likely just the tip of the iceberg. Additionally, much of the focus on the advertising element has distracted from broader and more powerful influence campaigns that operated outside of ads.

From an advertising performance standpoint yes, lookalikes and segmented email lists might perform best on the basis of maximizing engagement, shares, etc. that traditional reporting would suggest. But for a political campaign, enhancing the precision of issue-based messaging to target specific groups should theoretically have yielded gains beyond what the FB algorithm would optimize for – which would likely be more generalized based on in-platform behavior, and muddied by swaths of broadly viral content. While the desired signals might lie somewhere within Facebook's black box, I doubt that the algorithm is generally optimized for this type of political work, when FB's real money comes from driving product sales, signups, etc. In the cases of these political campaigns a lot of this content extended beyond spin to blatantly false information (i.e. made up / completely fake news, inflammatory memes, etc.) – therefore the variance in messaging could be unfathomably massive, limited only by the ability to generate huge amounts of content, which is where content / troll farms came into play.

And advertising aside, the Senate intelligence reports from a couple months ago suggested that the most powerful and far-reaching operations run by CA and similar parties were not based on advertising, and moreso around Facebook groups, Twitter bot / follower networks, and Instagram influencer spheres – recruiting real people into them, then propagating information within (e.g., a 2nd amendment group, run by false avatar accounts aligned with this voter profile, recruiting similar actual users in, and then propagating the desired information within). I've personally seen prior examples from 2014 of these types of mass influence campaigns, namely in the 2014 Senate race in North Carolina, where the seat was flipped to Tillis (R) from the incumbent Hagan (D).

If they had account information / emails, psychographic data, voter rolls, and were operating across platforms – the richness of the data would dictate how far you could go with it. According to the Senate report many of the hired trolls maintained multiple accounts across multiple platforms, were given marching orders each day for messaging, and quotas for performance. Match that with sheer manpower to create content to feed across these platforms, and enough horsepower on the analytics side to optimize based on performance, and you're staring into a frightening abyss.

We'll likely never know how far this went, but based on the data points I've seen from my own work and various reports on the CA / Russia campaigns, I see no reason why something this powerful couldn't exist with enough data, and enough money to put it to work.

The senate intelligence report is essential reading on the topic: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

[bart_spoon]

> Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters. Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.

I would dispute this claim, as it has yet to be proven any of the work Cambridge Analytica did was in any way influential or effective. As someone who has worked extensively in data science, including on marketing campaigns, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the effectiveness of advertising, or at least targeted advertising, is so overstated as to be bordering on snake-oil. Others working in the space agree [0].

[0] https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-h...

[cwkoss]

Marketers are most effective at selling their own industry

[shadowgovt]

If we assume that's true, it would imply marketing works, would it not?

[Intermernet]

It implies that marketing works for marketing. It's possible that those involved in the marketing sector are more vulnerable to marketing. This vulnerability could be the reason that they have faith in the sector's methods, and are therefore employed in the sector.

Many people are marketing averse, and marketing at them will have a negative effect. It just seems that there are enough people around who respond positively to marketing to make it a successful business.

[tie_]

Awesome article - thanks for sharing!

I'll support the authors (and their conclusions) by clicking on the ads links on the site /j

[rossdavidh]

While I agree with "how malleable opinions are...", the actual answer is, "not very malleable". Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small. Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one.

Now, the impact on the politicians of fundraising, is not at all small. The primary advantage of personalized advertising and fundraising, is to help a campaign rake in more cash, which is both legalized bribery, and an incentive to stoke your base's outrate instead of reaching towards the middle.

The worst thing about the CA/Facebook scandal, is that it's become an excuse for a large swath of the Democratic party to decide that it didn't make any mistakes in 2016 worth mentioning (or correcting).

[paganel]

Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else. That “it’s her turn now” was complete BS that messed up things even for us people who have never set foot in the States. I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it. On the other side of the aisle the Republican base was smart enough to send Jeb Bush swinging early on during the primaries, that’s why they now hold the Presidency.

[war1025]

I thought it was interesting how many of the people who opposed the "dynastic politics" of the Bush era were more than happy to back the same sort of thing when it came to the Clintons.

And further that they thought the fact that Hillary was a woman should override any misgivings someone would have about her.

2008 was the first election where I was eligible to vote (I didn't). But the number of people I talked to who backed Obama solely because "how great would it be to have a black president" really dimmed my view of how seriously people take elections.

People treat the president like a mascot as much as anything.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Being a mascot is a major aspect of the president’s job. For example, all presidential candidates have new laws from Congress as part of their campaign platform, even though presidents have no formal power to make Congress do anything. What they mean is that they’ll be a good mascot for the legislation and get Congress to do it that way. It doesn’t seem unserious to me if someone wants a mascot for broader issues too.

[keiferski]

I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way.

It’s nothing new - philosophers and media theorists have been writing about media manipulation for the past century or more. But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.

[malvosenior]

Probably not. In fact Obama did more or less exactly what Cambridge Analytica did:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

> "Consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.

The only difference is that at the time it was heralded as being technologically savvy because it produced results that the media and tech companies desired.

[dfxm12]

I'm not sure if you're arguing in bad faith or you misunderstand how either the Obama app or how Cambridge Analytical got their data.

Obama's app was advertised as an app for the Obama campaign. People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.

Cambridge Analytica obtained similar data, but in a different way by breaking Facebook's TOS. A developer made an app, advertised as some kind of quiz, never saying that the data would be handed over to CA. Not only was the app developer not being up front about what the data would be used for, but they also broke FB's TOS [0] with its usage.

Plainly, there are key differences here beyond how it was heralded at the time (and it should be noted that even the article your provided shows Obama's data collection in both a positive and negative light).

0 - https://www.vox.com/2018/3/17/17134072/facebook-cambridge-an...

[malvosenior]

> People who used the app consented that the Obama campaign would get access to data about them and their friends. For better or worse (better for marketers, worse for the friends of these app users), this was all within how Facebook was expected to work.

I see no material difference here. People shared their data and it was used accordingly. This is how Facebook is expected to work. It's not like the Obama app had a big button that said "upload your friends list to Obama's database!". That was covertly done behind the scenes.

Irregardless, all Facebook users should assume all of their data is being sold and sliced and diced a million different ways.

The main point here is that the media has tried to turn CA in to a scandal while they very much did not do that for very similar actions Obama was taking.

[NeutralCrane]

You are misunderstanding, in that the person you are commenting on isn't referring to their data collection techniques. The point is that, once the data was obtained, both of the campaigns used it for microtargeting. The only difference, as you pointed out, is that CA obtained their data in a way that broke the TOS. But whenever the "scandal" is discussed, it almost entirely focuses on the fact that CA/the Trump campaign was targeting voters with propoganda and manipulating their opinions. Yet, in that aspect, the Obama campaign was no different, but it receives a pass.

[senectus1]

not the same thing at all.

Obama's app was only ever installed on peoples devices that wanted it.

it was in effect preaching to the converted.

CA deliberately harvested people that were not politically involved and dissafected and whipped them into a fuhrer, and thats just how they got started and doesn't cover the outright lies they pushed and farmed.

[dragonwriter]

> I often wonder if any of this “age of post-truth” stuff would have become popular had the election gone the other way.

That probably depends how and why it went the other way, just like it probably wouldn't have the same degree of currency if Trump had won but there hadn't been a widely-reported on pro-Trump propaganda campaign apparently separate from the official campaign that was being compared to the Russian military propaganda technique referred to in a RAND analysis as the “firehose of falsehoods” even before any actual suggestion of Russian support for Trump or collusion between the campaign and Russia was publicly made.

> But the media got the last election so completely wrong that they have to find a grand theory to explain what happened.

Like many politically convenient narratives, yours only works of you ignore the facts, in this case specifically that the media narrative you suggest was constructed as a necessary explanation for the media’s missed prediction of the election results was prominent in the media in relation to the election as far back as the primary campaign (and actually had been a factor in US political coverage, though prior to the evidence of the propaganda campaign referred to earlier, one whose prominence had faded significantly since the end of the second Bush Administration, since Rove's derisive “reality-based community” comment in 2004.)

[keiferski]

As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor. Assuming they did happen and considering that the election was very close, then sure, an argument could be made that they ultimately determined the election.

But that isn’t your argument, or at least what I’m interpreting to be your argument (your last paragraph is a single run-on sentence and it’s quite hard to understand.)

If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race. Instead, they overwhelmingly showed Trump losing by a significant margin. Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events, when in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.

[dragonwriter]

> As far as I know, the consequences of any “propaganda campaign” were minor

Tracing causality in a single election is basically impossible for phenomena which aren't very similar to those in previous elections for which there is a solid base across many examples with many variations in alternative factors that themselves are well understood to provide controls. But the effects of the campaign aren't what drove the narrative of the post-truth era, it's existence which was a major media story starting fairly early in the campaign, and the absence of any disavowal of it was.

> If the media weren’t completely wrong, they would have predicted a close race

They predicted a race about as close as it was. They also (in many but not all cases) predicted a near certainty of a Clinton victory, because, as 538 pointed out before the election in explaining why their predictions were different and showed a much lower probability of Clinton winning than other media models, many models assumed that any poll-vs-vote differences would be independent between the states, while historically polling error is strongly correlated between the states.

> Hence my point: the mainstream media messed up, big time, and instead of acknowledging it, they’ve embarked on a campaign to find a nefarious reason for the entirety of the events

But, again, this claim doesn't work because (1) the media found the “explanation” before the events, and (2) no one except those trying to discredit the story describes it as explaining “the entirety of events”.

> in reality the cause of election results are far more mundane and have more to do with economics.

This is just as much of a self-serving and fact-ignoring explanation of the “entirety of events” as the propaganda as the narrative you are complaining about would be if anyone offered it for that purpose, the difference between yours and the other one is that no one—not even the center-right Democratic establishment, who has the most to gain from getting people to believe that story—offers the other narrative for that purpose.

[dragonwriter]

> Because the Democrats don’t want to hear that they lost because they chose Hillary to run instead of almost anyone else.

If by “the Democrats” you mean “the center-right neoliberal Democratic establishment”, sure. The rest of the Democratic Party has been saying that was a deciding factor (though not the sole deciding factor; there are a number of things you could take away and flip the result) since the day after the 2016 general election (and predicting it even earlier.)

> I can see the Democrats making the same mistake again with Michelle Obama in 4 years’ time if they don’t win this round, I only hope she’ll be smart enough to stay out of it.

Michelle Obama has neither the general negatives that hurt Clinton nor (and there is no plausible way to change this in 4 years) the institutional establishment experience and position that positioned Clinton to win the primary in 2016 (or even the kind that enabled her to get close in 2008.) So, she's got neither what made Clinton powerful in the primary or what made her weak in the general. Once she's spent two and half decades out of the White House, half of them in the Senate and a few more in the cabinet she might acheive the former, but even then it would take something special to acheive the degree of antipathy Clinton has gotten from everywhere except the Democratic establishment, whether it's outside of the party or the non-establishment left within the party.

Plus, the rules that interacted with establishment support to facilitate Clinton's win in 2016 were abolishes almost immediately due largely to the influence the Sanders factions gained in the DNC despite not winning the nomination, so even a Clinton clone with an electorate with no hindsight to 2016 failures would have a harder time.

> On the other side of the aisle the Republican base was smart enough to send Jeb Bush swinging early on during the primaries, that’s why they now hold the Presidency

The Republican base wasn't smarter, the Republican Party just has different nominating rules. Like those in the Democratic nomination system that was operational in 2016, they generally tended (and this is by design) reinforce establishment candidates, but the two systems have different failure modes. The Republican system is designed to work by magnifying the perceptual impact of early victories, even narrow ones, epsecially if they are common across the early primary/caucus states; which usually, when the rules were set, were a matter of name recognition and establishment support. The Democratic ones in 2016 provided a more direct link to establishment support by way of superdelegates (which media tends to count in delegate counts from primaries though they are separate, which gives the establishment candidate an air of inevitability, momentum, and popular support beyond what is factually present.) The Republicans went into 2016 without a clear consensus establishment candidate, which combined with Trump's celebrity status allows Trump to reap the benefit of early victories.

[susijdjdjxa]

> Plus, the rules that interacted with establishment support to facilitate Clinton's win in 2016 were abolishes almost immediately due largely to the influence the Sanders factions gained in the DNC despite not winning the nomination, so even a Clinton clone with an electorate with no hindsight to 2016 failures would have a harder time.

Hillary won the primary with 16.9M votes to Sanders’ 13.2M, are you telling me Democratic Party has changed its rules such that someone wins the vote like that won’t win the nomination?

[dragonwriter]

> Hillary won the primary with 16.9M votes to Sanders’ 13.2M, are you telling me Democratic Party has changed its rules such that someone wins the vote like that won’t win the nomination?

Elections that have coverage of results during voting are known to experience very strong positive effects from perception of success already attained (and in US Presidential nominating contests particularly this is known to affect voting both directly and by effecting fundraising, endorsements, etc.), and the coverage of the 2016 primary featured reports of delegates “won” in the nominating contest to date including both pledged delegates secured by voting and superdelegates who had made public commitments, on the basis that those were the expected first ballot votes. Because of her strong early establishment support, the absence of significant establishment competition, Clinton had huge superdelegate commitments at the outset of the nominating contest.

They've changed the rules to prohibit superdelegate voting on the first round unless the result is already determined, and to exclude superdelegates from the total on which the majority needed to win on the first ballot is needed.

[paganel]

> If by “the Democrats” you mean “the center-right neoliberal Democratic establishment”, sure.

Yeah, that's what I mean, and from across the Ocean it looked like those people "controlled the narrative" (to use an "americanism") well after the elections. I have to admit though that the recent prominency of both Warren and Sanders (who's less demonized compared to 4-5 years ago) make me think that those "center-right neoliberal Democratic" people you mention might have lost their grip on the party, which would be a really interesting development.

Re: Michelle Obama: she'd still be regarded as "dynasty" material, no matter how long she'll want to spend in Senate or as a potential State governor. And I have a feeling that if Trump wins it this year she'll be looked at in 2024 as a potential saviour for the Democrats and for the nation itself.

And then there's also the elephant in the room, i.e. race. Afaik Obama left aside almost all mentions of race during his 2008 campaign, or at least made them as brief as possible, for obvious electoral reasons (and those reasons proved out to be correct, as he won said election). He also didn't put much accent on race relations inside the US during his presidency, not even during his second term. I have a feeling a potential candidacy coming from Michelle Obama won't be able to leave the race thing on the side like her husband managed to, things have changed a lot in the meantime (and one could say that 4 more years of Trump will change things even more regarding this subject), can't see a potential Michelle Obama presidency campaign managing to be race-agnostic, at least not in this day and age and in this tense political climate.

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[shadowgovt]

Correct. A study I've heard described (apologies for missing a link directly to it right now) attempted to micro-target advertising to nudge numbers, and found the strategy that worked wasn't to tell "dyed-in-the-wool" supporters of a candidate to vote for the other candidate; it was to tell them their vote didn't matter and they should stay home. It appeared to have effect.

[3JPLW]

This is exactly why campaigns push so much harder on GOTV than persuasion for the general election.

[gregmac]

> Every well-designed study of political advertising

Wouldn't that be misleading though? There are active disinformation campaigns that are linked to the same people and organizations doing political campaigning.

Cambridge Analytica has apparently been (at the least) tracking people via these networks [1] [2], and it's not much of a stretch to assume some of the same targeting data used for traditional political ads would also be used for disinformation (which is often designed so it doesn't appear to be political).

There are news and TV networks that constantly present confirmed lies (often stated by the politicians themselves) as "news", so the fact they still have viewers and are still in business must mean this type of disinformation is somewhere between somewhat and extremely effective. Whether this is "political advertising" is maybe less clear, but it's definitely designed to influence politics and political opinions.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/19/cambridge-anal...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/sep/29/cambridge...

[GreeniFi]

I understand that it is difficult to change opinion, and targeted ads do not do this; they seek to either mobilize or suppress voters to attend or not attend the ballot box.

[crispyambulance]

>Every well-designed study of political advertising I've ever seen has shown that it's impact is very small, in some cases unmeasurably small.

Skeptical about that.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "political advertising". Does that include targeted misinformation campaigns?

Surveillance capitalism does work, there's no question about that. What happens when a customer of these platforms "tweaks" them for the purpose politics instead of selling shoes (or whatever)? I don't think the answer is clear, yet, but I expect there's some very ugly stuff in there that's "not compatible with democracy"-- as Shoshana Zuboff has said.

[duncanawoods]

> 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign

> Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one

These are not convincing examples. They are utterly dominated by confounding details. Clinton had the name-recognition of Coca-Cola vs. an unknown Sanders and the less said about the Trump circus the better. To compare advertising spend of brand-name candidates, you need to account for the vast quantity of non-paid marketing they have received before and during the campaign.

Better examples would be between two similarly unknown candidates in city/county elections. I have heard it claimed (reddit) that these races are almost always won by the biggest spender but I don't have a real source.

[mbesto]

> Thus, for example, the 2016 Clinton campaign raised a lot more $$ than the Trump campaign, whereas the Sanders primary campaign out-fundraised the Clinton one.

The amount of dollars directly contributed by the campaign is a red herring. Trump had WAY more earned media than Clinton, to the tune of billions of dollars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-t...

[qmmmur]

You don't even need as good as on average in the right circumstances. Take Britain, which only has a sample size of its 650 constituents and whose votes within those are not represented if not the majority. In fact, the seat of power rests in those seats which can flip flop by very small margins.

[makomk]

Britain is probably not a good example of this in 2020, since a whole bunch of constituencies which had previously always voted for the same party and which in theory shouldn't matter suddenly flipped in the last election.

[pbhjpbhj]

And all it took was good old-fashioned lies, brainwashing, and corruption.

[sifar]

>> the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.

More importantly, these people have realized it is far easier to shape the environment to the individual than mould the individual to the environment. When you can engulf an individual in his own filter bubble, you no longer have to predict his behavior, but can literally shape it.

[JackFr]

> Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades,

Ad experts and entertainment companies have claimed this for decades, and who knows, it may even be true. But it is true that it's how they justify getting paid.

[shadowgovt]

Given the time scales in question and the law of averages, I believe it is safe to assume that there is real value in exchange for money received in that transaction. To claim otherwise is to approach conspiracy-theory levels of people having to "buy into a scam and not give the game away" for those industries to have not collapsed.

[basch]

>it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters.

At the end of the day, one of two people almost always win. Either the person who spent more, or the person who was more outrageous. Democracy largely reduces to a competition to be louder, and those are the primary means to the ends.

[pier25]

The biggest issue in democracy is that the majority of people vote irrationally. For example a lot of people will vote the same party no matter what or will vote for a candidate because they like him/her regardless of the program.

[jfengel]

Single-party voting is not necessarily irrational. A vote is a compromise. In a democracy, you need a majority to achieve anything, and with many options available, it's going to be rare for any single option to pass 50%. You get things done by making bargains with other voters. And those bargains have to be durable over time: I'll vote for your thing today if you'll vote for my thing tomorrow.

A party is a semi-formalized way of acknowledging those long-term bargains. They are sets of people with overlapping concerns -- sometimes distantly overlapping, where A and B have things in common, as do B and C, but A and C barely recognize each other. But if you can't get A, B, and C all to work together, none of them get what they want.

And in the worst case for them, X, Y, and Z achieve what they want instead -- positions that A, B, and C all agree are bad. The party that behaves with unity will get things that some of its members want and all members can live with. The party that has people opt out every time they disagree will achieve less-than-nothing.

The point is that a party can be a rational long-term decision even if it seems in conflict with short-term interests.

[pier25]

> a party can be a rational long-term decision

Only assuming that there is something like a constant ideology that party members adhere to over the decades.

[jfengel]

Decades is too much to ask, but one decade isn't. It isn't a single ideology, but a set of overlapping ideologies. Those do shift, as circumstances and priorities change, but generally not radically within the scale of a single Presidential term.

I'd say it's not unreasonable to commit to a party and re-evaluate that commitment every decade (or perhaps 8 years is a better figure in the US). That's not to say that you won't be constantly looking out for new information, like a technological change that makes you reconsider your ideas or the discovery that some candidate is very untrustworthy. But if you want anything nontrivial done, it's not going to happen on a time frame shorter than a half-decade -- and your allies are going to want to believe that you'll still be with them once they've achieved your top priority.

[pier25]

> I'd say it's not unreasonable to commit to a party and re-evaluate that commitment every decade

But that's a rational attitude and not what I was describing initially.

A lot of people commit to a party for all their voting life which generally is quite a few decades. Sometimes this even goes for generations.

[jfengel]

Oh, definitely. Parties change, and people's priorities change, and that gradually leads to a strain. Even purely rational people have a hard time telling when that strain has become a breach.

And a new alliance isn't easy to construct. You can't just go to the opposite party and say, "I've swung to you, so start catering to my priorities". Usually, you'll spend some time voting for nobody, in hopes that somebody will notice you, but that's hard without some level of organization, and that's work. In the meantime, you're failing to vote for a party that you had at least some sympathy for, and possibly losing to a party that has no reason to be on your side.

So a lot of people make party-line decisions based on inertia. They could improve their situation, but it's not as simple as changing their vote, since the existing alliances have priorities that won't change for a few votes. That leaves a lot of people in limbo, where there is no really great rational choice.

[JoeAltmaier]

Hard to say what's 'rational' when voting. Lots of metrics; lots of theories. Vote for the person (character etc) vs their promises? Vote for the organization that will guide them (party) instead of the person?

I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen.

It's not a problem with democracy. Its a problem with people and power.

[pier25]

> Hard to say what's 'rational' when voting

First step you examine all the available options objectively, like any other decision.

Do you think the majority of voters do that?

> I'd say its entirely irrational to vote for the program as outlined by the candidate speeches. Because they rarely happen.

Right, but this another problem altogether.

I'm getting some cynic vibes from your comment. Are you against voting?

[JoeAltmaier]

I'm admitting I don't know what a rational voter looks like. I've been fooled too often by the campaigning so believe there's enough information there to make an 'informed' decision.

[deltron3030]

They vote ingroup first, whatever that means for them. What changed is that the're virtual ingroups these days, and that the limitations through location that once existed, where many connections just weren't possible, don't exist anymore.

[JackFr]

> The biggest issue in democracy is that the majority of people vote irrationally.

That is to say, they don't vote in a manner consistent with how you perceive their interests.

[shadowgovt]

I believe the term, when used in the literature, is more to mean "they don't vote in a manner consistent with how a dispassionate observer with access to global information state perceives the path to achieving their interests."

There's quite a lot of literature on the topic, and it's quite fascinating. For example, higher education has a tendency to change people's answers to a variety of survey questions (summary of this and other phenomena in the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter).

[bduerst]

Voting irrationally is sequitur from "having interests", just not rational self-interests.

Having interests is not mutually exclusive to acting irrationally.

[pier25]

What you're saying is that people voting for the same party for 30 years, regardless of the political program, are satisfying their interests?

[valvar]

First of, I think you are confounding irrationality with being misinformed. The only irrational voters would be those who are clinically insane or similar. Secondly, it's not really much of an issue as such, as votes are aggregated and groups tend to act in an informed manner - c.f. wisdom of the crowds.

[tomxor]

> Ad experts and entertainment companies have known this for decades, but I get the sense the average American citizen still thinks of themselves as a free and independent thinker and not a product of their environment.

I feel like I've just experienced an extreme microcosm of this: I recently treated myself to an expensive power amplifier... and reluctantly embarked on the painful process of choosing appropriate audio cables. Through the other side I am still in disbelief over how entrenched the market and consumers are in their pseudo scientific BS - so much craziness - and almost every successful cable manufacturer and professional reviewer is in on the game (of which there are countless).

I'm usually of the opinion that within healthy competitive markets, capitalism tends to provides a kind of democracy, hopefully with emerging attributes such as honesty which naturally push the consumer towards making good decisions without being deeply informed - but clearly that is not always the case.

It's relatively simple to become informed about the basics of audio cables such as speaker wire [0], but that's not enough, you need a strong disposition of skepticism to wade through the sea of nonsense claims based on (real) electrical properties plucked from the science of general EE and sprinkled irrelevantly all over audio cable marketing and reviews and then echoed by it's users... that's the easy bit, next you will have another sea of anecdotal ABX reviewers that start to persuade you that the science could be missing something, now you enter the world of improper ABX tests, and the psychology of greater_cost+any_change = perceived as improved (e.g improving sound through simply disturbing wire connections, causing destabilisation of older amps by increasing the wire capacitance and hearing the added artificial oscillations as "detail").

TL;DR

It's possible to wade through all this, just like it is with political BS by looking up or testing every single claim - but it's exhausting! especially when there are so few people doing it.

I think we need to somehow fundamentally change people's attitude towards new information: with a high degree of scepticism... at some point it will become easier when the balance between BS generated and people debunking BS makes it undesirable and risky to bother generating BS.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaker_wire

[pier25]

There is still so much superstition in the world it's embarrassing.

I still remember in the late 90s early 00s some friends claimed that some blank CDs were better than others for audio and sounded better. Then I asked if when burning a word document to such CDs it had better text than on the cheaper CDs.

[Mikeb85]

Anti-establishment sentiment has been brewing for awhile. Some candidates simply tapped into that (Bernie, Trump) whereas the losing candidates either pretended everything was fine (Clinton) or relied on older political ideas (Cruz). I don't think CA was responsible for forming opinions so much as knowing exactly how to exploit existing opinions. And anti-establishment opinions are still popular (Warren and Sanders are 2 of the 3 Democrat front-runners) despite media messaging.

Edit - examples of anti-establishment sentiment prior to Sanders and Trump are Occupy Wallstreet and the Tea Party. Recently I watched 'Saving Capitalism' with Robert Reich (Bill Clinton's former secretary of labour) and it chronicled the rise of anti-establishment sentiment quite well as well as the growth of inequality and how all this lead to the current political landscape. Based on Trump's messaging (his economic platform is basically the canonical right-wing solution to increase wages and employment), CA obviously tapped into all of this.

[groundlessly]

It’s absolutely wild to me that, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we’re still drawing conclusions about the public based on the fact that the person who earned by far the most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election.

For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one.

Maybe public opinion in the US is fickle or uninformed. Maybe it’s not. Either way it’s not reflected in the US political landscape, for the simple reason that the US political landscape reflects many things more consequential than public opinion.

[Moodles]

I agree the electoral college is not as good as a general public vote, however one counterargument to "side A won more votes than side B!" is that, both sides knew the rules ahead of time so if the rules were a general vote, then the campaigns would have been different so side B may still have won in that case. We will never know.

[makomk]

This is a particularly important counterargument when talking about the 2016 presidential election, since Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result. Trump's campaign, on the other hand, was by all accounts focused on simply getting enough electoral college votes to actually win. This was pretty obvious from their respective postmortems in the press.

The idea that a particular candidate was cheated because they won a symbolic but politically irrelevant victory that the competition wasn't even trying for is not a particularly good argument. In fact, it's positively Trumpian; he famously used the "popular vote" argument to discredit Obama's victory.

[dragonwriter]

> Clinton seems to have been the only candidate who was actually trying to win the popular vote. She put a bunch of campaigning resources into places like California which would increase her popular vote share but wouldn't affect the result.

What Clinton was trying to do was not so much “win the popular vote” but “maximize down-ballot coattails associated with an expected electoral victory” (and, thereby, assure that members of Congress of her party felt thet owed her.)

It's perhaps worth remembering that inability to marshal support from Congressional reps of his own party, particularly it's liberal wing, is what handed her husband two stinging early embarrassments (one of which was defeat on an issue she was the face of): the lesser being NAFTA passing with strong Republican support but widespread and strong Democratic opposition, and the greater being the humiliating defeat of Clinton's signature campaign initiative, health care reform.

[jandrese]

Bill Clinton did pave the way for HMOs. They were a punt, but it was progress in reducing healthcare costs.

[malvosenior]

> For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work

There's some irony in admonishing people for not understanding systems, while simultaneously failing to understand the electoral college. That's the system that decides who becomes president.

[jimktrains2]

> It’s absolutely wild to me that, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, we’re still drawing conclusions about the public based on the fact that the person who earned by far the most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election.

You're forgetting that we're not as a single, monolithic country; we're designed to be a union of (mostly) independent states. It is those state who select the head of the executive however they see fit individually. There is nothing stopping a state from issuing electoral votes by percentage and not by winner-take-all.

Since the Civil War and especially with the expansion of the commerce clause, we don't act quite like (mostly) independent states any more, but those basic premises and rules are still there. To be honest, the system works much like it's intended to -- the rural/agricultural states maintain some power even though since they're rural there are fewer people. This isn't inherently bad; however, I'd argue that making the number of people represented by a single representative essentially unlimited instead of having a bounded maximum like initially designed is the root of our problems. It's possible for states to gain or maintain population and loose representatives and electoral votes under the current system, which is the main issue.

[Mikeb85]

> most votes of any candidate in the race still technically lost the election

> For people who pride ourselves so much on understanding how systems work, we’re consistently really bad at understanding this one.

Well, CA seems to have understood that what matters is opinions across enough states to win the Electoral College vote. As you said, it's a system. They optimised for the system that exists.

Even if a majority voted for Clinton, there's enough discontent across the US that Trump won the election quite decisively (304 to 227 electoral college votes). Anyhow, look at the current landscape. Warren + Sanders make up nearly 50% of the Democratic primary polls and their popularity seems to be growing as others drop out and as we get closer to actual voting.

[nkassis]

Looking a just the total of electoral votes ignores the razor thin margins a lot of those states were won by. I wouldn't call that decisive.

[burfog]

Well the same goes for the irrelevant popular vote. She won it by less than a New York City.

[wayoutthere]

Among left-leaning circles there is an overwhelming feeling that the "Overton window" has shifted way too far right -- especially on things like regulation of business. Bernie Sanders is popular specifically because he shifts that window back to the left. From a deregulatory standpoint, I'm not sure Trump is significantly worse than Clinton. He's definitely worse, but the difference is smaller than Clinton vs Sanders; they're both in the pockets of the corporate overlords.

The far-left wing of the Democratic party felt that 4 years of chaos under Trump was an acceptable tradeoff in the long-term for moving the party (and the country) to the left on the economy. So they stayed home on election day and made the race close enough for Trump to win. In the current climate, moderates are going to find themselves left out in the cold in national races -- exactly because moderates are relatively easy to pull to one side or the other via targeted campaign advertising.

[dragonwriter]

> The far-left wing of the Democratic party felt that 4 years of chaos under Trump was an acceptable tradeoff in the long-term for moving the party (and the country) to the left on the economy.

No, all the polling and other research I've seen showed that non-Clinton supporters on the left (particularly Sanders supporters) supported Clinton more strongly on 2016 than Clinton 2008 supporters supported Obama. What people (largely because it conflicts with the simplistic linear left-right model where people vote for whoever is nearer their position on that line that so many people have internalized as how US elections work) is that Sanders polled substantially better among the disaffected independents, rural working class whites, and other demographics outside of the Democratic liberal base (and even outside of the Democratic Party at all) than Clinton did. Those are the people that, whether by voting the other way or just not turning up to vote at all the way they might have for a candidate that offered them something to turn out for, that made the difference.

> In the current climate, moderates are going to find themselves left out in the cold in national races -- exactly because moderates are relatively easy to pull to one side or the other via targeted campaign advertising.

Moderates aren't easier to pull, people whose variation from the political center isn't along the main axis of variation between the parties are easier to pull. That's not the same thing as moderates.

[mark_l_watson]

re: “ And anti-establishment opinions are still popular (Warren and Sanders are 2 of the 3 Democrat front-runners) despite media messaging.”

I really find it shocking how extremely biased outlets like MSNBC are in favor of pro-corporations candidates like Clinton, Biden, etc. I very rudely mock my friends who are Democrats and who swear by what the paid shills on MSNBC do to negatively cover any candidate who does not tow the corporate state party line. Of course, it is the same for the rare republican candidates like Ron Paul who also are not paid shills for the corporate state.

[Kye]

All the cable networks are owned by major corporations that use them to serve their interests. This shouldn't be shocking.

[mark_l_watson]

Of course, you are correct.

[akhilcacharya]

Ultimately a non-trivial number of people have a collection of views that confound traditional left/right political boundaries in the US. I think CA was (allegedly) very effective in promoting issues that emphasized particular collections of views well, specifically on immigration.

[boobePhuu7iet7i]

[flagged]

[malvosenior]

> Probably the most useful takeaway from CA's approach is that it's useful to realize how malleable opinions are of large swaths of "independent" voters.

What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact.

> Not enough to flip people's opinions 180 degrees, but enough to, say, get a reality TV star elected over a politician with a checkered history (that has itself been subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered).

Clinton vs Trump wasn't an option people were waying. No one switched from Clinton to Trump (or vice versa) because of an ad or anything else. Those that hate Clinton voted for Trump, those that hate Trump voted for Clinton. It's really is as simple as that.

Have you ever met or even heard of someone who supported one of those candidates but switched to the other? I haven't.

[Spooky23]

Absolutely.

Delivery of the Trump message absolutely resonated with and flipped voters who normally vote democratic or who wouldn't vote. Union members, Catholics, etc. In my county, which hasn't elected a GOP candidate in 30 years, it drove 5% more republican votes than 2004/2008/2016. That matters in competitive places.

Bernie Sanders was very similar on the democratic side. Many people not so happy with the mainstream party candidate were attracted to his message, which was delivered mostly via social media, especially early on.

Don't discount the power of social platforms. The impact of a good targeted message is real on its own, but is magnified when your dad/cousin/friend/boss implicitly endorses the message by commenting or sharing. If you look at Trump's campaign, that made it possible to say and do socially unacceptable things. "Make America Great Again" means something to people who support him... they find it inspirational.

[takeda]

> What makes you think that people are malleable? This article doesn't say anything about the effectiveness of what CA did. It's impossible to say if people voted the way they did because of a FB ad. My >20 years of experience in the consumer technology (ad) industry tells me that ads had little to no impact.

The difference here and ordinary ad is, that unlike ads which target people based on where they live, interests, gender, income and many other things, here they categorize people by a psychological profile and then use whichever triggers work best. They also use other information to trigger emotional responses. For example my family member is a veteran who is a Republican. He forwards plenty of messages that has intentions to scare him and make be even more to the right. For example some article of a parent of a soldier who got a note on his car from supposed liberal wishing him that his son would be killed, or liberals burning flags, or democrats not standing up and clapping when a widow of a soldier that died (it was in 2017 I believe) was honored by Trump etc. It is trivial to manipulate pictures or recreate scenarios that would trigger, but those things work really well on him, and he wasn't even a nut before.

> Clinton vs Trump wasn't an option people were waying. No one switched from Clinton to Trump (or vice versa) because of an ad or anything else. Those that hate Clinton voted for Trump, those that hate Trump voted for Clinton. It's really is as simple as that.

> Have you ever met or even heard of someone who supported one of those candidates but switched to the other? I haven't.

Yes if you're hardcore Democrat or Republican and only vote in party lines, it's unlikely that you will be changed, but then you would be classified as a different profile.

The effort was to discourage Democrats from voting or even make them vote 3rd party (for example there was a campaign that made Clinton look quite evil, and frankly it fooled me too), everyone else was encouraged to vote for Trump (in different ways depending on their profile).

Back in 2016 I saw on /r/AskReddit a question, someone was asking why Trump supporters were planning to vote for Trump. What stick with me was one response where person acknowledged that Trump was bad, but he still was going to vote for him, because he hated establishment and "it needs to get real bad before it gets better". People have different personalities and reasons but if you can categorize them correctly you can provide them reason they want to make them cast a vote for candidate you want.

[malvosenior]

What you're basically saying is that if a candidate tailors a message to an individual, then that individual will support them. Yes! That's how it should work. The candidates have to earn the support of the voters. They should be trying to craft messages that resonate with them. If people can flip voters with ads alone, then where does it end? Who has the better ads?

What we say was a constituency that was upset with the status quo. When given a chance to vote for an outsider, they jumped on it. I think advertising played little to no role in the 2016 election and I've yet to see data to suggest otherwise.

[takeda]

That was traditional way, Trump during his campaign sad many things that contradicted itself. Nobody really knew what his actual policy would be in the end.

The messages were more in the tune: "Trump maybe is not the greatest, but Hilary will be a catastrophe."

[rumblerock]

Completely agree with these anecdotes, and this is where the potential power of the campaign extended far beyond ads to Facebook groups, and Twitter / Instagram follower networks. Within those spheres you have free reign to curate audiences based on profiles, feed this type of blatantly false information to trigger people, and optimize from there. I went into greater detail in another comment in this thread, but I would suggest reading the Senate intelligence report from October to learn more – if you care about this topic it's riveting and frightening.

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

[Balero]

But people were coerced by the media they saw into hating whichever candidate and, many, into loving one of them.

[malvosenior]

Only if you discount people's ability to think for themselves. Both these candidates had been in the public eye for decades. People decided based on what they've witnessed with their own eyes.

[takeda]

You work in advertising in >20 years, you really think you would have job if it didn't work?

Everyone who you will ask will absolutely say they aren't influenced by advertising, yet the branded products are still successful despite being more expensive.

For example medication, people still are buying Tylenol, Mortin, Aleve despite there being cheaper alternatives that are essentially the same thing: Acetaminophen, Ibuprofen, Naproxen. They will start buying these generics only after they are educated that these things are the same thing.

If you're looking for an insurance company (for a car, life etc) you will tend to chose companies that you heard the name of. You might pick up one that's not familiar (to you) only after you do research or someone else will recommend it to you.

It's same with politics, if you would do research I don't think those campaigns would influence you much, but most people won't have time to do a research.

[larnmar]

Personally, I buy the big brand name drugs over generics for the somewhat-rational reason that I trust the quality control and deep pockets of a Johnson and Johnson or GlaxoSmithKline more than I trust whatever random company makes those generics. It’s probably a minuscule extra risk but my medication budget is a few bucks a year and I am happy to have the extra peace of mind of knowing that a $300 billion company’s reputation is resting on these pills not being contaminated.

[takeda]

I guess it's your choice, but it's not like those companies didn't have scandals in that area.

[Balero]

Yeah I agree completely. The media can manipulate this by controlling what people witness with their own eyes.

People tend to stick to a small number of news sources, so these sources only tell one side of a story.

You need as much of the info as possible to think for yourself, and you can be manipulated by what you have witnessed.

[Moodles]

I liked your comment until you brought Trump vs Clinton politics into it. I think it's better if you leave that part out.

[luxuryballs]

Reality TV star? Or are you just cherry picking something that can be made to sound unfit for office?

How about American business magnate and billionaire playboy who even in his 70s was loved enough by the public to become a TV star?

Yeah I just played the opposite card but for the sake of balance and honesty, here:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?187762-1/united-nations-headqu...

https://youtu.be/CXmXd1xrBUQ

[tekmate]

the guy was always a laughingstock

[luxuryballs]

He was “presidential” and anti-corruption before it was cool: https://www.c-span.org/video/?187762-1/united-nations-headqu...

[shadowgovt]

Whatever claims of anti-corruption he may have made in the past kinda fell out the window when he appointed his family to key political positions, one would think.

[luxuryballs]

...for example?

[shadowgovt]

I don't understand your question. If he is ostensibly anti-corruption, the rampant and obvious nepotism is counter to that goal.

Unless he is simply anti-corruption that doesn't benefit him directly, in case rampant and obvious nepotism is not incompatible with his goal (but, I assume, not what voters were actually hoping for when they elected him).

[tekmate]

you're clinging to a fantasy

[Moodles]

You're going to be down-voted to oblivion on hacker news, but I do agree with the general point that, the post you're replying to saying "'reality TV star' vs 'politician subject to decades of effort and millions spent to make said history checkered'" is needlessly political and doesn't belong on hacker news (same as your post).

[shadowgovt]

I'm happy to accept criticism of my characterization if it was factually inaccurate.

[Moodles]

It’s not so much the factual inaccuracy as the loaded language. One can factually describe Trump in a positive light and Clinton in a negative light. It’s needlessly emotive and doesn’t belong on HN in my opinion.

[shadowgovt]

I'm not sure I'd classify it as "needlessly" emotive; the topic is very serious and deserves engagement from people, and emotions are one of many ways to engage people.

In the spirit of the founder of Y Combinator, I'd suggest that perhaps the emotive response signals that there is a sacred cow worth exploring here.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[Moodles]

I assume you would appreciate the loaded language if it was biased against your side then.

[luxuryballs]

fair enough, perhaps I should restrain myself from rebuttals in the future... but it was just too tempting

[tialaramex]

> How about American business magnate and billionaire playboy

American is redundant. It is _literally_ a requirement of the office that you be an American. You might remember this because Trump spent almost a decade pretending to believe his predecessor wasn't American. Countries which are more confident don't have such a rule but the American Founding Fathers feared a European power might try to seize control.

Magnate just means wealthy or powerful man so it is also redundant with your other qualifications.

Billionaire is based on Trump's claims, he has gone out of his way to ensure nobody actually knows what he's worth. One of the dirty secrets about "rich lists" is that all the interesting people on them don't have verifiable wealth so the list makers invariably resort to guesswork or fiction.

So that leaves "playboy". My dictionary explains that a playboy is single and devotes their life to pleasure, typically sexual pleasure. But Trump is on his third wife and his main pleasure appears to be either golf or soaking up praise from other people.