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Quick. What company is spending $700 million for Kamala Harris in a controversial way? Don't know? Well, we didn't either until we saw this story in The New York Times. The company, Future Forward, has raised and is spending $700 million in a way that some campaign pros think is inefficient. But the company was founded by a group of wonky Obama campaign veterans who think they know better than the pros, and are acting accordingly. They are extremely secretive, which is why nobody has ever heard of them. But they are exceedingly focused on what they believe is the best strategy for Harris and don't especially want any input from her campaign team.
The company is more like a political science lab than a super PAC. It has tested thousands of messages with ads on TV and the Internet and social media postings. Only one in 20 of the tested messages is ultimately approved and run big time. The company is serious about testing its messages thoroughly before pushing them out everywhere. The company claims to have run 10 million voter surveys since January, of which four million were since Harris entered the race. Seems like a lot to us. Each message is ranked in its effectiveness in moving voters, and it is the survival of the fittest. Whichever company is getting the order for all the hard disks they are buying to store their data is surely doing well. The company has some very rich donors supporting their work, but they are rather shy about naming names.
David Nickerson, the political scientist who ran the experiments division of Barack Obama's very data-driven 2012 campaign said: "They're probably the most analytics- and evidence-driven PAC I've ever seen." But not all pros think that so much money should go to testing ads and spending the rest of it on running the best ones, even if they are really good at it. Some of them want to see more money going to GOTV efforts, but that is not what Future Forward does.
Here's where the controversy is: The pros want to microtarget the ads. What about those fence-sitting left-handed middle-age wealthy college-educated Baptist Black married vegan lesbians? Shouldn't we be focusing on them? OK, maybe not so specific, but people in the Harris campaign think all day long about which demographic groups they need to microtarget. Future Forward says that all of its data say that broadly based ads are more cost effective than a collection of microtargeted ads. That's where the disagreement is, and Future Forward says it has disks full of data to back up its claim.
Since July, the group has tested over 300 ads, both online and on TV, and measured the effectiveness down to a tenth of a percentage point. They haven't disclosed how they do that, but presumably they do some polling in some market, run the ad, and then poll again. According to their measurements, this is the best ad of all. It is only 1 minute and worth watching. If you are not signed into a YouTube account and get a message asking you to sign in, you can just click on the "best ad" link and watch it there.
The ad starts with Harris at a rally speaking directly to the camera talking about what she will do to help ordinary people by trying to reduce prices and cut taxes. She says: "If you want to know who someone cares about, look who they fight for." The ad cuts to families in kitchens and people shopping as she continues speaking. So after 4 million voter surveys, the company discovered that all they had to do was use footage of her repeating Ronald Reagan's stump speech. No microtargeting at all here. Just a generic speech talking about how she would help middle-class voters on kitchen table issues. That got the best response of the hundreds of ads they used. The campaign didn't like this at all. They wanted to microtarget a dozen very specific demographics, not just say: "I'll lower prices and cut taxes." Who is right? We dunno. Maybe James Carville ("It's the economy, stupid"). (V)