By way of a background aside, a couple of years ago, Michele’s stepfather, Jim, gave us a subscription to Forbes. I am an avid magazine reader, almost any magazine, like People in a dentist’s office for example, but Forbes is probably the one magazine that doesn’t resonate with me, even in the slightest. It is a celebration of rich people only because they are rich and we often take it from the mailbox and throw it directly into the recycling. But, because we were getting Forbes, I think, we got a complimentary issue of Bloomberg Business, which is a different and, to my sensibilities, much better magazine. End aside.
If you read the same papers that I do – the New York Times, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, for example – it is hard to think of Trump as a rational player. It seems like it will be a win for us all if he just doesn’t get in a pissing match with Putin and start WWIIl. But after reading this fascinating article, Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go, in the aforementioned Bloomberg Business, Trump seems very rational. The article was obviously written before the election and takes the general attitude that Trump is going to lose – for lack of a better word – but it still makes the case that Trump’s campaign was not just randomly different, but different in a calculated way.
Like Obama and his team eight years ago, Trump and his team changed the game. Before the article, I had sort of held the position that Hillary lost because she ran a lousy campaign – I had joked that, in a year of change, Hillary’s campaign was Vote for me for more of the same – but, with new information, I’ve changed my mind. Now I think Trump won because he ran a brilliant campaign. The article is well worth reading, here is a sample:
Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts.