Book Reviews 363

Sasha Issenberg. The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning

Campaigns. New York: Crown Publishers. 2012. 357 pp. $26.00 (cloth).

John Sides
George Washington University

Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab is the history of how campaigns got smart
by using better models, better methods, and social science. It is and likely will
always be the definitive book on this subject. It is lively, fun, and packed with
fascinating detail. Full disclosure: It is hard for a political scientist to dislike
a book in which political scientists are main characters—even if we can’t all
have the “Ken-doll looks” of the University of Texas’s Daron Shaw.
Issenberg’s book is the history of two separate trends in campaigning.
One is the creation and evolution of micro-targeting. Issenberg describes
the work of figures like Alex Gage, Hal Malchow, Ken Strasma, and Dan
Wagner. He details how targeting shifted from geographic areas to individu-
als as campaigns amassed the necessary information from voter files, con-
sumer databases, and elsewhere. Campaigns also learned to survey small
fractions of voters, incorporate their responses into their database, and then
use models to predict how other voters would have answered these survey
questions. The result is that campaigns are far smarter in how they deploy
resources.
Of course, sophisticated targeting and “big data” can’t tell a campaign what
will actually move voters. Thus, Issenberg focuses on a second trend: the use
of field experiments to identify the causal effects of campaigning on voter
turnout and candidate preference. Issenberg’s book moves from the early field
experiments of Harold Gosnell to the reinvigoration of this research by Alan
Gerber and Donald Green to the work of Mike Podhorzer, Todd Rogers, and
others who were behind the creation and success of the Analyst Institute. The
Analyst Institute’s work has produced best practices for voter mobilization
that are taped to the walls of the field offices of many Democratic and progres-
sive campaigns.
This brings us to another point: The book is also the history of the Democrats’
advantage in the science of campaigning—even though some innovations first
came from the Republican side. For example, the Bush campaign in 2004
may not have had all the bells and whistles of the Obama campaign in 2008
or 2012, but it did have a commitment to data and the sort of in-person voter
contact that field experiments have proven effective. The mantle was picked
up by Rick Perry strategist Dave Carney, leading to some of the most innova-
tive field experimentation ever done: the actual randomization of Perry’s ads
and appearances during his 2006 gubernatorial primary campaign. Perhaps the
GOP will now fully embrace this sort of science.
Of course, one can quibble with the book as well. Issenberg sometimes
draws overly sharp distinctions among political science theories. For example,
364 Book Reviews

Issenberg argues that political science had never incorporated the notion of
low-information rationality, preferring to imagine citizens as “socially prepro-
grammed toward political attitudes” (the alleged approach of The American
Voter) or “walking calculators able to make perfectly rational choices” (a ref-
erence to rational choice theory). But of course much of the literature on party
identification, beginning with The American Voter, could easily be read as
an account of low-information rationality: Party identification is as much an
information shortcut as anything else. And Issenberg’s seeming critique of
The American Voter is in tension with later sections that discuss the success of
targeting models and emphasize just how predictable voters can be. Perhaps
“pre-programmed” isn’t so far off after all.
A bigger question is whether The Victory Lab puts a bit too much sheen
on this “secret science.” To be sure, Issenberg is careful to say that structural
forces like the economy shape election outcomes, and that sophisticated cam-
paigning typically matters at the margins. He is also careful to portray many
of this new breed of practitioners as modest, careful thinkers (“geeks”) rather
than gurus. But the book is fundamentally a narrative of how this science
has succeeded, and so it says less about its limitations. One limitation: Even
sophisticated targeting models struggle to predict basic demographics like
race or religion when such information is not already available in the voter file.
There is also no consistent evidence that micro-targeted messages are more
effective than broadly targeted messages. (On both points, see the research of
political scientists Eitan Hersh and Brian Schaffner.) Moreover, experiments
sometimes fail. A  large-scale voter contact experiment in Wisconsin during
Obama’s 2008 campaign actually backfired—likely costing Obama votes in
that state, according to research by Michael Bailey, Dan Hopkins, and Todd
Rogers himself. All of this research postdates the book, and so the point is not
that Issenberg should have incorporated it. The point is that similar kinds of
challenges have already confronted and frustrated social scientists and prac-
titioners of campaign analytics and experiments. In The Victory Lab, these
experiences are mainly in the background.
That said, the limitations of the scientific study of campaigns pale in com-
parison to the limitations of the primitive campaigning that the science is
replacing. Indeed, as someone who has gritted his teeth at the self-serving
and thinly evidenced stories consultants tell in the pages of Campaigns and
Elections, I found The Victory Lab a satisfying indictment. As Issenberg tells
it, when Carney brought Gerber and Green to Austin to educate a group of
consultants, he likened it to “going into the Catholic church telling everyone
that Mary wasn’t a virgin, and Jesus really wasn’t her son.” If the secret sci-
ence was once heresy, then we’re all heretics now. And campaigns will be
better for it.
doi:10.1093/poq/nft048