Robo-Gerrymander

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Bruce Mehlman:

Researchers were using high-performance computing and big data to discover new materials and analyze proteins before AI… but AI massively accelerated & improved such data-intensive efforts. Gerrymandering dates to 1812 in the U.S. Party strategists have been leveraging voter data and computing to draw advantageous maps for decades. AI promises gerrymandering on steroids — weapons of mass division in the 2025 redistricting wars — with powerful AI models able to (1) precisely-sift unprecedented amounts and unprecedentedly-personal data, (2) compare unlimited potential maps to optimize outcomes. But while AI-enabled cramming could reduce the paltry 20% of seats that are currently competitive, AI-drawn maps might also create more competitive seats by shifting voters out of safer seats (where risk-averse incumbent politicians often prefer them).

The Deepfake Election

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social media and campaign technology.

Eva Surovell at The Messenger:

The National Republican Congressional Committee released new advertisements using images generated by artificial intelligence of national parks "overrun with immigrants."

The advertisements target Democrats who voted last week against legislation that would prevent the use of public lands for temporary housing for immigrants seeking asylum.

 

Oliver Knox at WP:

President Barack Obama warned us in 2018.

Or rather, a digitally manipulated video of Obama, voiced by actor-director Jordan Peele, warned us: “We’re entering an era in which our enemies can make it look like anyone is saying anything at any point in time, even if they would never say those things.”
...

If the Obama video seems a little clunky, consider that it’s five years old, before the latest AI tools, like ChatGPT were household names and available to pretty much anyone with an internet connection.

Back in March, my colleagues Isaac Stanley-Becker and Naomi Nix chronicled how AI-generated images of former president Donald Trump being arrested rocketed around the internet, getting millions of eyeballs.


In April, Isaac and John Wagner reported on the Republican National Committee releasing a 30-second ad built entirely with AI imagery of a dystopian future in which President Biden has been reelected and America is falling apart. (The RNC included a disclosure about AI use.)

Deepfake War

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social media and campaign technology.

Josh Archote at the Tampa BayTimes :

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ political campaign’s apparent use of fake, artificial intelligence-generated photos of former President Donald Trump hugging and kissing Anthony Fauci has raised concerns among experts about the new technology’s ability to deceive voters.

The pictures were part of a 40-second video posted last week by @DeSantisWarRoom on Twitter criticizing Trump — DeSantis’ chief rival for the GOP presidential nomination — for not firing Fauci, an infectious disease expert who was a part of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Many Republicans say Fauci advised keeping businesses and schools closed unnecessarily throughout the pandemic.

...'

In May, Trump shared a two-minute parody video on Truth Social and Instagram of DeSantis’ presidential announcement that made it look like DeSantis was making his announcement alongside the devil, Adolf Hitler and others. And Donald Trump Jr. days later shared a video that replaced Steve Carell’s character from the hit show “The Office” with a figure that looked and sounded like DeSantis. In the scene, the characters of the sitcom mock Carell’s character for unknowingly wearing a woman’s suit.

Deepfakes

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the impact of social media and campaign technology.

David Klepper and Ali Swenson at AP:

Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election.

The synthetic images that emerged were often crude, unconvincing and costly to produce, especially when other kinds of misinformation were so inexpensive and easy to spread on social media. The threat posed by AI and so-called deepfakes always seemed a year or two away.

No more.

Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost. When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.

...

Former President Donald Trump, who is running in 2024, has shared AI-generated content with his followers on social media. A manipulated video of CNN host Anderson Cooper that Trump shared on his Truth Social platform on Friday, which distorted Cooper’s reaction to the CNN town hall this past week with Trump, was created using an AI voice-cloning tool.

 

Outrageous. Trump post fake clip of Anderson Cooper saying, “That was President Donald J. Trump ripping us a new as*hole here on CNN.” It’s outrageous because his gullible MAGA supporters will believe it’s real. pic.twitter.com/t2xQVLEHvN

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) May 12, 2023

The Social Media Gap

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  

Read this morning's Technology 202 newsletter for the latest updates on Twitter's "manipulated media" flag. Facebook has now also labeled Dan Scavino's post of the edited video: https://t.co/IpgKIJ8Xr1

— Cat Zakrzewski (@Cat_Zakrzewski) March 9, 2020

Jim Rutenberg and Matthew Rosenberg at NY Times:

The doctored video didn’t originate with one of the extremist sites that trade in left-bashing disinformation. It was posted on Twitter by Mr. Trump’s own social media director. From there, it collected shares, retweets and likes from the social media accounts of the president, his eldest son and the multitudinous conservative influencers and websites that carry his message to voters’ palms hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second.

The video, based on a speech Mr. Biden gave earlier this month, registered five million views in a day before his campaign responded — with statements to the press and cable interviews that largely focused on persuading Facebook to follow the example of Twitter, which had labeled the content “manipulated media.” A direct social media counterattack, aides said later, would have risked spreading the damage.

Yet the Biden camp would have been hard-pressed to mount a proportional response had it tried: Mr. Biden has only 4.6 million Twitter followers to Mr. Trump’s 75 million, 1.7 million Facebook fans to Mr. Trump’s 28 million, and nothing resembling the president’s robust ecosystem of amplifying accounts.

...
Part of the Democrats’ technological degradation could be attributed to brain drain. Many of Mr. Obama’s 2012 digital operatives found jobs in Silicon Valley or started their own companies.

But in interviews, Democrats also argued that Mr. Obama had not adequately worked to rebuild the party for his successors. After 2012, he started his own competing political operation, Organizing for Action, and Democrats complained he was slow to share his valuable data and email lists.

“Obama effectively left the party alone for eight years,” said Mr. Dean, a former Democratic Party chairman, adding that such neglect was not uncommon among second-term presidents.

Mr. Obama has acknowledged failing “to rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level,” as he told ABC in 2017, explaining that he had been focused on presidential responsibilities at a time of war and economic recovery.

The article goes on with detail about the GOP's more effective use of partisan outside groups.

Karl Rove on the Digital Battlefield

In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign finance and campaign technology.   The update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.  

Karl Rove at WSJ:

Instead of resting on their laurels, Republicans have continued to grow their data edge. In 2018 Data Trust collected information daily on who voted early or requested or returned an absentee ballot. This allowed Republicans to stop spending money calling, mailing or knocking on doors of people who’d already voted, and instead focus on those who hadn’t. This saved an estimated $100 million.

Republican dominance of the digital battlefield is hardly complete. Since creating the ActBlue online fundraising platform in 2004, Democrats have steadily built a vast universe of small-dollar donors, giving their candidates a huge financial edge. In response, Data Trust helped this year to create WinRed, a unified Republican donor site. Mr. Trump boosted WinRed by placing his re-election’s small-dollar fundraising on its platform. Still, it will take much more investment and experimentation to grow a pool of GOP small-dollar givers comparable to what Democrats have.

Nor will the Republicans’ data supremacy go unchallenged. Stymied for 18 months by state chairmen reluctant to lose the revenue from renting their voter lists, in February DNC Chairman Tom Perez launched a data-sharing entity led by former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. Uncharacteristically for the DNC, money may not be a worry. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman earlier said he’d invest $35 million in such an effort. There are also big potential clients: former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg vows to spend $500 million to defeat Mr. Trump with a significant slug going for data, while a new dark-money group called Acronym has paired with Pacronym, a political-action committee, to mount a $75 million anti-Trump digital effort. If that’s not enough, both the talent and political money in Silicon Valley are overwhelmingly left-wing.

Christy Smith Video

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update -- recently published -- looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.

State legislators often make good candidates for the House. They have well-established networks of fundraisers and volunteers. They also may have plenty of campaign videos that they can repurpose for a congressional race.  Case in point:  Christy Smith, a member of the CA Assembly, who very quickly jumped into the special election to succeed Katie Hill, who abruptly resigned.


 

Warren: The In-House Campaign Model

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the early stages of the 2016 campaign, when many candidates were unknowns.  The update  -- recently published --includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.  We are now in the early stages of the 2020 race.

The Warren campaign has a unique approach to campaign management. Alex Thompson at Politico:

The campaign has gone without an outside polling firm, and says it has no plans to hire one, even though it is standard operating procedure for most serious candidates. Instead of initially stockpiling resources for a home-stretch TV ad blitz, she's amassed a payroll of 300-plus staffers in the early months of the campaign — overhead that could deplete her coffers if her fundraising ever falters.

And now, the campaign told POLITICO that it is shunning the typical model for producing campaign ads, in which outside firms are hired and paid often hefty commissions for their work. Instead, Warren's campaign is producing TV, digital and other media content itself, as well as placing its digital ad buys internally.

Taken together, Warren's approach is a rebuke of the consultant-heavy model of campaigns — an often lucrative arrangement in which the people advising campaigns invariably tell candidates that the best political strategy is to buy what they sell, namely TV ads and polling. If carried out for the duration, the moves would create the most robust in-house media production and buying team in recent presidential politics.

Foreign Influence

 In  Defying the Odds, we discuss  Trump's record of scandal.

I found Bannon's tools.
Facebook ad tools, scrapers, targeting scripts, etc.
Federal authorities have it all now.
Smoking gun evidence involving foreign influence in US elections.
Reports going up momentarily at: https://t.co/nLj8P5DeaG and https://t.co/ZjfGvuXqsx pic.twitter.com/B9uPUHX0KZ

— Chris Vickery (@VickerySec) March 26, 2018

Craig Timberg and Tom Hamburger at WP:

Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to ­Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections.

The assignments came amid efforts to present the newly created company as “an American brand” that would appeal to U.S. political clients even though its parent, SCL Group, was based in London, according to former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie.

Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854.

Cyber Update: Guccifer 2.0 and Cambridge Analytica

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign.

Spencer Ackerman and Kevin Poulsen at The Daily Beast:

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.

In September, Byron Tau reported at WSJ:

Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser to Donald Trump, told members of the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that he had no involvement in what U.S. officials have called a Russian campaign of interference and disinformationduring the 2016 presidential election.

Speaking to reporters after his closed-door interview on Capitol Hill, Mr. Stone said that “a substantial amount” of the questioning focused on his interactions with entities and organizations that helped disseminate stolen emails aimed at embarrassing the Democratic Party, including the website WikiLeaks and a hacker entity called Guccifer 2.0.

In a lengthy statement released before his appearance, Mr. Stone disclosed his correspondence with Guccifer 2.0 and detailed his interactions with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. During the 2016 campaign, both entities published stolen emails from Democratic Party organizations, an element of what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as a Russian effort to tip the presidential race toward Mr. Trump.

Mr. Stone, a veteran Republican operative who worked for Mr. Trump briefly as a consultant and continues to serve as an informal adviser and confidant, said in prepared remarks that he resented “any allegation that I would collude with the oppressive Russian state to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.”

Paul Lewis and Paul Hilder report at The Guardian:

The blueprint for how Cambridge Analytica claimed to have won the White House for Donald Trump by using Google, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is revealed for the first time in an internal company document obtained by the Guardian.

The 27-page presentation was produced by the Cambridge Analytica officials who worked most closely on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

A former employee explained to the Guardian how it details the techniques used by the Trump campaign to micro-target US voters with carefully tailored messages about the Republican nominee across digital channels.

Intensive survey research, data modelling and performance-optimising algorithms were used to target 10,000 different ads to different audiences in the months leading up to the election. The ads were viewed billions of times, according to the presentation.

 https://www.scribd.com/document/374672745/Cambridge-Analytica-s-Trump-for-President-debrief 

Matthew Rosenberg at NYT:

The political action committee founded by John R. Bolton, President Trump’s incoming national security adviser, was one of the earliest customers of Cambridge Analytica, which it hired specifically to develop psychological profiles of voters with data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook profiles, according to former Cambridge employees and company documents. 

Mr. Bolton’s political committee, known as The John Bolton Super PAC, first hired Cambridge in August 2014, months after the political data firm was founded and while it was still harvesting the Facebook data.

In the two years that followed, Mr. Bolton’s super PAC spent nearly $1.2 million primarily for “survey research,” which is a term that campaigns use for polling, according to campaign finance records.

But the contract between the political action committee and Cambridge, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, offers more detail on just what Mr. Bolton was buying. The contract broadly describes the services to be delivered by Cambridge as “behavioral microtargeting with psychographic messaging.”

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trump

"The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless." 

-- John LeCarre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- based loosely on the story of the Cambridge Five.

In  Defying the Odds, we discuss Russian involvement in the 2016 campaign

Emma Graham-Harrison and Carole Cadwalladr at The Guardian:

Senior executives from the firm at the heart of Facebook’s data breach boasted of playing a key role in bringing Donald Trump to power and said they used “unattributable and untrackable” advertising to support their clients in elections, according to an undercover expose.

In secretly recorded conversations, Cambridge Analytica’s CEO, Alexander Nix, claimed he had met Trump “many times”, while another senior member of staff said the firm was behind the “defeat crooked Hillary” advertising campaign.

“We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape,” said the executive. “And so this stuff infiltrates the online community, but with no branding, so it’s unattributable, untrackable.”

Caught on camera by an undercover team from Channel 4 News, Nix was also dismissive of Democrats on the House intelligence committee, who had questioned him over Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign.

Senior managers then appeared to suggest that in their work for US clients, there was planned division of work between official campaigns and unaffiliated “political action groups”.

That could be considered coordination – which is not allowed under US election law. The firm has denied any wrongdoing

...
 “We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy,” he told reporters who were posing as potential clients from Sri Lanka.

The company’s head of data, Alex Tayler, added: “When you think about the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3m votes but won the electoral college vote that’s down to the data and the research.

“You did your rallies in the right locations, you moved more people out in those key swing states on election day. That’s how he won the election.”

Daniel Drezner at WP:

And then, over the weekend, this Guardian story about Cambridge Analytica came over the transom, and it is pretty bonkers. It would appear that Cambridge Analytica, a firm that did data analytics work for the Trump campaign, illegally harvested Facebook data so as to develop its influence techniques. The article contains this sentence: “Dr Kogan — who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan — is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate.” Oh, and of course, Russians are involved on the periphery.

The first story was enough to send Facebook’s stock in the United Kingdom down six points. And then, on Sunday, part II of the story broke, and hoo, boy, Cambridge Analytica is gonna be in big trouble:

The company at the centre of the Facebook data breach boasted of using honey traps, fake news campaigns and operations with ex-spies to swing election campaigns around the world, a new investigation reveals.

Executives from Cambridge Analytica spoke to undercover reporters from Channel 4 News about the dark arts used by the company to help clients, which included entrapping rival candidates in fake bribery stings and hiring prostitutes to seduce them.

In one exchange, the company chief executive, Alexander Nix, is recorded telling reporters: “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”

...
What I want to do, but can’t, is dismiss the whole story as another conspiracy. In a world in which this administration is hemorrhaging scandal after scandal, commentators need to rethink what constitutes a fair deal. And I hate having to think like that.

How HRC Lost

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the mechanics of the 2016 campaign as well as the economic distress that brought down the Democrats.

Stanley Greenberg in The American Prospect:

The campaign relied far too heavily on something that campaign technicians call “data analytics.” This refers to the use of models built from a database of the country’s 200 million voters, including turnout history and demographic and consumer information, updated daily by an automated poll asking for vote preference to project the election result. But when campaign developments overtake the model’s assumptions, you get surprised by the voters—and this happened repeatedly.

Campaign manager Robby Mook and his team believed that identity politics, demographic trends, and Trump’s temperament would be enough to win, so they could avoid confronting the “trust problem.”

Astonishingly, the 2016 Clinton campaign conducted no state polls in the final three weeks of the general election and relied primarily on data analytics to project turnout and the state vote. They paid little attention to qualitative focus groups or feedback from the field, and their brief daily poll didn’t measure which candidate was defining the election or getting people engaged.

...

The fatal conclusion the Clinton team made after the Michigan primary debacle was that she could not win white working-class voters, and that the “rising electorate” would make up the difference. She finished her campaign with rallies in inner cities and university towns. Macomb got the message. “When you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice,” Joan Williams writes sharply in White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

Digital Don

Issie Lapowsky writes at Wired:

MARK ZUCKERBERG IS trying hard to convince voters that Facebook had no nefarious role in this election. But according to President-elect Donald Trump’s digital director Brad Parscale, the social media giant was massively influential—not because it was tipping the scales with fake news, but because it helped generate the bulk of the campaign’s $250 million in online fundraising.

“Our biggest incubator that allowed us to generate that money was Facebook,” says Parscale, who has been working for the campaign since before Trump officially announced his candidacy a year and a half ago. Over the course of the election cycle, Trump’s campaign funneled $90 million to Parscale’s San Antonio-based firm, most of which went toward digital advertising. And Parscale says more of that ad money went to Facebook than to any other platform.

“Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” he says. “Twitter for Mr. Trump. And Facebook for fundraising.”
...
Facebook proved to be a powerful way for Trump’s team to hone the campaign’s message with the kind of enormous sample sizes you can’t get with traditional polling. “They have an advantage of a platform that has users that are conditioned to click and engage and give you feedback,” says Gary Coby, director of advertising at the Republican National Committee, who worked on Trump’s campaign. “Their platform’s built to inform you about what people like and dislike.”

....

Social media was Trump’s primary communication channel. It wasn’t a platform for broadcasting pre-planned messages but for interacting with supporters and starting new conversations—however controversial those conversations often were. Bleeker says one of the biggest lessons he’s learned from this election cycle is that social media is increasingly going to be part of any candidate’s so-called “earned media strategy”—that is, the coverage a candidate gets for free in the press. The President-elect has shown he can turn a news cycle in 140 characters or less; in a recent 60 Minutes interview, he said he plans to continue using Twitter as president.

McKenzie Funk writes at The New York Times:

Do you panic easily? Do you often feel blue? Do you have a sharp tongue? Do you get chores done right away? Do you believe in the importance of art?

If ever you’ve answered questions like these on one of the free personality quizzes floating around Facebook, you’ll have learned what’s known as your Ocean score: How you rate according to the big five psychological traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. You may also be responsible the next time America is shocked by an election upset.

For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.

,,,
One recent advertising product on Facebook is the so-called “dark post”: A newsfeed message seen by no one aside from the users being targeted. With the help of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Trump’s digital team used dark posts to serve different ads to different potential voters, aiming to push the exact right buttons for the exact right people at the exact right times.

Demobilization

Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg report at Bloomberg Businessweek:

[N]either Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.

To compensate for this, Trump’s campaign has devised another strategy, which, not surprisingly, is negative. Instead of expanding the electorate, Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans. Trump’s invocation at the debate of Clinton’s WikiLeaks e-mails and support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership was designed to turn off Sanders supporters. The parade of women who say they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and harassed or threatened by Hillary is meant to undermine her appeal to young women. And her 1996 suggestion that some African American males are “super predators” is the basis of a below-the-radar effort to discourage infrequent black voters from showing up at the polls—particularly in Florida.

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

The Trump team’s effort to discourage young women by rolling out Clinton accusers and drive down black turnout in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood with targeted messages about the Clinton Foundation’s controversial operations in Haiti is an odd gambit. Campaigns spend millions on data science to understand their own potential supporters—to whom they’re likely already credible messengers—but here Trump is speaking to his opponent’s. Furthermore, there’s no scientific basis for thinking this ploy will convince these voters to stay home. It could just as easily end up motivating them.

Bots, Trolls, Cyborgs

Ben Schreckinger reports at Politico:

When Donald Trump confronted revelations that he used money from his charitable foundation to settle private legal disputes and purchase portraits of himself, a tireless army of tweeters went to work to keep the focus on Hillary Clinton’s foundation instead.

Then Trump stumbled on a debate question about why he refuses to release his taxes, and the same army has since rushed to create the appearance of a grass-roots demand that Clinton be held accountable, instead.

The accounts pumping out the tweets created the appearance of authentic outrage but had all the hallmarks of fakes, according to researchers who specialize in “bot” networks — short for robot — that shower social media with phony messages appearing to spring up from the grass roots.

The pro-Trump networks tweet incessantly, but only to praise Trump and bash Clinton and the media, constantly retweeting Trump staff, pro-Trump pundits and other fake accounts, thousands of which recently added “deplorable” to their usernames.

Indeed, the Clinton Foundation tweets follow a pattern of pro-Trump Twitter activity spotted by professionals throughout the campaign — accounts made to look like real people that are instead run by software and designed to amplify a certain messages — that serves to neuter negative coverage of the New York businessman.

“The bot nets usually turn whatever the issue is back on Hillary,” said Phil Howard, a professor at Oxford University’s Internet Institute and the principal investigator at the Computational Propaganda Project, which has closely tracked the networks. Howard has noted the same pattern in response to stories about Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, with bots alleging that Clinton is keeping even bigger secrets from the public. “They tend to be used to confused or muddy,” he said.

In addition to fully automated bots, Trump has benefited from the Twitter activities of “trolls,” dedicated, human provocateurs, and “cyborgs,” accounts that blend automated activity with human input.

Clinton Analytics

At Politico, Shane Goldmacher profiles Elan Kriegel, Clinton’s director of analytics.

When Clinton operatives talk about their “data-based” campaign, it’s invariably Kriegel’s data, and perhaps more importantly his models interpreting that data, they are talking about. It was an algorithm from Kriegel’s shop — unreported until now — that determined, after the opening states, where almost every dollar of Clinton’s more than $60 million in television ads was spent during the primary.

The tool bypassed the expertise and instincts of her traditional media buyers by calculating the “cost per flippable delegate,” in the words of one senior Clinton official, and then spat out what states, television markets, networks and shows to buy. Obama veterans were wowed by its advancement; internally, some Clintonites saw it as their secret weapon in building an insurmountable delegate lead over Bernie Sanders.

Now, with Donald Trump investing virtually nothing in data analytics during the primary and little since, Kriegel’s work isn’t just powering Clinton’s campaign, it is providing her a crucial tactical advantage in the campaign’s final stretch. It’s one of the reasons her team is confident that, even if the race tightens as November approaches, they hold a distinctive edge. As millions of phone calls are made, doors knocked and ads aired in the next nine weeks, it is far likelier the Democratic voter contacts will reach the best and most receptive audiences than the Republican ones.

Zac Moffatt, who served as Mitt Romney’s digital director in 2012, was already worried about this back during the Republican primaries. In an interview then, Moffatt feared that whoever emerged as the GOP nominee would be perilously handicapped when it came to data analytics just as Romney had been compared to President Barack Obama who, like Clinton, had honed an analytics operation more than a year in advance.

“If you’re not prepared for it, you can’t catch up,” Moffatt said. “You can’t have a baby in 3 months, that’s just the reality of life. I tried.”

Clinton Has a Much Stronger Campaign

Lisa Desjardins and Daniel Bush report at PBS:

To pinpoint campaign operations, PBS NewsHour compiled office data from 15 key states, speaking with state and national campaign officials, cross-referencing Federal Election Commission spending reports and checking local news coverage.

As of Aug. 30, Hillary Clinton has 291 offices in those 15 battlegrounds. Donald Trump has 88. (Those figures include joint presidential and party offices.) Both campaigns pledge that more offices are coming.

The Trump campaign says its number will more than double — adding another 132 offices — in coming days and weeks.

But lagging so far behind in infrastructure as the campaigns enter the post-Labor Day blitz is unprecedented. To win, the Trump team hopes that their candidate can rewrite the laws of the ground game.

John Sides writes at The Washington Post:

This is obviously unprecedented in modern presidential elections. Typically, the candidates have similar resources and campaign organizations. Typically, it is difficult for one candidate to have a large advantage in televised advertising or fieldwork. In 2012, for example, my research with Lynn Vavreck showed that neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney could sustain a durable advantage in advertising. Obama’s edge in fieldwork did appear to net him votes, although not enough to be decisive in the electoral college.

By comparison, Trump is being vastly outspent in advertising and is limited essentially to whatever field organization the Republican National Committee can provide — which will be exceeded by Hillary Clinton’s, much as Romney’s was exceeded by Obama’s. How much will this cost him on Election Day?

Probably the best estimate comes from a recently published piece by political scientists Ryan Enos and Anthony Fowler. They show that the effect of the 2012 presidential campaign on voter turnout was quite large, about 7-8 points overall.

Digital Clinton v. Analog Trump

Sasha Issenberg reports at Bloomberg:

Both of President Barack Obama’s campaigns were organized around a series of six regional pods, with a lead official in each responsible for managing field, data, communication, or digital across seven or eight states.

2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton also uses pods—but hers look nothing like Obama’s. As she has reoriented her campaign for the general election, her team has devised a structure that reflects not geographic contiguity, with its common weather patterns or vernacular music traditions across neighboring states, but instead the different type of campaigning she will need to win each one. Most importantly, the structure acknowledges the increasing importance of early voting, which offers Clinton the potential to lock in an early lead when ballots begin to be cast in late September.

...
In Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, states with major opportunities for early voting—such as North Carolina and Colorado—are in their own pod, while the remaining states are divided into two. One pod has large, diverse states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, where mobilizing minorities and young whites will be essential to her victory. The other pod contains smaller, mostly white ones like Iowa and New Hampshire, which present fewer opportunities to identify and turn out new voters but a major need for persuasion.

Jim Tankersley reports at the Washington Post: \

Hillary Clinton is running arguably the most digital presidential campaign in U.S. history. Donald Trump is running one of the most analog campaigns in recent memory. The Clinton team is bent on finding more effective ways to identify supporters and ensure they cast ballots; Trump is, famously and unapologetically, sticking to an 1980s-era focus on courting attention and voters via television.

He interviews Issenberg:

Trump is very much a throwback to that old mass-media world — this is a guy who seems to prize being on the cover of Time or featured in "60 Minutes" above anything else — but has also decided to run for president on the cheap. So he's still relying on the three national networks (and cable news), but since he isn't paying for airtime, he is reliant on the media to filter his message in a way that past candidates haven't been. No wonder he's in such a love-hate relationship with us.

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Now I think that dramatically fails to appreciate the extent to which campaigns are not just about changing people's opinions to get them to like you. Now more than ever, thanks to partisan polarization, campaigns are about modifying the behavior of people who already like you — getting the unregistered to register, mobilizing infrequent voters to turn out. That is best done through targeted communications that don't involve the candidate

We know from dozens if not hundreds of randomized field experiments that the best way to turn a non-voter into a voter is to have a well-trained volunteer from his or her neighborhood conduct a high-quality face-to-face interaction at the doorstep. The Clinton campaign is building the structure to do a lot of that, at scale, before voters they have modeled as most likely to change their behavior as a result. That doesn't fit into Trump's idea of what an election is about. To his credit, though, unlike a lot of candidates, he doesn't go through the motions of halfheartedly opening field offices — or printing up yard signs to fill them with — without understanding how they fit into his broader strategy.

Early Voting in Primaries

Shane Goldmacher and Marc Caputo report at Politico:

Florida and Ohio, the two biggest winner-take-all prizes on the presidential primary calendar in March, aren’t waiting until next month to vote. They’re voting now — and with potentially profound consequences for the 2016 campaign.

Struggling to survive until their home states’ votes are tallied March 15, Ohio’s John Kasich and Floridians Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio are racing to bank tens of thousands of early ballots that are increasingly being cast well before primary day.

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 In Florida, nearly 850,000 Republican absentee ballots have so far been requested. Almost 43,000 Floridians have already voted, roughly 25,000 of them Republicans.

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As Bush and Rubio are busy working the absentee system to carve up Florida’s 99 delegates the main beneficiary of their in-state rivalry might be Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, who continue to outpoll the rest of the field.

But in Ohio, the dynamics could benefit Kasich. Polling stations there open for early in-person voting on Wednesday and Kasich appears to have the state all to himself to collect early ballots and get a jump on Ohio’s 66 delegates.

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In Florida and beyond, Bush is getting on-the-ground help from Right to Rise, his super PAC, which is sending mailers to frequent absentee voters. "This is a long and expensive process and early voting makes it even harder for candidates with limited resources to compete,” said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the Bush super PAC. "Some candidates will have a hard time living hand to mouth with a condensed calendar and multiple states voting at the same time."

The Rubio-backing Conservative Solutions super PAC is doing no similar work.

Trump's Unusual Campaign

Maggie Haberman and Nick Corasaniti report at The New York Times:

David Carney, a veteran Republican strategist here, has received six phone calls at his Hancock, N.H., home from Donald J. Trump’s campaign the last few days. But five came after the Trump volunteers were told that the occupants were backing another candidate: Mr. Carney’s wife is Carly Fiorina’s campaign director in the state.

For Mr. Carney, who has often praised Mr. Trump’s message, the wayward calls signaled impressive grass-roots enthusiasm. But they were also a telltale sign of strategic rudderlessness.

“They have a lot of volunteers and they’re proud about that, but volunteers is not a ground game,” said Mr. Carney, who was the top strategist for Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential race and has been deeply involved in studies of how campaigns use information about voters. “They’re basically just picking up the phone book.”

 CNN reports:

On the cusp of the New Hampshire primary, there are growing questions about GOP front-runner Donald Trump's ground game in the state even as he maintains a double-digit lead against rivals.

An email sent out to supporters on January 30th called on them to "Talk for Trump Today!" and listed call centers across the state in four field offices, and four public meeting spaces.

At one hotel -- listed as a call center -- a receptionist told CNN one Trump staffer and about three volunteers showed up throughout the day. At two of the restaurants listed, employees told CNN they weren't aware of any campaign activities that day.

In the months leading up to the primary, Trump has eschewed conventional wisdom that has had other candidates camped out in New Hampshire for months. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are staking their campaigns on success in the state, and Trump has held around one-quarter of the events as each of them.

 Nicholas Confessore and Sarah Cohen report at The New York Times:

Donald J. Trump once boasted that he could someday be the only person to turn a profit running for president. He may be closer than anyone realizes.

Mr. Trump’s campaign spent just $12.4 million in 2015, according to disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission, millions less than any of his leading rivals for the Republican nomination. More than half of Mr. Trump’s total spending was covered by checks from his supporters, who have thronged to his stump speeches and bought millions of dollars’ worth of “Make America Great Again” hats and T-shirts.

About $2.7 million more was paid to at least seven companies Mr. Trump owns or to people who work for his real estate and branding empire, repaying them for services provided to his campaign. That total included more than $2 million for flights on his own planes and helicopter, a quarter of a million dollars to his Fifth Avenue office tower, and even $66,000 to Keith Schiller, his bodyguard and the head of security at the Trump Organization.