The Victory Lab (19 page)

Gage frequently grew restless before giving a presentation, his nervous energy leading him to endlessly tweak his slides—moving images slightly, adjusting the color of text—until the moment he had to show them. There was a particular reason for Gage’s nerves as he waited for his meeting with Romney’s brain trust to begin. The campaign’s ranks were filled with Harvard MBAs and former management consultants, perhaps the world’s foremost PowerPoint artisans, and Gage was pitching them a targeting technique yet to be fully implemented anywhere. Gage gave his primer on what he called “super-segmentation,” explaining how with the latest technology and data it should be possible to merge new consumer records with traditional political information to develop a rich profile of each individual, and then model them to look for once-hidden patterns that could help predict which voters would make the worthiest targets. Once Gage was done, he looked around the table for questions. Alex Dunn, a former high-tech venture capitalist who had left the business world to serve as Romney’s deputy campaign manager, raised his hand. “You mean,” Dunn asked Gage, “you don’t do this in politics?”

THE PUZZLE GAGE
believed he had solved was one that had, largely unbeknownst to him, bedeviled analysts for nearly a half century. To social scientists and campaign operatives, breaking the electorate into clusters represented a holy grail; to outsiders, it was an alternately dazzling and dystopic symbol of modernity as democracy entered the computer era. For the close circle around John F. Kennedy, however, the quest to segment the country was a key part of the secret history—a project formally denied at the time and since forgotten to all but those who engineered it—of how they had won the White House.

In his 1964 novel,
The 480
, Eugene Burdick, a University of California,
Berkeley, political scientist who had edited a collection of essays on voting behavior, unfurled a thriller about an unlikely presidential campaign of an American engineer who stumbles into a South Asian border conflict and emerges a national hero back home. Within weeks, John Thatch is being drafted to run for president by Madison Curver, a dashing young Ivy League–educated lawyer who believes he can use a novel statistical system—which splits the electorate into tiny demographic clusters—to shape the unformed Thatch into the perfect Republican candidate to defeat John F. Kennedy’s bid for a second term in 1964. “
They went through every poll worth looking at and after a lot of work came up with four hundred and eighty groups which seem to react and vote in the same way,” Curver explains to a Republican power broker. “And now they know a lot about each of those groups, so much, in fact, that they can simulate how the group will act before the group has even heard of an issue.”

Two years earlier, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Burdick cowrote
Fail Safe
, about an accidentally triggered nuclear conflict. Four years before that, he had cowritten
The Ugly American
, describing Western diplomats meddling in Southeast Asia.
The 480
, too, was grounded in real-life power games: during his brother’s 1960 campaign, which he managed, Robert F. Kennedy had ordered up top secret mathematical simulations of electoral outcomes run on a computer some ominously described as a “people machine.” In the discursive preface to his novel, Burdick described the Kennedy project as the catalyst for a new movement that would replace “
the underworld of cigar-chewing pot-bellied officials who mysteriously run ‘the machine.’ ”

“
The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorize, and reproduce this information at the press of a button,” Burdick wrote. “
This underworld, made up of psychologists, sociologists, pollsters, social survey experts and statisticians, cares little about issues. That is one reason the candidates keep them invisible.”

Even though the academics who had run Kennedy’s “people machine” shared some of the details of their operation with Burdick, he may have overstated the reach of their underworld. In 1959, Columbia sociologist William McPhee had begun using IBM 704 computers to predict how population changes would alter the electorate over a four-year presidential cycle. His tool was the simulation, measuring how strings of variables would interact under different conditions, an approach popular with military planners gaming out battles and engineers eager to see the potential effects of repeated stresses on a structure. When MIT political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool heard of McPhee’s research, he thought it could be possible to rewrite the program so that it could simulate the potential impact of tactical decisions as candidates made them. McPhee in effect aimed to design a long-term climatological model;
Pool wanted to predict the next day’s weather.

Pool, along with McPhee and psychologist Robert Abelson, spent a year
compiling sixty-six pre-election polls from the previous decade, which included 130,000 respondents who could each be identified by their race, religion, gender, party, place of residence, and professional and socioeconomic status. With these categories, Pool’s team was able to divide the United States into 480 “voter-types.” In 1959, they conducted a poll to take the temperature of each voter-type on fifty-two “issue-clusters,” to determine if “Eastern, metropolitan, lower-income, white, Catholic, female Democrats” had different attitudes than “Southern, rural, upper-income, white, Protestant, male Independents” toward civil rights, Harry Truman, and which party was best in a crisis. With that framework, Pool believed, the computer could simulate the effect that a change in the issue terrain—a shift in a candidate’s position, or a reordering of voter priorities—would have on broader public opinion and even electoral-college math. “
The Presidential election of 1960 was the first in which all the technological prerequisites for our project existed: survey archives, readily available tape-using large-memory computers, and previously developed theories of voter decision,” wrote Pool, Abelson, and research assistant Samuel Popkin.

McPhee brought the nascent technology to Edward Greenfield, a New
York businessman and leading reform Democrat, who introduced the academics to officials of the Democratic National Committee and a liberal affiliate, the Democratic Advisory Council, which found a group of donors willing to invest thirty-five thousand dollars in the project. Because universities would not allow their professors to mingle scholarly business with political money, they organized as a private company that could make its research available for sale. Greenfield became the president of the Simulmatics Corporation, housed in a dowdy office in a converted town house near the New York Public Library. He enlisted many of the day’s most prominent political scientists in advisory roles, including Samuel Eldersveld, the Michigan professor who had run field experiments in his own campaigns for office in Ann Arbor, and Harold Lasswell, a protégé of Charles Merriam’s at Chicago.

One of Simulmatics’ academic advisers had already had a formative influence on the logic of unpacking the country into “voter-types.” Paul Lazarsfeld, a colleague of McPhee’s at Columbia, was a Vienna-born sociologist and prominent socialist who had stumbled into the study of elections from
his interest in how people made consumer decisions. During the 1930s, as Austria became inhospitable to Jews, Lazarsfeld decided not to return home and resettled at Columbia University and launched an Office of Radio Research.
A major project was panel studies that followed households to measure the effects that broadcast advertising had on their shopping habits. In 1940, Americans would be selecting not only dairy items but a president, and Lazarsfeld thought an election would offer a rich venue to study what he called “
the psychology of choice.” With colleagues Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet, Lazarsfeld went to Sandusky, Ohio, for seven months before the election, interviewing the same six hundred voters each month to track how their views changed with time.

Lazarsfeld and his colleagues had expected to find that voters chose between candidates the way they picked among brands, individually assessing products and their packaging before making a choice shaped by the influence of advertising propaganda. But in the book they published on the
study,
The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign
, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues were surprised that the centralized forces they expected to play a direct role in driving decisions—especially the party organizations, as mediated by television and radio—proved to have a meager impact. Voters arrived at an election season with existing “brand loyalties” to parties, derived from the religious and class context in which they lived and reinforced by the influence of peers. Likening voting to a “group experience,” Lazarsfeld was ready to altogether abandon the analogy to consumer choice that had first drawn him to study electoral politics. “
For many voters political preferences may better be considered analogous to cultural tastes—in music, literature, recreational activities, dress, ethics, speech, social behavior,” he, Berelson, and McPhee later wrote. “Both are characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.”

In 1948, the three professors decamped from Columbia to Elmira, New York, with the goal of more properly studying those dynamics. Again they used the method of panel interviews—revisiting the same group of respondents in sequence. As the race between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey narrowed, the Columbia scholars had Elmira residents explaining their decision making in real time. They saw Democrats who, despite worrying about Truman’s international leadership, returned to their home party as its nominee emphasized economic issues that were at the core of the party’s appeal. (This, as much as faulty polling, explained Truman’s comeback.) In their 1954 book
Voting
, they labeled this a “reactivation” of latent class loyalties, which had been temporarily weakened as Americans were distracted by the early rumbles of the Cold War.

Throughout the 1950s, the so-called Columbia Studies dueled with the Michigan Studies for primacy as a universal model of voter behavior. The midwesterners eventually won out, thanks to the weight of the regular election year polls backing their 1960 release of
The American Voter
. But the Columbia model proved psychologically potent, and Pool saw that the notion of different identities exerting competing forces on the human
mind lent itself to the same kind of mathematical study as the engineering simulations that measured how a bridge held up against earthquakes or beneath the daily rumble of trucks. “
The lifelong Democrat who is a rich, rural, Protestant is under cross pressure. So is the rich urban Catholic,” wrote Pool, Abelson, and Popkin. “The latter’s coreligionists in the city mostly press him toward what was the group’s traditional Democratic affiliation. His wealthy business colleagues press him to a Republican one.” Since their 480 voter-types included all these various identity permutations, the Simulmatics team believed they could measure how each of them would respond if the candidate’s choice of issues put new weight on one pressure, such as emphasizing foreign policy over economic concerns.

On August 11, 1960, nearly one month after the Democratic convention concluded in Los Angeles, Robert F. Kennedy ordered a series of reports from Simulmatics. The campaign’s leadership was most racked by the question of how to deal with his religion in a country that had never before elected a Catholic. Nixon led in summertime polls, and reports of anti-Catholic activity trickled in with growing frequency to John F. Kennedy’s Washington headquarters. Kennedy’s advisers knew they had two strong options: they could ignore religious questions altogether or they could address the subject directly and condemn as bigots those who would let Kennedy’s faith affect their vote. The latter approach, they knew, would take what had been a subterranean issue in the election—the stuff of flyers and local rumor, but ignored by the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns—and force it to the surface. When trying to assess what that would do to the race’s dynamics, none of the campaign strategists had much to go on but instinct.

So Pool ran the numbers for the Democratic National Committee. One of the Simulmatics issue-clusters had compiled respondents’ views when asked how they felt about having a Catholic president. (The typical question: “If your party nominated an otherwise well-qualified man for President, but he happened to be a Catholic, would you vote for him?”) At this point, he had to rely on a little guesswork of his own. Among his 480 voter-types, Pool identified nine significant subsets he thought worth measuring
on the faith question, mixing and matching between three party categories (Republicans, Democrats, and Independents) and three religious ones (Protestant, Catholic, and Other). Two groups, Protestant Democrats and Catholic Republicans, he felt, would face the greatest cross-pressure on the question of a Catholic in the White House. Raising the salience of religion in the election would likely push each group in a different direction. (Other groups would also be affected but to a smaller degree, Pool predicted, such as Catholic Democrats, who would be less likely to defect if Kennedy’s faith became an issue, and “Negro and Jewish Republicans,” who could be pushed to vote Democratic if the election became a referendum on bigotry.)