The Victory Lab (54 page)
Authors: Sasha Issenberg
THE SOUL OF A NEW MACHINE1
middle-class, largely white Ellet: “Ellet,” Akron Neighborhood Profiles, Department of Planning & Urban Development, City of Akron,
ci.akron.oh.us/planning/cp/neighborhoods/Ellet.pdf
.
2
one of the city’s oldest and most racially mixed neighborhoods: “Middlebury,” Akron Neighborhood Profiles, Department of Planning & Urban Development, City of Akron,
ci.akron.oh.us/planning/cp/neighborhoods/Middlebury.pdf
.
3
including $16 million in online advertising: Kate Kaye, “Google Grabbed Most of Obama’s $16 Million in 2008,”
ClickZ
, Jan. 6, 2009,
www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1703163/google-grabbed-most-obamas-usd16-million-2008
.
4
who had grown up in a Missouri trailer park: Ari Berman,
Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), 38.
5
The professor, Marshall Ganz, had dropped out: Scott Martelle, “Famed Organizer Sees History in the Making,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 15, 2008.
6
“politics as marketing”: Quoted in Micah L. Sifry, “Marshall Ganz on the Future of the Obama Movement,”
TechPresident
, November 20, 2008.
7
cash he considered “Monopoly money”: Plouffe,
The Audacity to Win
, 191.
8
In December 2007, Obama’s online team decided to test: Dan Siroker, “How Obama Raised $60 Million by Running a Simple Experiment,”
The Optimizely
blog,
http://blog.optimizely.com/how-obama-raised-60-million-by-running-an-exp
.
9
Bird wrote in to say that: Sean Quinn, “On the Road: Big Stone Gap, Virginia,”
FiveThirtyEight
, October 25, 2008,
www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/10/on-road-big-stone-gap-virginia.html
.
10
One political scientist’s later analysis: Daniel J. Hopkins, “No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates,”
Journal of Politics
71, no. 3 (July 2009): 769–81.
11
“It’s just a fact of life”: Quoted in Wallace Turner, “California G.O.P. Candidate Dismayed by Aide’s Racial Comment,”
New York Times
, October 9, 1982.
12
“We’ve been designing and we’ve been engineering”: Quoted in Robert Barnes, “Obama Encourages Early Voting in Ohio,”
The Trail
blog,
Washington Post
, October 10, 2008,
voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/10/obama-encourages-early-voting.html
.
1
In 1994, the
Dallas Examiner
published: George E. Curry, “How to Increase Black Voter Turnout: Those That Don’t Vote Will Be Put on Blast,”
District Chronicles
, August 26, 2004.
2
Before the 2006 elections, the
Tennessee Tribune
ran: Costas Panagopoulos, “Affect, Social Pressure and Prosocial Motivation: Field Experimental Evidence of the Mobilizing Effects of Pride, Shame and Publicizing Voting Behavior,”
Political Behavior
32 (2010): 369–86.
3
Ely residents who received the postcard: Ibid., 377.
4
two psychologists found that restaurant servers: Bruce Rind and Prashant Bordia, “Effect of Server’s ‘Thank You’ and Personalization on Restaurant Tipping,”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
25, no. 9 (May 1995): 745–51.
5
Utah Republican Mike Lee’s Senate campaign: Genelle Pugmire, “E-mail from Mike Lee Campaign Puts Voter Privacy in Question,”
Daily Herald
, October 19, 2010.
6
The share of the population voting: “Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections: 1828–2008,” American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara,
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/turnout.php
.
7
“these calls were our sincere attempt”: Quoted in Paul Kiel, “Nonprofit Women’s Voices Women Vote Stops Suspicious N.C. Robo Calls,”
Talking Points Memo
, April 30, 2008.
8
“Rube Goldberg-ish”: “Clinton, Nixon; Nixon, Clinton,”
Democracy in America
blog,
The Economist
, April 30, 2008.
