Reddit reviews The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

Elections aren't won by who belongs to which party. Elections are won by who shows up to the voting booth.

Campaigning isn't about convincing people you're right and it hasn't been for a long, long time. Most people have made up their minds on just about every issue. If they haven't, they will very quickly once they are exposed to it (and they won't so readily take the word of a single source.) The most a candidate can do is attempt to align themselves to the beliefs of an already decided electorate.

Campaigns are, in reality, won through mobilization. It isn't about convincing people you're right. It's about getting as many of your people out to the voting booth as you can without getting their people out in the process. Something like this is a double-edged sword because Democrats aren't the only people watching. This is a public drama and Republicans are watching, too. And you may well end up inadvertently mobilizing decidedly Republican voters in your attempt to mobilize Democratic voters.

In other words: voters are already convinced of what they believe and, more or less, convinced of what party they would vote for. The question for campaigners is whether they're actually going to go out and vote. A campaigner needs to convince their own voters that they need to go vote, but they need to do so without frightening or angering their opposition's voters such that they go out and vote, too.

The Obama/Biden 2008 campaign had some VERY clever campaign tactics using microtargeting, which--for lack of a better word--stealthily campaigned directly to probable Democratic voters without actually exposing their message broadly to Republican voters. e.g. instead of blasting TV commercials exclusively, the Obama campaign did stuff like put QR codes on buses and benches in predominately Democratic neighborhoods, ensuring that only people who gave enough of a shit about Obama actually went to those sites. They also used this strategy with layman donors and used more technical microtargeting software to profile probable supporters and advertise to them directly via emails, mailers, etc. Rick Perry's gubernatorial campaigns pioneered many of these techniques, openly allowing studies to be conducted from within his own campaign. A good book for reference.

The key part of your ost is:

> (based on an admittedly limited dataset)

Sure, we have limited information on events that have only happened ~50 times. Take a physical phenomena with that limited of a data set and there will be lots of uncertainty on physics too!

But if you take something like congressional elections, we can actually predict those with a very high degree of accuracy. There's actually been a lot of really exiting work done in the last few years in campaign science- read up on the Analyst Instiute which has spent several years conducting full scale RCTs on voter contact methods. There's a whole book that just came out a few weeks ago, too: The Victory Lab.

Yeah, a bunch of it. Check out The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg.

There is a ton of political science to back it up. But if you want to read just one book on the subject, I would recommend The Victory Lab by Sasha Issenberg. He covers research going back to the late 19th century up through the most recent electoral cycles, as well as the way that research has be put into practice by campaigns. You should also read "The Effects of Canvassing, Telephone Calls, and Direct Mail on Voter Turnout: A
Field Experiment" [pdf] by Gerber and Green (2000), which is the most significant modern paper on the subject.