\n\n"}\n\n\n\nThis was an interesting read.
\n\nI\u2019ve also fallen toward a consultant theory of change \u2014 or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.
\nBut that\u2019s not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved.
\nYeah this whole interview is great
\nIn a paranoid and apocalyptic zeitgeist like this one, saying this \u201cboring,\u201d nerdy, null-hypothesis kind of stuff in totally unapologetic and relentless manner is a breath of fresh air
\n\n\nA tasteful Marxist (or whatever the opposite of a \u201cvulgar\u201d one is) might counter that class biases were implicated in that mechanical error \u2014 that cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class pollsters and operatives\u2019 eagerness to see their worldview affirmed led them to ignore the possibility that their surveys suffered from a systematic sampling error.
\nThat\u2019s exactly right. Campaigns do want to win. But the people who work in campaigns tend to be highly ideologically motivated and thus, super-prone to convincing themselves to do things that are strategically dumb. Nothing that I tell people \u2014 or that my team [at Civis] told people \u2014 is actually that smart. You know, we\u2019d do all this math, and some of it\u2019s pretty cool, but at a high level, what we\u2019re saying is: \u201cYou should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.\u201d And we\u2019d use machine learning to operationalize that at scale.
\nHe\u2019s right and he should say it!\u00a0 And because he was dramatically ~cancelled~, people will actually listen when he does!\u00a0 (Strike me down, etc.)
\n