white christian country to a minority in just a short amount of time. so even if people don't know the stats that while, many white christians, particularly white conservative christians feel this shift in their bones that mrs. bharata the reactivity we are seen. just about one more symbolic issue across the same time. , i am putting up here support for gay marriage over the same period of time. if you had to go back to 2008, what you see is only for his tent of americans supported gay marriage when barack obama was running for president in 2008. the number two days 53%. ..

politics over the last 20 years, starts eing in the middle of the 19 '90s, up through the 2014 midterm election cycle to explain some of the differences between the republican and democratic parties when it came to taking up technology in the service of electoral goals. >> host: what do you mean by the

term, "prototype politics." >> guest: what i wanted to think about and think through where does innovation come from through political campaigning. how do campaigners invent new technologies and new tools. how do they take up new social media platforms to use them for new ways. how do they find new ways to engage the electorate whether on twit other or snapchat. what i wanted to think about reading the sociology literature and political science literature and communication literature why is it so important? in the book i talk about how campaigns become prototypes. which is models for doing things differently in electoral politics and there is a couple of really key examples of that. probably most famously obama's election in 2008 which was really the first campaign to use

social media like facebook effectively for the purposes of organizing and engaging the electorate and ultimately turning more people out on election day. in 2012 we saw another great example of a campaign that became a prototype which was sort of new ways to use data and analytics in service of election bowls, one that is widely copied on both sides of the aisle. the idea of a prototype is constructing a new way of doing things that becomes a model can for future campaigns to adapt and take up themselves in the service of trying to electing their candidates. >> host: professor kreiss does superior technology and data win elections? >> guest: no. technology and digital media and social media platforms and data analytics work don't win elections for candidates. there are many other things that are more important.

the electoral contest, who is incumbent, things like fund-raising and which groups are more likely to turn out on election day and really important structural factors like the state of the economy. all those things provide really the backdrop. the hands that candidates are dealt so to speak that they have to navigate effectively. where technology and digital media and data analytics come in providing real gains at the margins. can we deploy resources better in terms of contacting the right voters to turn them out on election day? can we use email in a really effective way, in a data tested way to raise even additional dollars or recruit additional volunteers for campaigns? can we use data in effective way to figure out which states we need to contest? which message will resonate with voters.

how it will reach them, buying particular time on cable television or showing up at their door at an hour they're likely to be home. once they're talking to voters what is the right message to say to make them care about the election and ultimately make them turn out on election day. when we talk about campaign strategy broadly and talk about campaign technologies and digital media and data analytics, what we are talking about ways figuring out ways to gain advantages on the margins. cain a couple extra points, turning out right voters on election day. raising a couple of million dollars that can then be poured into field offices or be used to run broadcast advertising. that is the sort of advantages we're providing but at the end of the day i think, that's a question ultimately of efficiency and ultimately of question of margins that exist around these larger determining factors like the state of the economy and partisanship and

incumbency. >> host: so who has done it well on the margin? >> guest: a couple of examples you look at in the course of history, here is where i really go back in time during the 2:00 cycle it was george w. bush's campaign that really was heads and tails above what john kerry and democratic party was able to put together. during the 2004 tie kel the bush team and rnc had much more sophisticated national voter database with members of the electorate. they had much more turnout operations in states of ohio. they had novel online policing programs title to field organizing putting people on line and making phone calls to targeted voters. at the end of the day what you really saw during the 04 cycle

was a bush team and a republican party had much more sophisticated technology and data and analytics and digital operations than the democratic party. it was because of that the democratic party after 2004, particularly under chairman howard dean decided to take a step back, evaluate what they were doing and really build a modern technology and data infrastructure that's now provided the core for democratic campaigns during every presidential election since. a couple of other examples that i would point to really building off the work that dean and the democrats put in place after the '04 election was obama's campaign in 2008 which really harnessed the power of social media, particularly facebook, in the service of electoral organizing, mobilizing youth and young voters, turning them out on the polls, using social media effectively as a tool for

fund-raising and email, building massive email lists on the order of 13 million person email list for the purposes of fund-raising, financing through small donors that subsequent democratic campaigns have taken advantage of. i would follow the obama campaign of 2012, of a campaign that harnessed data and analytics to give obama a margin of victory over his rival, mitt romney. when we're talking about margins, obama's small dollar fund-raising operation driven through email, help obama keep pace and rely on candidate centered fund-raising that could be spent much more flexibly than the team of romney and the republican party as he well as outside groups that had more restrictions on how the money could be spent. i would really point to those three examples as being ones that really harnessed the power of technology on the margins to

give the campaigns competitive electoral advantage. george w. bush in '04, barack obama in 2008 and again barack obama in 2012. >> host: did the republicans not capitalize on their 2004 technological success? >> guest: i think what happens is, that the george w. bush team in 04 and rnc in '04 really had every advantage in the world over the democrats at that point in time. there was less impetus after that election to rethink fundamentally what they were doing and make massive new investments in the party at that moment in time. the other thing that happened too are just the contingencies of history. george w. bush had a very fraught second presidency with declining numbers in the polls. a lot of energy and momentum behind the republican party had dissipated by the 2006 midterms.

even more heading into the 2008 election, extraordinary financial crisis one where the republican's party nominee, john mccain, was sort of inheriting an incumbent presidency, one during extraordinary economic challenges. i think all of those things sort of combined to mean the obama campaign in 2008 and democratic party more broadly as well as a network of democratic party organizations founded after 2004 that remain among very prominent political consultancies today were really able to capitalize on energy and the money flowing into democratic covers at that moment in time to make new investments in technology, data infrastructure, in digital media and talent and expertise in ways that really paid dividend in 2008 and that is something i think the democrats were able to continue company tallizing on after 2008 as well.

ultimately heading into the 2012 obama re-election campaign where the obama team really inherited a lot of this work, this network of staffers and network of organizations and the infrastructure that the democrats were able to build from 2004 and carry it forward to the president's re-election victory. meanwhile on the republican side of the aisle, even coming after the 2008 campaign the republican party heading into 2012 suffered from significant debts. the troubled tenure of chairman michael steele, just had less money to able to invest in the areas, less infrastructure developed at that moment in time. during 2012 faced a very fractured field, where their ultimate nominee, mitt romney faced not only tougher, stiffer competition but had to spend more resources in areas like mass broadcasting and couldn't afford to build the technology infrastructure that the obama team in 2012 enjoying their

technical advantage of incumbency could be building for entire year while romney ran in a contested primary. >> host: professor kreiss, in your book "prototype politics" you talks about this, investments in technology, is that pretty expensive stuff? >> guest: i think what happens you see ebbs and flows especially during presidential races where particularly well-financed presidential campaigns will invest order of millions of dollars in building out a technology infrastructure and what this really entails is first and foremost talent and expertise. one of the things i found in a lot of my research campaigns look to hire expertise from outside of the political field. engineers and developers who can come into politics with specialized skills and use them to really bring them to bear in politics to solve political problems at that moment in time.

another area they look to spend money on is ongoing data maintenance and data management. this is something that gets carried across election cycles and really is built up by political parties themselves as well as outside party firms. what this means looking to provide basic data infrastructure, cloud platforms that will supply analytic services, database is as well as the real grunt work that it takes to perform hygiene on data to make sure it is up-to-date over election cycles. this is where presidential campaigns become very important. during the course of presidential campaigns they make millions of voters contacts. when they send people out to knock on doors they get information on voters. they figure out what are active phone numbers for them? what are active-e mail addresses? whether they plan to vote in a party primary or general election.

all the data makes its way back to the coffers and party databases maintain and parties maintain of the at the end of the day that is transferred across election cycles. it is really on going work of infrastructure building and infrastructure maintenance that parties spend millions of dollars on and campaigns invest millions of dollars in resources in to really build up their electoral operations that provide them with advantages on election day. >> host: how have digital campaigns evolved over the past 20 years? >> guest: yeah, so that's a great question. first and foremost one of the really interesting patterns that we see we live in a time of rapid technological change where cycle to cycle, entirely new platforms are cropping up that campaigns have to navigate and adapt to. as well as there's changes in social media plaid forms continually campaigns have to figure out how to navigate.

one of the examples i really love, after i wrote my first book i interviewed a campaign staffers on the obama 2008 campaign and one of the things they told me was that in 2008, you know, twitter was an afterthought for the campaign, that they had an intern or somebody who basically ran the twitter feed because so few people were using it. it was really a marginal attraction in 2008. by 2012 twitter had become an absolute central way that campaigns were using technology to actually help set the agenda of the professional press. and you can actually look at this just in terms of massive growth of twitter usership just in the pan of those four years. that became an entirely new genre of campaign communication that campaigns had to figure out how to best use. what are the audiences there we need to apply, to appeal to. how do we use this in effective way to reach supporters and active supporters to fire them

up and translate energy and enthusiasm into election resources such as volunteers and money. that is one great example after campaign platform in the short span of four years became absolutely central to modern campaign communication and provided significant advantages simply in terms of being able to set the agenda of professional press. jump ahead to 2015, snapchat is increasingly important tool campaigns use to particularly connect with younger voters. voters 18 to 24 years old who are interested in seeing behind the scenes to elections. campaigns have had to figure out how do we see this in a new way? what sort of audiences are there? what sort of communications work? there is entirely new things that crop up like twitter and snapchat that campaigns have to figure out how to navigate in new ways. the other thing i would say is,

that social media platforms in particular don't remain static. if you look at television advertising the 30 second spot remains largely the same over the course of 30 years, in terms of what the genre is, what it is designed to accomplish, people who produce it, the process way they produce it. there is greater targeting. you can use cable networks to more fine grady target your message. when you look at the 30-second campaign advertisement is generally remained the same across election cycles from the 1960s on to today. however social media platforms and social media firms are changing and they change their platforms on an ongoing basis. so one of the things i found significantly in my research that platforms such as facebook, for instance, will change the algorithms that relate to the sorts of attention that campaign content received.

so, any one election cycle facebook might change the cycle to award videos as opposed to static content. links to facebook's content as opposed to links to outside content. visual information opposed to textual information. campaigns have to be very sensitive to looking at their analytics and the data that they have coming in about the reach and engagement that their content is receiving on a platform such as facebook, in order to figure out sort of what is going to be the most effective content we can use in that moment of time. they have to adapt to changes in things like facebook's underlying algorithm to reach enengagement on their platform. >> host: daniel crease, university of north carolina at chapel hill.

his first book, taking our country back from howard dean to barack obama. his newest book, "prototype politics," technology, intensive campaigning and the data of democracy. professor crease, has the digital portion of the campaign into the larger organization or still a separate unit? >> guest: this is something campaigns struggled with history, where does digital sit in a contrary campaign? i think one of the things you see when you look at history, a broader evolution of moving digital away from being a department, really in the service in mass media communications to now being part of campaigns that really touch every other aspect of a campaign's operation. so, when you think about what digital does, digital plays a role in field campaigning.

when you to to sign up to volunteer for a campaign online, one of the things you will want to do, figure out how do all the people signing up for campaign online, get to the field operation in a way they're being useful for us, whether on the ground, connecting somebody to a local field office or helping them make phone calls through a web browser, going to voters targeted in terms of online to the electoral goals. digital is in the service of field campaigning. when you think about fund-raising you can't think about digital media apart from amount of resources things like email is able to bring in or online advertisements is able to bring in. so digital media is very much sort of used in the service of online fund-raising in really effective and really important ways. online advertising is something that supports every other aspect of a campaign. whether it means voter registration or whether it means

fund-raising or message and persuasion advertising. so what i think you see over time is sort of increasing recognition on both sides of the aisle and in campaigns from both the lowest and highest levels that digital really has a hand in every conventional aspect of contemporary campaigning and needs to be integrated with all the other aspects of a campaign. to this end campaigns adopted various strategies. some campaigns give digital a senior staff position, one where they're really working with other division heads to help compliment what they're doing. some campaigns developed liaison positions where dedicated teams of staffers will work closely with staffers on, within other units of their operations to help bring these different operations together. sometimes they create mixed teams where you might have a digital staffer working with a field staffer in order to help

them all sort of work together to compliment one another's goals. when you look out at the landscape we're rad piddly moving to a time when just digital is part of everything else that every other unit on a campaign does. it doesn't quite make sense to think about these things separately anymore. >> host: professor kreiss there is a lot of micro targeting of people online, isn't there? >> guest: absolutely. one of the things, one of the stories i tell in both of my books is really the way technology, data analytics have become increasingly central to contemporary electioneering, because it's a lot harder to reach citizens than it was 30 or 40 years ago. when you go back to the 1960s you could reach 80, 90% of the electorate buy by buying a television ad on any of the

three networks at any particular time. to reach that much. elect rat you have to be across hundreds of platforms, dual screening watching live tv and consuming media on laptops or their mobile phone n this world of much more fragmented media attention in a world of dual screening in a world of multiple different platforms where people consume media and time shifting campaigns really need data and analytics and technology to figure out which voters do we need to reach, what messages are most likely going to appeal to them, and really how best do we reach them? you how do we get our message to people and help them realize what the stakes of an luck shun are? how do we make them care about politics and how do we get them to be interested about our candidate? micro targeting is strategy where campaigns have limited resources. they can't contact every member of the electorate.

so how do they use data in a way to figure out who are the most likely people going to be supporting us and how do we get them to the polls? how do we make them care about the election? and then figuring out which people are likely to be persuadable and likely to be, to vote. so how do we figure out how to harness data in a way to go after them to craft a persuasive message and at the end of the day convince them to vote for us so that we can ultimately gain more votes at the end of the day. micro targeting really sort of fits exactly into this broader dynamic how do we use data in a way that make people care about politics, how do we figure out how to reach them and how do we get more votes at the end of the day. >> host: daniel, kreiss, what is happening this this year when it comes to technology and campaigning? >> guest: we could talk about a couple different things in terms of the 2016 cycle which in so

many ways has been unprecedented at a number of different levels. first of all as i alluded to before, there are new platforms, like snapchat, platforms that have growing electoral importance like instagram, that campaigns are figuring out how to use to appeal to voters in new ways. and you know, we talked about this early on but like snapchat is now emerging as an absolutely central tool, as way to reach younger voters in particular and really deliver campaign messages to them. i think another thing we've seen really effectively during this election cycle is the importance of twitter, particularly for donald trump, who has really i would say in unprecedented fashion leveraged the power of social media and particularly twitter, to set the agenda of the professional press. so you know, when trump uses particular forms of rhetoric, when he uses twitter in a way to

excite certainly his base of supporters but more broadly, uses twitter effectively in a way professional press outlets take up in their own coverage and start writing about and get story ideas from and use as rebuttal to words of his opponents during the primary and general elections, i think that is unprecedented. we haven't seen a candidate effectively use social media to set the gender today the professional press and amplify his own message that in a way utterly saturated mainstream coverage. that is qualitatively new. one of the things we've seen on the democratic side of the aisle is the continue all investment not only in digital media and digital technologies but also data analytics. the hillary clinton campaign invested sizable amount of resource sources in expertise and analytics expertise that comes from the democratic party's own networks.

comes from consultancies founded after the obama 2008 and 2012 campaigns, specializing in data and analytics. comes from the party's massive voter database that includes not only vast data stores drawn from public sources on every member of the electorate but all the field date that that the obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 generated in addition to commercial data sources to figure out which voters we can't what do we say to them, who will be likely to vote and how we design a field strategy around that. that is the final piece on the democratic side of the aisle, continue all investment in field strategy. knocking on people's doors. registering voters. figuring out which voters we need to contact, what do we need to say? how will we get them to early vote? how do we get them to absentee vote. ultimately how do we end up with

more votes than our opponent on election day? that basic field organization that the democratic party really has developed since 2008 and you saw in such great effect on both obama runs, i think hillary clinton is looking to replicate, mustering volunteers as well as data and analytics ruch infrastructure to help her carry out from now and really heading through november. >> host: finally, professor kreiss, do you have personal evidence what the two campaigns and parties no about you because of your online activity? >> guest: yeah, so, one of the things that campaigns try to do online is bring you into a database where they want to identify who their supporters are. and they want to identify at the end of the day how do we contact you best in order to continue to sort of reach out to them?

i think most importantly what campaigns want to do is run things like online ads to people to capture email addresses so they in come say wan figure out how do we best contact and continually go back to these people. they want to use various sorts of data to figure out what sorts of issues you might be interested in. whether you're likely hillary clinton supporter and donald trump supporter in a way to really reach out to them and run targeted advertising to them. open up your wallet to give money to the campaign or you might be susceptible to a volunteer appeal. they want to figure out what issue you might care about and be responsive to. what you see and through my dozens conversations with campaign practitioners over the years campaigns use digital media and social media to help bring people into a database to be further leveraged to try to find volunteers. to try to find donors. ultimately to try to turn these people out on election day.

really that's how campaigns sort of use digital and social media to target and profile and ultimately make appeals to people in the course of election season. >> host: professor daniel kreiss, of the university of north carolina chapel hill is the author of this new book, "prototype politics," technology intensive campaigning and the data of die mock sy. thanks for being with us. >> guest: thanks so much. >> host: representative, marcia blackburn, what is on your reading list? >> guest: i have a great reading list for the summer, one of the things i'm starting with is the constitution and so many of my constituents are reading through the constitution and the declaration. they're doing that with their kids this summer and, so we're going to have some fun with that, do some things, working