and i thought we are not going to have to same feeling for number two. and i thought i want because it doesn't happen twice. well of course it did happen twice and i bonded with her, too. >> this is a picture of you -- >> that is more recent. i find among the many changes that take place in us, both grandmothers and grandfathers, that we cannot say no to our grandchildren. no matter how strict we were as parents, how critical, how much we were on their case, grandparents love unconditionally. we never say no. it is always yes. i hated going to the park with my daughter. i hated slides. it is pushing the damn swing back and forth. and my grandchildren want to go

to the park i am there and i am pushing the swing and it is great. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. c-span, created by america's cable television companies and brought to you as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. >> host: the book is called "prototype politics" and the author is professor daniel kreiss. what was your goal of the book? >> guest: my goal was to tell the history of technology in politics over the last 20 years starting in the middle of the 1990's up through the 2014 mid-term election cycle and really try to explain some of the differences between the republican parties when it came to taking up technology in the

service of electoral goals. >> host: what to you mean by the term prototype politics? >> guest: i wanted to thing where innovation comes from in political campaigning. how do they take up new platforms and use them in new ways, how to they invent new ways of engaging the electorate whether it is on twitter or snapchat. in reading the political science and communication literature i started thinking about where innovation comes from, how it happens and why is it so important. i talk about how campaigns became prototypes which is models for doing things differently in electoral politics.

there is a couple key examples and most famously was obama's election in 2008 which was the first campaign to use social media like facebook effectively for the purposes of organizing and engaging the electorate and turning more people out on election day. in 2012, we saw another example of the campaign becoming a prototype which was new wave to use data and an analytics. future campaigns adapt. >> host: professor, does superior technology and data win elections? >> guest: no, technology and digital media and social media

platforms and data and analytics work don't win elections for candidates. there are many other important things this includes which party is in office, who is the incumbent and who is likely to come out on election day and important factors like the state of the economy. all those things provide the backdrop, the hands that candidates are dealt so to speak that they have to navigate effectively. where technology and digital media and data and analytics come in are providing gains at the margin. can we deploy resources better in terms of contacting the right voters. can we use e-mails in a really effective way and data tested to raise additional dollars or recruit additional volunteers for campaigns.

can we use data in an effective way to see what states we should contest, what message resonates with voters. how it is best to reach them whether it is buying a particular time on cable television or showing up at their door at an hour they are likely to be home. once we talk to voters what is the right thing to say to make them care about the election and turn out on election day. when we talk about campaign broadly and campaign technology and data and digital media and analytics we are talking about ways to gain advantages on the margins. when it comes to raising additi additional couple of millions that could be poured into field offices or used to run broadcast advertising. that is the advantages we are providing. at the end of the day, i think that is a question ultimately of

efficiency and margins that exist around these larger determining factors like the state of the economy and partisanship. >> host: who has done it well on the margin? >> guest: i think a couple examples you would look at in the course of history and here is where i will go back in time and say during the 2004 cycle, it was george w. bush's campaign that was heads and tails about what john kerry and the democratic party was able to put together. during 2004, the bush team and rnc had a more sophisticated data member base with data on members, they had more extensive turnout operations in states such as ohio, they had novel online precinct capitals that was helping them bring in people online and put them to work in

the field to make phone calls to targeted voters and at the end of the day that is what you saw in the '04 cycle was a bush team and republican party with more sophisticated data, technology, and analytics than the democratic party. it was because of that that the democratic party after 2004, decided to take a step back, evaluate what they were doing and really build a modern technology and data infrastructure that provided the core for democratic campaigns during every presidential election since. a couple other points i would talk to building off the work the democrats put in place was obama's campaign in 2008 which harnessed the power of social media particularly facebook in the service of electoral organize, mobilizing youth and

young voters, turning them out on the polls, using social media effectively as a tool for fundraising, and e-mail, building a massive e-mail list on the order of 13 million for the purpose of financing mostly financed through small donors. i would point to the obama campaign in 2012 of another example that of leverage over romney. obama's small dollar fundraising operation driven through e-mail was able to help obama keep pace and really rely on candidate-centered fundraising that could be spent more flexible than the team of romney and the republicans and the

outside groups that had more restrictions on how the money can be spent. i would point to those three examples of ones that harnessed technology to give those campaigns competitive eelectrle advantage. >> host: did the republicans not capitalize on the 2004 technological success? >> guest: i think the george w. bush team in '04 and the rnc in '04 really had every advantage of the democrats at that moment in time. there was less of an impetus coming off the election to rethink what they were doing and make massive new investments in the party at that moment in time. i think the other thing that happened, too, or just the contingency of history, george w. bush had a fraught second term presidency.

a lot of the momentum behind the republican party dissipated by the 2006 midterms and even more heading into the 2008 election extraordinary financial crisis. one where the republican parties nominee, john mccain, was sort of inheriting an incumbent presidency and during historic economic challenges. i think that combined means the obama campaign and organizations founded after 2004 were able to capitalize on energy and the money flowing into the democratic coffers at that moment to make new investment in data infrastructure, digital

media and ways that paid d dividend in 2008 and they kept capitalizing on it until 2012 where the obama team inherited this network of organization and the infrastructure the democrats were able to build from 2004 and bring it forward to the president's re-election victory. on the republican side of the aisle, even after the 2008 campaign, the republican party suffered from significant debt, the troubled tenure michael steel and just had less money to invest, less infrastructure developed, and a very fractured field where their nominee facedfaced

a tougher, stiffer competition but had to spend more areas in mass broadcasting and couldn't afford to build the team like the obama 2012 team was building for an entire year while ramney ran a contested primary. >> host: what kind of investments are we talking about in technology? is this pretty expensive stuff? >> guest: i think what happens is you see ebbs and flows particularly during president elections. they will invest in millions in building out a technology infrastructure. what this really intells is first and foremost talent and expertise. campaigns look to hire experts like engineers and developers

who can come in from the outside with specialized skills use them to solve political problems at that moment in time. another area they spend money on is ongoing data maintenance and management. this gets carried across the election cycle and it is built up by parties and outside firms. what this means is really looking to provide basic data infrastructure, cloud platforms that will support analytic services, databases, as well as the grunt work it takes to maintain and perform hygiene on data to make sure it is up to date over election cycles. this is where presidential campaigns become really important. in the course of presidential campaigns they make millions of voter contacts. when they send people out in the field and knock on doors they gain information on voters and figure out thing like active

phone numbers and e-mails for them, whether they might be planning on voting in a party primary or general election. that makes its way back to the coffers that the campaigns and parties campaign and that is transferred across election cycles. so it is ongoing work of infrastructure building and mant maintenance they invest billions in to build up and gain advantages. >> host: how have digital campaigns evolved? >> guest: we live in a time of rapid change. cycle to cycle entirely new platforms are cropping up that

campaigns have to navigate and adapt to. as well as changes in social media platforms that campaigns have to figure out how to navigate. after i wrote my first book, i interviewed a staffer and they said an intern ran the twitter feed because so many people were using it in 2008. by 2012, twitter was a central way campaigns were using technology to actually help set the agenda of the professional press. and you can actually look at this in terms of the massive growth of twitter leadership in the span of those four years. that became an entirely new genre of campaign communication that campaigns had to figure out how to best use it, how to use

it in an effective way to reach reporters and active supporters to translate their internally and enthusiasm is in resources like vaolunteers and money. that is one example of a campaign platform that became essential in four years and provided significant advantages in terms of being able to set the agenda of the press. jumping ahead to 2016 snapchat is a tool campaigns are using to connect with voters 18-24 who are interested in seeing the behind the scenes. campaigns figure out how to use it in a new way. what kind of communication works? one thing we see is there is an ongoing change where entirely

new things crop up like twitter and like snapchat that campaigns have to figure out how to navigate in new ways. social media platforms don't remain static. if you look at television advertising the 30 second spot remained largely the same over the course of 30 years in terms of genre, the people who produce it, the process by which is produced. there is greater targeting using cable to help fine grain the message but at the end of the day the 30 second campaign advertisement remains the same across election cycles from the 1960's on to today. social media platforms and firms are changing and they change the platforms on an ongoing bases. one thing i found in my research is that platforms such as

facebook will change the algorithms that relate to the sorts of attention that campaign content receive. so during any one election cycle, facebook might change their algorithm to reward videos asa poseded to static content. or links to facebook's own content as opposed to outside content. or visual information as opposed to text information. these things constantly change. as a bake medium for campaign communication campaigns have to be sensitive to looking at their analytic and the data they have about coming in about the reach and engagement their content is receiving on platform suf as fable in order to figure out the most effective content we can use in that moment of time and have to to adapt tho get better reach on their platform.

>> host: daniel kreiss is a professor of university of north carolina. his first book, taking our country back and his book, "prototype politics: the making and unmaking of technological innovation in the republican and democratic parties, 2000-2014" has the digital portion of the campaign been integrated into the larger organization or is it still a separate unit? >> guest: this is something that has been a struggle for years. one thing you see the broader evolution of moving digital away from being a department in the service of broadcast and mass media communication to now being part of campaigns that really

touch every other aspect of a campaign's operation. digital plays a role infield campaigning. when you go sign up for a campaign online you want to figure out how do the people who sign up on get to the field opra operation or if it goes to voters and digital is in the field of fundraising. when you think about fund fundraising you cannot think about it apart of what online e-mail or advertising brings in. digital media is used in the service of online fundraising is really effective and important

ways. online aspects like voter registrati registration, fundraising and persuasion advertising. what you see is the increasing recognition on both sides and of the aisle and both the highest and lowest levels that digital has a hand in every aspect of temporary campaigning and needs to be integrateded with all of the other aspects of the game. some give digital a staff position and where they work with others. some have teams where dedicated staffers work within other units to help bring the operations

together. sometimes they create mixed team where you have a digital staffer working to help with goals. it doesn't make sense to think about these things separately anymore. >> there is a lot of micro targeting of people going on online isn't there? >> absolutely. one story i tell in both books is the ways technology, data and analytics are increasingly central to contemporary elections because it is harder to reach citizens than it was 30-40 years.

in 1960 you could reach 80% of the electorate bif you buy a tv ad. you would have to be crass hundreds of platforms and trying to appeal while dual streaming. in this world of fragmented media attention and dual screening and a world of different platforms campaigns need data and analytics to figure out what voters we need to reach, what likely appeals to them and how best do we reach them. how do we get the message to people and make them realize the mistakes? how do we get them interested in

our candidate? campaigns are limited so how do they use data to figure out whoouz the likely people supporting us and how do we get them to the polls and get them to care about the election, and figuring out which people are persuadable and get them to vote? how do we harness data to go after them and craft the message and convince them to vote for us at the end of the day. micro targeting fits in this broader dynamic of how do we use data in a way that makes people care about politics. >> host: daniel kreiss, what is happening this year when it comes to technology and

campaign? >> guest: i think we can talk about a couple different things in terms of the 2016 cycle which in so many ways has been unprecedented on a number of different lebls. as i alluded to, there is now platforms like snapchat, platforms that have growing electoral platforms like instagram. snapchat is a tool to reach younger voters and deliver campaign messages to them. i think another thing we have seen effectively during this election cycle is the importance of twitter for donald trump who has in an unprecedented fashion leverages the power of social media and particularly twitter

to set the agenda of the professional press. when trump uses the rhetoric he does it in a way to excite the base of supporters. he uses it in a way they pickup their own coverage and write about and get story ideas or use in a rebuttal to the words of this opponent during the primary and general election. i think that is unprecedented. i don't think we have seen a candidate as effectively use social media to set the agenda of the professional press and amplify his message in a way that saturated media coverage. one thing we have seen on the democratic side of the aisle is the continuing investment in digital media and technology but also data and analytics. the hillary clinton campaign has

invested sizable amounts of resources in expertise that comes from the democratic beliefs that were funded in 2008 and 2012. specializing in analytics comes from the massive party database that includes public sources on ever member of the electorate but all of the field data the obama campaigns in 2008 and 2012 generated in addition to commercial sources to figure out which voters to contact, what we should say, who is like lay to vote and how to design a field strategy around that. we see a continuing investment infield strategy. knocking on people's doors, registering voters, figuring out which voters to contact and what

to say, how to get them to early vote, how to get them to absente, vote, and ultimately how do we end up with more votes than our opponent on election day. that field organization that the democratic party has developed since 2008 and you saw it with great effect on the obama runs and i think hillary clinton is working to replicate and mustering volunteers and data and analytic infrastructure helping her carry out now and through november. >> host: and finally, do you have personal evidence about what the two campaigns or parties know about you because of your online activity? >> guest: i think 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 want to identify how they contact you best in order to reach out to them. i think most importantly what campaigns want to do is run things like online e-mail. they want it use various sources of data might you be interested in and what issues you might be interested and whether you have a hillary clinton or donald trump supporter in a way you can run targeted support to help you open up your wallet. you might be susceptible to a volunteer appeal. they want to find out what issues you might respond to. and campaigns use digital and social media to bring people

into a database that can be further leverages to try to find volunteers and donors and ultimately try to turn these people out on election day. that is really how campaigns sort of use digital and social media to target and profile and ultimately make appeals to people in the course of election seas season. >> host: professor daniel kreiss of the university of north carolina chapel hill is the author of this new book "prototype politics" thanks be being with us. >> guest: thanks so much. >> c-span, created by america's cable television companies and brought to you as a public service by your cable or satellite provider. >> here is a look at the current best selling non fiction b