>> good afternoon, everybody. i'm mark kennedy, the director of the graduate school here at george washington university, and we welcome everyone here

from george washington university to our panel on digital complaints, 2012 and beyond. we give a special welcome to our c-span audience that's joining us. we also give a special welcome to those from the american political science association that have come to all day seminars here in advance of their conference study tomorrow. at the graduate school of political management, we are very pleased that one of george washington's trustees, mark shenkman who is with us here today has funded a series of research an digital campaigning. as we've all seen, the world in all aspects of our life is going more digital and we want to make sure that our students are at the forefront of understanding how you apply big data for political success. so today's seminar is very timely. i'm very pleased to be collaborating with this with the school of media and public affairs and frank sessna will be

leading the conversation here. frank has a great background, a multi-media platform to make sure that we're highlighting the best innovations in sustainability and he is an emmy award winning journalist prior to being the leader of the school of s and pa, he was with cnn and ap for 21 years. please welcome to the podium, frank sessna. >> thank you, mark. good day, everybody. welcome to george washington university and the jack morton auditorium and the school of media and public affairs. we like to say we are the cross roads of the school of media and public affairs for where media and politics, communication, information meet, collide, explode, whatever verb you

choose, they do it here and we're very pleased and very honored to be a part of this event today. i want to thank you again for joining us at this digital campaigning 2012 and beyond discussion. this is the first of our fall events. we hope that you will join us for subsequent events as well. we have other ones upcoming on september 9th hosting a panel of journalists we'll be discussing covering the mid-term elections. this will include professionals, journalists from roll call, mcclatchy, meet the press, "washington post," all of them who just and purely coincidently happen to be alumni of the george washington university. please join us for that. you wouldn't want to miss that.

we heard mark kennedy thank mark shenkman and i join him in thanking him. i would also like to thank paul wilson whose contribution helped make it possible to host the absa preconference which many of you attended today. paul is a member of our national counsel advisory board for media and public affairs. he's the founder of wilson grand communications and we thank him for all of his service to the school of media and public affairs. i'd also like to do a shoutout to my colleagues, steve livingston and dave carp who are co-chairs of this year's absa preconference, so thank you to you both. i also want to congratulate one other colleague, professor silvio waisbord who is named the journal of communication. he's stepping down as editor in chief of the international journal of press and politics and his successor, rasmus nielsen is with us today.

please join me in congratulate is them. now we'll go online. we'll go digital. i'd like to introduce our two guests today, and i'd like to ask them to come out as i do so. zach moffit is the co-founder of an advertising agency that has served over 220 campaigns and organizations. please have your seat. he was the 2011 digital director of mitt romney for president where he managed the campaign's digital strategy and will have a great deal to tell us about that. i would like to welcome michael slabe. he's the managing partner of a new company helping to solve creative capital. i like that. in addition, he was the chief

integration and innovation officer in 2012, obama for america, where he insured the implementation of technology across the campaign. so it would seem we have the two campaigns here, and i'm going to go and take my seat in the middle. welcome to you both. i explained in addition to our c-span audience we have a number of students, graduate and otherwise who are here and faculty. so be very targeted in your comments. i want to start broad and then we'll come down and compare your campaigns. i know you'll have complete agreement on all things, looking back.

what three things would each of you say are the most significant game changers or strategy changers in this online world in your worlds of campaign. you want to go first? >> sure. i think the ubiquity of social media has changed the way we communicate, the way citizens communicate with governments and i just think the fundamental nature of the communication landscape is different than it's been in the past. we have a tendency to talk about social media through the lens of a network, very naturally because we see them as social networks, facebook has promoted this concept very heavily. i think we've advance today a stage where all communications functions like a graph where we are nodes in a graph and interconnected in all kinds of ways, whether we are

individuals, we are campaigns, we are companies, we are media companies and our ability to understand the interrelationships and the power and the value of strategic indirect communication is as important as the value of strategic direct communication. >> what's strategic direct and indirect? >> direct communication is what i say to you. indirect communication is what you hear about me from someone else. that can be done haphazardly at random which it will be done whether you like it or not, or it can be something that's part of how we try and build efforts around helping people engage with each other and the power of horizontal communication as one of the fundamental communications in the way media functions. media used to be high arcual. publishers reached an audience and everybody's roles in that system were fixed which is sort of boring and unexciting.

>> i didn't think it was boring and unexciting when i was doing it. >> it's a little more complicated now. ubiquity of social media. cloud computing has changed what's possible in terms of our ability to build and manage our infrastructure. we talk a lot about the differences between our campaigns and the differences between our campaigns in 2012 relative to the application of technology versus the development of technology which is a totally different bag of cats. but the rise of ease and accessibility of cloud communication can really change things. >> one more. >> i have to do one more? >> no. those two were good. no, i think the last one that i would say is still really

important goes to the question we were having when we were back stage which is the modern political campaign hasn't changed that much since 1840 or 1896. we were having a political debate. but the idea of engagement and communication and the durability of the strategic value of empowering people to drive an organization forward is completely independent of digital tools, social media, e-mail, facebook, twitter, whatever is going to be new next week, and that digital is a force multiplier for things like campaign and organization of any type needs to do well. it is not -- we don't -- because we have developed digital tools we don't now have digital outcomes and goals associated with the organization. we're still trying to win votes. that's something that's easily overlooked. >> zach, what are your top three? >> michael is right. the premise for 2012 for us is we thought digital in 2008 had been a list building and fundraising exercise at scale. it did a lot of other things but that was the core competency at a digital level. a lot of things were alluded to but the audience weren't there via facebook or twitter to go beyond that. in 2012 it was the first campaign where you would have people who would vote for you

but never went to your website but they interacted on facebook or twitter or maybe e-mail but never having gone directly to your site. so you were trying to think about what does that experience look like and as a result that plays into the things that have changed the most, redefining your budget where you put data and digital at the center and fund as a result. i think the secondary component is actually even though we've become more advanced in technology, the role of a human is so much more advanced than ever before, like the staffing. when i look at the obama campaign i was never very jealous of the technology. i was always the vision, the ability to hire so many staff and to fund so many staff and to have that process is something that was really unique to what 2012 showed us. when we look post 2012, some of the things that are being missed, lean and mean does not mean lean and mean. it means we're not doing stuff. we're going to cut corners and

hope in five weeks that 1,000 gross ratings points get me over the line. i think that process has shifted. if anything the role of social media is more powerful at the local level and yet it's all talked about at the presidential level. there are all these different elements to go through. i think budget, staffing as it goes through and i think how you leverage technology. i think this belief that democrats are ahead or republicans are ahead and this thing flips over 8 years and normally someone in power has a nice effect on that. i don't think it's like that anymore. i think it's the ability to take technology and leverage it and are you building for yourself or trying to glue pieces together. i think that will always be the challenge for campaigns as they move forward. >> who is in power? the candidate, the campaign, the consultants, god forbid the public? >> hopefully in some ways it's all of the above.

i think the capacity -- as zach said the local smaller races, smaller and challenger campaigns to reach audiences that you may never have been able to reach without tools like this, operate at scale, some of the things that we were able to do that sort of shouldn't scale, it's too personal, it's too much about one to one communication, sort of shouldn't be able the work at the scale that we were able to do except for the capacity to engage and drive a ladder of engagement via the internet. that's the only way you end up with 2.2 million active volunteers doing the exact same thing a volunteer has always been doing in a political

campaign. i think more opportunities to engage and listen and get more information in more places is good for voters and citizens. i think the transparency and the discipline that's required of candidates is good for them as candidates. i think any time there's something new, consultants are going to benefit and find a way, but that's part of the system, too. >> i agree. i think that the challenges are different. digital has allowed the apparatus of the campaign to be choken up. there's a lot of younger generation of people to be involved earlier and had their voices heard. i think that probably three presidents before michael and i it would have been a whole different role in a campaign.

it just wouldn't have been a possibility. so our experience, there's no such thing when someone says they're a social media expert. it just means they really like it. there are some things that make sense relative to the brand or the client or the campaign, but there is just kind of like the separation that this constantly evolving and just when you think you've got your hands around it it continues to evolve and it's no longer in this lock box of this is the way it has to be. i think that's empowering and presidential campaigns if you didn't have social media the role of technology would be the same 8 to 12 states and people wouldn't get to participate. it's kind of like extended the ability for people to participate. >> it hasn't changed where the candidate goes.

>> if people can -- it moves dollars. social media and fundraising as a whole, that's why it started there. it's so easy to track that. you can see the conversion as you're going through the process. the use of social media. i look at marco rubio after the 2013 state of the union when he drank the water bottle. that's a specific moment but a generational model. if he was an older candidate, no one would have talked about it. it completely changes the conversation in a matter of seconds. something that social media allowed him to do and change the conversation. ann romney had that moment with

us when hillary rosen's comment occurred in 2012 and she was able to cut through the clutter. i can promise you having being there that was not where we started the communication. it was the last thing we did but it changed the entire conversation. that's where social media as leveled the playing field and allowed people to have followup conversation.

>> probably wouldn't you coming to you actually. >> that's okay. what zach said about investing early really important and institutionalizing the values of engagement and relationship building as an essential part of the campaign so that digital becomes -- i used this phrase before but it becomes a force multiplier for the things you're trying to do relative to building community and empowering people to participate in a process. that means that digital is going to drive whatever rules are present in the campaign. the tools that we use and zach uses are the same. i always think it's sort of funny. it's not like we invented fusion and didn't share. we're using them differently and applying them differently. the constraints around our campaigns were very different in 2012 so how restaffed, budgeted, the time we had to plan was a wild advantage for us that i think gets overlooked a lot. in terms of coming to us and where you start, you start early with building relationships and you have to start with a premise that you are willing and interested in engaging in sort of a humble way as a participant in a process with others. >> are you suggesting that a politician is going to engage in a humble way?

>> yes, if they're going to do it well. i think we continue to see traditional candidates thinking in traditional communications terms one way, how can we use these tools to broadcast to another audience. >> you think something fundamental has changed? >> these are not broadcast tools. if you use them as broadcast tools they will be only marginally effective. if you're using them as a mechanism for communication building relationships, they can become something greater. if you're interested in using facebook as another version of the channel 7 news it's going to be boring and people would see through it really fast. >> we almost tell them we will help them set up their facebook page so it's tagged the right way and has the right images but

after that we say we can't respond for you. the worst thing that will happen is you respond and they go to the supermarket and they talk to a person and they say i have no idea what you're talking about. if you're running for let's say recorder of x county, you're talking 5,000 votes each way, plus or minus 300 votes. you only need 15 volunteers, 30 volunteers to make a huge difference and that's what the tools have done. they have leveled. what people like michael and myself can do is help you eliminate your wasted time. what we do is learn from our mistakes and hopefully we can help you take the most of your time and be as efficient as possible, but at a certain point if we're the ones having a conversations that will come through quickly and as soon as that comes through you're in a very tough spot. >> what zach said before, the investment that's required is largely human, that if you're going to participate in these conversations and be engaged and we're using these tools and these networks, it's a huge

commitment of time and energy. you need to be prepared to engage and respond in a dialogue. you need to be prepared to create content on a constant basis. that is a -- people have a tendency to say it's the internet, it's free, it's social media, it's free. using the tools is free. using them well is a talent and means a team that you are going to staff and resource appropriately to do this well and maintaining relationships with millions of people at a national level means a big team. >> is that a dramatic departure for candidates in the way they're going to engage through a campaign, or is it merely an evolution? retail politics always has been about a conversation if you're going to do well. if you knock on someone's door and you give a stump speech, they're not going to stand there with you for very long. is it merely transferring what's been done anyway or is there something fundamental here? >> being able to do -- essentially you're talking about being able to do retail politics at a distance. instead of talking to a voter you can talk to millions of voters through a team, through platforms, that you are doing some of those same person to person and one to one relationship building scale.

i do think one. things that it does fundamentally change is pace. the requirement of producing content in a real time engagement and real time response we talked a lot about -- there's a phrase of rapid response in politics and rapid response is too slow. real time response is this fundamental nature of twitter conversations an engaging with the press and is something that has to approximate real time to be effective is a genuine shift. >> should candidates tweet? >> yeah. they have to. i think you have to but i think you have to be careful that there's risk reward and you have to be cognizant of that.

i wouldn't tweet late at night when you're angry. when people are mean at you at twitter that's when you wand to respond. you get horrible trollers out there. i think it's hard for people to take that separation. same with athletes, they don't treat them like people. it's hard because you get caught up. >> let's go to 2012 where you both were firmly rooted and where you both helped redefine this whole landscape. zach, i'm going to start with you and with thanks to my colleague dave carp for suggesting this question we'll go right to the fun stuff which is orca, which is the system that didn't work so well. a little background for the audience, this was a mobile optimized web application that was meant to be used as a get out the vote vice. it was supposed to enable volunteers at polling stations, right, around the country to be able to report who turned out and who didn't and target

accordingly. your candidate, mitt romney at one point said it would provide an unprecedented advantage which it did not do because it did not work. why? >> i will take this in a couple pieces. the challenges for us at the very beginning and this is an example of how campaigns are structured. as the digital director we had no involvement in the process. >> you wash your hands. >> not wash your hands of it. this is what happens and this is where i think the professionalism of campaigns are going. it was built out of the political shop. something at the state level through the primary process had worked effectively. i don't think that sometimes even people on campaigns understand what it's like to scale against a presidential model in the general. what you saw there was the short comings of professional project managers and technical managers to run a process. everyone believed it was going to work as it went through. i think that the concept really was not just to turn people out which was a big part of it, that was to let us know the efficiency. if we have 100 people vote and we know who 40 of them are we can take our resources and talk to the 60 who haven't voted. no one really knows what time of day people vote, if you're a morning voter or afternoon voter. that was data dependent that would have had the most valuable because that would go into the models of how you turn people out. the challenge became when you start to scale it hit this breaking point very quickly

across the board. it is one of those huge frustrations that you have because i think so many of the campaign members said this is going to be a huge tool. no one goes into election day not believing, one, they're going to win and the tool that they have is going to be amazing. i would use that was the back drop. that was the challenge for us. campaigns have to undertake these audacious tasks because that's what they want to do to get that last little bit. the challenge unfairly had orca work perfectly it would have told us that we lost sooner. unfortunately, what i think it's done is allowed people who want to be frustrated with the process to be able to point to a culprit. that was always the take away and that's why i felt strongly even though it wasn't a project that we undertook, i wanted people to understand, they did collect 15 million pieces of data. the problem was it did not do

what we hoped it would do. i think this is really -- i hope it never happens again that people don't understaff and underresource which is such an important task. >> there are people in the conservative side of things who say that this technology and this focus on technology somehow actually depressed the vote. >> i think that people -- that's their choice. i do not fundamental believe in that at all. i don't know how it would depress the vote and turn out less people. if that was the case, michael can talk to it probably better than i could, but then should barack obama have won by more in 2008? >> there's almost no way that's true. just for what it's worth. zach and i were talking about this at lunch. this also reveals just how hard it is to build technology at scale inside an organization that's as messy and moves as fast as a political campaign and that the point zach is making about the right people to build the right kinds of things is really important. the technology seems to accessible to us, but creating it is actually really, really difficult. there's a very big difference

between using and consuming and applying technology and building and creating technology. >> now that i've asked him what didn't go right in his campaign, what didn't go right in yours? >> this didn't go right for us in 2008. we had the exact same system, built differently. the parallels in this external realities of our campaign and their campaign were similar. no time to plan, very little time to prepare for the general election. it ended up having -- we ended up in '08 having huge resources but very late when building things gets risky. we built a system on election day to help use mobile phones to track who had voted early in the day so we could repurpose resources and it crashed miserably early in the day and

no one has ever heard of it because we won. it's almost -- it's four years later. the technology they built was undoubtedly better than what we built because it moves forward but they both failed because it's hard to build things to scale at that pace in that kind of system and i think the reality that what we had in 2012 was we had a massive internal engineering operation to create and build our own technology. we also had a year to build and plan without an opponent. we had time to staff really early. we hired in the technology group very, very early in the campaign. we started spending money on engineers and product managers who weren't from politics. >> how many did you hire? >> the technical groups that led was 125 people in headquarters. >> and you brought them in when? >> harper, our cto, joined us in march, the 1st of april i think,

just after the announcement. we hired as early as we could. on top of the technical infrastructure is a whole other layer of content and strategy and engagement talent in the digital team that's another 175. so we're talking about 300 people, almost half of headquarters dedicated to this. the proportion, the raw numbers are not the important part. the proportion of commitment to this as a valuable strategic element and as an element that's going to drive all of the things the campaign needs to do. the campaign needs to deliver messages, mobilize people and raise money. digital becomes a part of all of those things. you don't have money, mobilization and digital goals.

>> organizationally, this is baked into the foundation. >> it is a layer that empowers the rest of the organization. >> is that how you were organized? >> no but i think because of the structured nature, the protracted primary, that's the problem. i think that you would always be -- it would be the greatest thing for a campaign to have a michael across the board, to always have the cto, person sitting at the table from day one. when you try to do is figure out how do we get these pieces to work together as seamlessly as possible. i think that's just difference between a challenger versus incumbency. those numbers, when rick santorum dropped out, our digital department in total was 14 people. our entire campaign was 87. now, i would argue and i have often that republicans underinvest in human capital. i think that that is the detriment of our campaigns. i hope everyone in 2016 that they want to spend more on staff. the challenge is that's easy to say until resources bottom finite.

we made it through a primary. our model was going to every state down 8 points, send 2,000 points of television and win every state by ten points. it was rinse and repeat and we did it again and again. to the point that we had to probably cut back on staff. that worked fine when we were communicating with other people who had limited resources. that doesn't work against the president of the united states. when they have hundreds of millions of dollars it's not the greatest tool. you made it through the primary but we're looking up and seeing an incumbent. they weren't meant to make sympathy for us and i felt no sympathy for kerry. for us, we became the nominee and we had five months. you say, okay, we can undertake six major projects. what are those six and how will each one come to fruition. you have a curve where i have

lots of time, no money. suddenly i have lots of money and no time. once that changes, you're gone. the next thing you know you have conventions, debates and then you're electing. the whole process -- it's hard for people from the outside. i'm sure people who are mad at orca are mad at facebook when it goes down. they understand all the architecture of how facebook works. >> you have great sympathy for healthcare.gov. >> exactly. >> what's the biggest threat to your perceived or technological advantage as democrats now? >> technology doesn't stand still well. the continued investment in moving technology forward and continuing to build new products, new platforms, continuing to invest institutionally in the creation and advancement of technology and the training of a new body of talent.

we both talked a lot about the need for talent and staffing. they've got to learn somewhere and they're going to learn from those of us who have done this before and there aren't that many of us so we need to do a good job of sustaining and building talent inside the party so that we can continue to -- that we don't have this incredibly tight ladder where there's talent at the top and then no one else. there are hundreds of thousands of elected officials. and continued investment in this is really, really important. there is a lot of the talent and technology inside the democratic party lives in startups and venders that we use. same is true on the other side. there are pluses and minuses to

this is the build or buy question for organizations and institutions is important and complicated. but in either case, this is us continuing to invest in the advancement of technology, that we haven't solved the problem. we have defined a solution to the sort of ongoing application of technology to what we're trying to do and that means continuing to do it on a regular basis. >> zach, during your campaign you said, we buy advertising for people who don't watch tv anymore. what did you mean? >> one of the things that my company did prior to going in is we spend a lot of time looking for people who we define as off the grid. >> one in three voters -- >> one in three voters did not watch live tv over the past week except sports. >> yes. that number has remained constant. it's pretty consistent. we've seen this huge explosion that we just did this study with google this year.

that is the first time that screen agnostics, people don't mind where they watch it is now over 50%. we got that 17% of the population are linear but 54% are in this middle bouncing around so their entire lives are fragmented. really, they have dvr and the only time they see ads is during sports. it's the one thing you really want to know what's going on. people are off the grid who are not buying -- they are not buying the cable box. that's a growing number of people. it's growing in democrat graph ins -- 35-plus is the fastest growing area. our argument was, if you want to go to election day one-third of the voters is 1.2 million. it's 160,000 or less in the last four presidential cycles.

do you want to go to the polls believing that one in three people have not seen your tv messaging? we're spending as if there's three channels and everyone is watching it all the time. we're pretending it's the 1980s. i believe that a lot of the tv buyers, that's how they see the world because it pushes through for polling. the question is, we know the number to move polling. we don't know the number to win elections. that's the challenge we're going through. we know how much television will allow you to move the polls. we don't know what is the right media mix to allow you to win. >> what is the right mix? >> everyone wants to think there's one method. they should each have a different budget. i got budget of 10% of a television budget. but i should have got less money in northern florida where there were more senior watching television and more in northern virginia where i'm trying to get a different demographic.

that's how campaigns should be run. by district or state they should have different budgets. you have to be willing to commit and to have the type of staffing you have to make that. the single most impressive thing was obama did was buying television efficiently and take into consideration waste and to factor that into the decision making process. that's something that post election is where i spent a lot of my time focusing on that. it gets the least amount of time talked about. it's scary as it comes to resources. >> with the resources you have, where did you buy and how did you take this very thing into consideration? >> the piece of technology that was driven by our chief analyst officer who is a brilliant guy, he and his team and a woman built a system which was the idea was to look at the world

and buy television based on consumption, not based on -- the gross rating port is sacrosanct. the gross rating point is a statistical idea of how many people might be watching based on previous behavior. you're not buying actual impressions. what we wanted to do is make tv buying more like digital buying where you are buying actual impressions or actual conversions, even better. there are increasingly data sets available about set top box data and what's being watched. now how many people might be watching but what's being watched and how is that actually relating to people's individual consumption of information and then tieing that to targeted voters. the other problem with traditional media buying is it's very coarse, gender, age, that's about it and geo. the reality is, that is not

nearly detailed enough to understand the people that we're trying to reach and the relationships and stories we're trying to tell. if we can go deeper into not just our people 35 and older seeing this but our targeted voters, what are they watching and trying to get to a level where we are looking and thinking about the individual and what their experience of the campaign is. >> what do you mean by that? >> what are you watching? >> you. >> i don't want tv. i watch everything on dvr. >> right. i don't watch -- the only live television i watch is a crisis or a great game. right? if you want to get to me and i'm a guy of a certain age and all the rest -- >> we won't ask. >> i won't tell.

i don't count. in the world of television, i no longer exist once you are over 54. i just gave it away. >> you consume information from all kinds of sources. you just don't consume it from broadcast television. what we need to look at it is, are there a group of people like you that are important to us as target voters that we need to persuade? >> in a certain place and time in. >> our goals around votes, who is going to vote for us in ohio that gets us to the vote goal that means we win ohio? what do those people look like and how do they consume information. >> one more and we will go to the audience. >> can i take that one step further? if you understand this, it cracks open the entire resource conversation which allows to you have the resources to do what michael was talking about. campaigns don't need more money. most campaigns are strapped for cash. they have finite resources. i think that if we can crack this, it opens up other resources to do more engagement, more door to door knocking,

things that should be done in a campaign. it's important that people understand what the television buying just how bad that is, because a dma was made to sell you tide, to sell you stuff. it wasn't to do political realities. look at florida 13, this is post 2012, all this data, february of this year, we had almost $10 million plus put into broadcast. florida 13, makes up 18%. 80 cents on the dollar is wasted before you start. half those people aren't registered. 10.6% of the people are registered. you get ten cents on the dollar. unfortunately, florida is a high absentee ballot vote. so you are getting 4.7 cents of value on the dollar before you did anything else. we talk about -- >> this is the republican party. >> this is both parties.

we are all lucky, because it's a republican and democrat issue. no one gets fired for buying broadcast. so you are getting 4.5 cents. both sides did the same thing. but it's this idea of disarmament, i'm not going to stand down until the other side down. everyone is nervous about it. >> are you on inside saying you should? >> of course you are. we even gced a race. you get this last moment of saying, what if we do it wrong and then we get blamed? i got blamed for something i had nothing to do with. you can't change it that much as you go through the process. i say jokingly, but you are nervous, because if you are the one who made the decision that broadcast is not necessary and you lost, no matter what the reasoning was, that is the reason. i think that's the challenge. it's important for people who want to be a part of politics, is you have to realize the money you have to spent is the most important resource you have to

do all the other things. >> do you believe that that is going to carry on into the future as this realization that the audience and the access to the audience, to the voters has so changed and fragments? >> yes. >> you do think so? >> i don't think television is a broken medium for it. it will for short run because that's what people know. >> there's inertia there. if you look at ad spending relative to media consumption, the graphs are all kinds of hilarious. in terms of how brands buy versus where people are consuming information, they just don't line up. it's not because people are stupid. this is hard. it's easy to do the thing that you are confident in. you know that someone is going to watch the tv ad. there's a muscle memory and a certain amount of inertia that has to shift. there's a system and a whole -- there's a set of media buyers and people who get paid.

there's incentives that line up for the system to continue the way it is even though it doesn't make sense anymore. it's becoming more obvious that it doesn't make sense, which makes it more likely our campaigns in 2012 were very different in terms of how much we were able to spend in other places that weren't tv. we still put a couple hundred million dollars worth of ads on tv. >> before we go to that microphone, you were talking about money and resources. i'd like you to talk for a moment about you use technology in your views in the most original, most effective, most digital way to raise the most dollars. >> i think most innovative is when you leverage your smart phone using the square application. we did a popup store at convention where we made people making a donation when they buy.

the host committee had been a source of money that hadn't gone anywhere. leveraging technology used in the marketplace, you see it now. you are using square. it's the same thing. we were a year and a half ahead of that. that's one of the things is that campaigns have to be alphas of trying technology. the fec make it a restriction for using commercial applications. it's a challenge. but i think using square was an important example. using data to find out more and to create look a likes. you create models of what your donors look like. that's what you can do is you find by people's purchasing habits or the way they spend their time. you create models of the people you should run your campaign to. it kind of makes you smarter. that's where digital separates itself. when fund-raising mail goes out, the best is your first day. you should get better every day. that's the way to look at it. you are establishing a baseline and measuring against. this list is burn. i'm going to this list. it's a different world view. >> most effective?

>> i think the thing we did really well in 2012 in particular was applying best practices from large scale ecommerce to making donation process as efficient as possible. it's not super sexy but it's things like speed kills. the faster the system is, the more people donate. if at any point in the process there is any kind of lag, you are just introducing an opportunity for people to get bored. speed matters a lot. we used to joke about making the process as easy -- so easy that if people tripped and hit their head on the computer they would give us money by mistake. >> preferably more money. >> ideally. and doing things like amazon and large ecommerce retailers have allowed you to save payment information for a long time. you can buy with -- you go on.

i want to buy that. shipped before you even had a chance to say maybe i don't need that. we like that idea. when people get inspired about something, we don't want to introduce barriers to participation. so things like save payment information, no one had done it in politics. we had to build this in to our infrastructure during the 2012 campaign. it's something that's been a best practice in ecommerce for a long time. >> let's go to the audience and questions. let me invite anybody from the audience to be the brave first person to go to the microphone. let's see what happens. there's a hand up. while she's making her way to the microphone -- you will get there first. take the first question. when you come around, we will let you be number two. >> hello. a little short. my name is brittany. i'm in the graduate school of political management. zac, you were in our summer class.

my question is, someone who is young and interested in doing what you do, i'm always being told that you are young, you should be on hill. that's great and i love my experience. wanting to do what you do and especially wanting to do it in the 2016 campaign in some capacity, do you still recommend doing the hill or trying to get in the private sector in. >> did you ever work on the hill? >> i would never work on the hill if i were you. >> i appreciate that. was you. that would be my personal take. >> i appreciate that. >> if you want to do campaigns, that's the problem. sometimes the hill people think they're good at campaigns. i know i'm not good at hill stuff. so i think if you want to do campaigns and that's what you're passionate about, you have to do it. there are opportunities if you're doing things in d.c., you can work at firms that are assisting campaigns. when you're here, you're safe. the lights turn on all the time. there's food. there's water.

air-conditioning for the most part. you want to go somewhere where you're in the back of a grocery store many ohio being like, this is what it's really like. if you don't go through that experience, that's one of the challenges with digital, i did ten years of toiling in the field before doing this. >> what was toiling in the snood. >> i ran victory programs across the country. child care, door knocking, whatever it took. i ran the most efficient -- >> most efficient child care possible. it was all about relationships. that's what the bush/cheney model is like. if this is what you're passionate and you want to do, you have to go do it. there are ways in d.c. you ral want to get on a campaign and go do it. you're making a huge commitment to do a campaign because it's a different type of life. >> michael, i would like you answer that but also keep in mind that we have a c-span audience and national audience, lot of people who aren't in washington who would like to get in politics who are already

using social media. >> i agree with zac. i never worked on the hill. >> most people don't come to washington. >> so there's a big difference between campaigning and governing. if you want to work in government, work in government. if you want to work in campaigns, work in campaigns. they're not the same. they're not the same skillsets. there are some people who do both and do both well, but doing both well is actually pretty rare. and i think zac's point about being involved in a campaign at the field level and seeing what campaigns are really like is really important. i started in politics not working in digital. i had a career doing graphic design and digital development and sort of digital content and strategic communications all these kinds of things then i went and worked in politics and campaigns. i was a field director and volunteer manager and bunch of other pieces and i sort of put those two pieces together when digital campaigning became a thing. i think the advice -- if this is

what you want to do, find a way to do it. there are campaigns everywhere all the time. right? there are always -- almost -- if you really want to sort of be a campaign person, there are off-cycle states you can work in. many mid-term cycle, like now, there are places anywhere in the country to get engaged in. there are opportunities to participate in the process everywhere. both physical ways and digital ways. and i think increasingly we see good campaigns blurring the distinction, right? that we should just be talking about engagement. i think the idea that we're talking about digital campaigning, this is probably the last time we should talk about that because the reality is -- right, if we think about the progression from 2004, i have a friend who worked on the kerry campaign who tells this joking story about the campaign managers sort of yelling about don't let the guys in the computer let us get in trouble.

then in 2008, joe reported directly to david pluth. that was a huge shift, right? now it's not subservient to communications but it was called new media because it was new. now it's not new anymore so we call it digital. what's the difference between digital and communications? i don't know anymore. and so at some point we're going to stop -- like having a digital director and having a communications director becomes redundant and strange and uncomfortable depending on their skill sets. this is just campaigning, right? that includes online and offline actions and we blend it in a seamless way. if you're here in d.c., find ways to get engaged in campaigns that aren't -- if you want to do campaigns, get off the hill and go work on a campaign. and hill experience is great. that's where i started in senator durbin constituent office in chicago. that was my first job in

politics was opening the mail for the senator. and it caught taught me a lot, actually. it was a very important experience. i didn't learn about campaigns until i started working on campaigns. >> thank you very much. let's go to the next questioner. >> thank you. >> hi. how are y'all doing? >> how are you? >> i'm student. so first off, thank you for your efforts because you've given me so so much great material to study and i really appreciate it. so my question now is i'm studying now sort of what i've called sort of self personalizing. so candidates using social media to either share personal details about their lives to framing policy or campaigning through a personal lens. relating to their own story or own lives. i see a range right now of anywhere from some candidates doing zero% up to 30%. this is me talking about twurn gubernatorial candidates. do you see these kind of posts

drive engage snmt is that something that you view as a successful strategy for the candidates or sit more of a detriment? >> i think it's incredibly successful and i think it's really important. the reality of most of the interconnectedness in the media landscape we operate in are driven by platforms that were designed for humans to have relationships with other humans. right? these are not broadcast mechanisms. these are not designed -- facebook was not designed for national, political campaigns to build multimillion person communities. they were designed for people to stay in touch at college. right? so the more human we behave in using them, the more effective we tend to be. that's really uncomfortable for brands, political campaigns, being human, being fallible is also something we tend not to allow leaders or candidates to be, which is an interesting challenge between voters' expectations and demands and the requirements of using these systems well in a personal and

authentic way. i think authenticity and meaning and being humble and aware of your humanness and sharing that is something that these tools are incredibly useful for. i think doing that well requires a candidate to be comfortable with that kind of exposure, right? that kind of exposure is very different than being on tv everyday. these sort of scripted kind of exposure that we are comfortable with as leaders or professionals even. this is a very different kind of exposure for me personally than a different kind of -- any number of different conversations. you don't -- i'm not talking about my personal life. i'm talking about some experiences and it's -- this is a very comfortable public position to be in. if i start talking about something more personal, it changes the nature of this conversation completely. right? and i think there's an opportunity there if we want -- if candidates want to build real

relationships, being human is a great for that. >> are you saying in response to the question that candidates -- that running for office because of these very trends will become even more personal, more invasive in some ways? >> i would love it if it became more human and that we allowed our leaders to be human, which we don't generally speaking. we expect them to be perfect sperltive entities that never make mistakes and never cuss, which is [ bleep ] ridiculous. >> let's hope they have a video delay. >> i forgot about c-span for a second. >> they won't forget about you, michael. it's been a glorious, if short career. >> i think, you know, it really also -- you have to take into consideration is a comfort level. i think people know when you're

faking it and that's really the challenge. i think all these things are true, but it has to be because that's where you want your campaign to go. and i think you can't kind of fake it and dip your toe in and walk back. it's kind of like, i always tell the campaigns we work with, if you don't really want to know what they say if you ask them a question, don't ask them the question. there's no worse than asking a question and there's no feedback. tell us what you think and nothing shared. there's no followup and it's just done. the committees all do quite well. tell us the four most important things and never follow up with the four most important things because they're working this fast turnover world. with candidates, a lot harder. and i think michael is exactly right about social media and these platforms. they build these massive audience. i look at the hilary rosem moment, within three days we had 100,000 moms for mitt and they became our best volunteers and were sharing their stories.

to try to cultivate that and us to think about how do you change the image everyday to be someone else standing for you, how do you make that a greater part of the campaign knowing that that has probably no tangible effect at someone of the strategy team can say i know what's going on, for us to know that was so powerful for us for what we were trying to do recruit volunteers. that's where the disconnect will always be the hard part of blending the coms director and the digital director. if you don't have that background and that skill set because it would be very hard to teach someone all the digital elements. >> people will come with different -- the reality of the campaign staff that you're going to put together is people will come with different levels and intensities of expertise, right? >> yes. >> did that answer your question? >> it did. thank y'all very much. >> thanks. >> yes. go ahead. >> hi, my name is also shannon. i'm an undergraduate student and research assistant at the university of delaware and i'm

studying mass communications and political science. and with that, i've noticed there's a kind of splintering of the definition of participation in terms of politics. there's this old school kind of donating and volunteering to a campaign and also this kind of new communicative form where you're liking a candidate on facebook and you're sharing them and you're talking about them with their friends. so i was wondering as kind of coordinators of digital campaigns, as a person -- as a constituent myself, what are you kind of courting noting that there's limited resources. which one do you think is more effective in helping someone vote for your particular campaign? >> well, i mean, i think the more tangible -- if you look at them as continuum of tweeting something or liking it and giving an actual donation your address is being the other end. that's the most easy to measure as you go through. this is really powerful because it goes to the point that michael opened with in saying

you're reaching people indirectly. a third person value day tor to say i agree with this. that's why the obama campaign saw this, sharing negative content in facebook didn't go very well. people are very tough on twitter. can be very harsh and can -- but on facebook it's very hard to do that. it's very difficult. so different contents. you have to look at each platform differently and communicate with people accordingly. it's very hard the presidential level because you do a post and get 10,000 comments in five hours to go through all those is a huge undertaking, right? it's a real challenge. but at the local level, it's very easy to do. it's something that every campaign needs to do. that person can become not only a donor but much more and can become -- you've reached out. when someone donates or gives their e-mail sa different expectation. they expect you to talk to them. on social, when you reach out and make that connection that is really powerful. i think that's hopefully where campaigns are going. again, you answered little bit of the skill and resources, do you have enough sniem that's where you can use volunteers who

aren't on your campaign to do that outreach it's a bit of a challenge. the tools are getting better to have these longer conversations and filter them and have better responses but you have to decide. we're in an era of big da and the a small content. we haven't figured out ho crack answer all these questions. someone might ask a thousands questions and we only want to give them six responses. we have to figure out where to put them. that's a real challenge. campaigns just don't feel comfortable, i don't think posting like incorrect answers or limited answers. >> i think the other aspect of the gradient that zac is talking about is really important, think about this a both/and question not a neither nor question. we want to give people easy low-barrier entry tasks that are simple for them to do to start finding their way into the community and becoming active. right, something like a retweet or a like is easy to do. do it at distance. you can do it mobilely. it doesn't require a lot of time

or energy or commitment. something like volunteering at your local field office requires a whole different level of commitment and you want to build people's relationship over time. one of the great things about -- you're blending online and offline in this gradient. one of the great things about social and digital tools is it offers more low barrier entry opportunities to more people at a distance. it doesn't require people who want to participate in a campaign to come to an office. which means their are whole groups of people who couldn't volunteer in the past who now can, single moms, for instance. right, this is a group that overwhelmingly -- people look at our campaign and digital tools and assume it's all college kids. college kids love to volunteer. single moms can't. they want to participate so they can use online calling tools. they can volunteer from home. i'm making big generalizations here obviously. but the opportunity here is give more opportunities to engage and

participate in a relationship and you can decide the nature of your relationship. and whatever you decide is great. we want you be part of this in the way that makes you feel -- that we've enspired you to be and we want to keep deepening that relationship and have you be more active. all of the kinds of actions you're talking about are generally really talking about supporter actions. this is the other distinction i want to draw. the relationship between those things and voting. most of the things we're talking about are talking about ways we activate supporters, who we assume are voting for us, mostly, right? generally speaking the people on your e-mail list who are donating money to you are going to vote for you. so thinking about social in terms of those individual actions like retweeting and likes as activations for supporters and the voters that are getting touched that you need to persuade are the second circle beyond them. this is a really important strategic principle that became

really important in the second campaign when we had this massive facebook audience of tens of millions of people was that meant the first circle might be tens of millions but the second circle was basically the entire voting age population in the united states. what is the opportunity to have you, who are interested and passionate and have decided you like the campaign, you want to be a part of uts, how are you influence the circles around you? right? and that's where you start talking about voter persuasion engagement that's different from supporter activation. >> that's good. >> was there something that you did, whether you could point to, as the most effective way to get to that outer circumstance? >> we built a whole platform around this to try to help make sharing behavior better than random. right? so you see brands and campaigns constantly talking about sharing things with your friends. and we use online tools for all kinds of things, whether it's content delivery and sharing, whether it's activations like donation or list acquisition or

online voter registration, for instance. but if we ask you to share a voter registration with five friends, we don't mean any five friends, we mean your five unregistered friends in ohio. >> but you have to convey that. you have to say that. >> so not only -- >> because you have to provide instructions. >> there's two ways to do this. we can tell you. share this with your five unregistered friends in ohio which by the way you don't know which of your friends are unregistered -- >> or. >> or you can tell us who your friends are and we can tell you which ones of them are unregistered. >> how many parking tickets they have outstanding. >> that's less deriving of a voting detail. >> i joke. i joke. thank you very much. >> thank you. >> another question? yes, sir. >> hi. thank you. phil howard, university of washington in seattle. i'm wondering if you guys could look ahead and maybe talk about bots -- >> talk about? >> bots. a growing number of political

campaigns and democracies around the world that are using out mated scripts to solve the problems of volume of content or realtime is not fast enough. are candidates in the u.s. going to start using more out mated scripts, they'll lose that personal face to face interaction, but they'll solve lots of logistical challenges, right? >> i think out mating engagement is dangerous. the likelihood of it ringing false and inauthentic is incredibly high and the risk is very great. using out mated tools for listening and monitoring and seeing conversations and being able to listen to your communities at scale are really important and there are great tools for this now. but my experience with out mated response, unless it's something as trivial as thanks for your notification, we'll get back to you that's very clearly out mated f you're trying to impersonate personalization, you're in a very risky territory.

i think generally speaking i think it's not a good strategic decision. i think using out mated responses to gi people a sense that there's a process and that -- we heard you, we're going to get back to you and set an expectation about when, that's fine. that's clear lly auto mated. it's transparent to the user. you start thinking about the user experience of that feeling comfortable. if you send a response that feels like a robot, even if -- or is discovered to be inauthentic in some way, you're running a huge rick of destroying a relationship. >> you agree with that? >> i do. i don't think it solves the content problem because you still are to decide what you're going to say beyond that component of it. that's the challenges that out mated responses the risk/reward is pretty -- not in your favor. >> it doesn't work well in politics. >> i mean, you have found n and what you're saying that there is -- if not a sophistication,

certainly an expectation in the audience in the voting public that will sniff through this kind of thing and this conversation now is required and it can't be faked. >> i agree, yes. >> another question. sir? >> hi. my name is israel and i'm from university of political science. my question is, they used to be very vertical and now they're becoming more horizontal. becoming more horizontal, i'm sensing that you lose some of your ability to be administering orders to soldiers. they can do things that perhaps you're against or you didn't think about plus you have to respond in seconds to whatever the other side is doing. so how do you keep control of your troops? >> this is a really great question. when we work with organizations, political campaigns or otherwise, we talk about a

progression of how to design an organization that's going to be effective working in the world that we're in. we think about the progression that goes values, drives strategy, drives tactics. typically most of this conversation is centered digital conversations center around tactics. how do we use twitter? what about the e-mail? how is digital media buying change. those are all important and totally mutable and will change by the time the next election comes around. what is durable is who are we whand are we trying to do? >> if you're clear as part of the culture of the organization, part of how you on board people in the community, how you hire, how you recruit, how you on board staff, how you introduce people to who you are, people are joining your mission because they want to help and they're going to -- they're going -- if you are clear and vocal about who you are, they're going to be joining you because of a shared sense of purpose and they're going to work in line with where

you're going. are they professional, political communicators, not everybody is david axelrod. that's okay. we don't need everybody to be david axelrod. we need you to speak to your friends in a genuine authentic way that is in line with me who we are as an organization, who we are as a community participating together. organizations that end up with too much command in control tend to avoid the emotional and cultural work of getting values in mission correct. this is particularly egregious in brands who don't want to have that conversation at all. this is more comfortable, naturally comfortable in a campaign in some ways than it is in a corporate setting, but it's where corporations go wildly off the rails. >> i think that's exactly right. i think the process you have to have is you can also start where michael is saying unfortunately become very militaristic by the end. they start to clamp down and actually stifles the creativity and to the detriment.

using the besh/cheney example, we were very metrics and result driven in 2004 and as a party it became so numbers driven it became detrimental to what we were trying to achieve because you had a crypt that hadded to be done in a certain amount of time and you got that feeling as you went through. a testament to the obama campaign of allowing their volunteers that type of flex to believe the have more conversation. but also that comes with having the structure to have implement that because what you're talking about is how presidentials do it. how do you do it when you're only six people is completely different, right? but i think that you have to have your north star. you have to know what you want to achieve and think about what tools you can provide to make them better at it. the command snot giving out enough information which is why people are going rogue. we're the ones holding it back and people make it up. there's some legal components -- the one problem now with communications that's become very difficult, one person goes rogue, everyone tries to superimpose they speak for everyone. the campaigns are opportunistic.

republican makes a mistake the dnc will not let that go. this person speaks for everyone and this is the way it is. that's on both sides. that's why people are so controlling. but i hope that media understanding as it gets better, people know how to respond better. that started -- it's less difficult to deal with now. i remember twitter in 2011 was so difficult because do we have to respond to everything? do we need to deal with this right now? it was like, no. but you knew that because you had been using it for x amount of time. the campaign was working through it. >> the the tyranny of now. >> and i think it's a challenge for the reporters too? it's the challenge for them they have to be first. they give you eight minutes to respond. >> we really haven't gotten into the impact of sort digital campaigning on traditional media and the echo chamber and all of that. i mean, right? one level the day of the gate keeper is gone. but the day that the -- where the candidates need to gate keeper is gone. candidates go online to announce

their candidacy. they don't hold news conferences? >> why would they? >> i could come up with all kinds of reasons. >> we have time for one more question from the floor. >> she's been waiting. >> you get the last question. sorry. grab him afterwards. >> thank you. monica from harvard university. a lot of big campaign fundraisers so for big doe nurs, you're $1 million will get dwlou many minutes in tv. this is how you're changing my campaign. how do you sell digital? you say $1 million is this many responses to tweets. how do you do that for your big donors? >> that's a great question. >> i mean, $1 million buys this many impressions in digital media is a more accurate piece of information than might buy this many eyeballs on television any way. i would argue with the premise of question. generally speaking we tend to -- we overvalue this line item nature of fund raising that

often we can provide too much detail to people. they want to believe that you have a plan for using resources effectively. that doesn't necessarily mean they want to know the relationship between a tweet and a dollar. this is talking about things that failed in 2008. we built a system around line item fund raising. we wanted people to buy -- we needed seven vans in iowa next week, you're going to buy one and then you're going to buy one and then someone bought seven, that was gone. didn't work at all. so confusing, people didn't care. >> not motivated to buy vans. >> so frustrated by us trying -- they didn't want to know. they didn't want to see the sausage getting made that much. but we thought it would be really compelling because it was going to fill this need of people understanding the value of their dollar. i think that's a more emotional need than it is a data. so when we think about donors in

general, we have a tendency to think left and right brain, right? i think we need to think about them as data has a tendency to convince and emotion has a tendency to inspire and you need both. when we separate this into a purely roy discussion, people say that's interesting. i'm bored. i'll give my money to somebody else. people see this content about some organization doing something amazing but are concerned are they having an impact? we need to treat people as a whole human in this regard. >> i think on the donor side, flip it. i think now donors who realize they're investigations in digital are investing in infrastructure. they're seeing that they're investing -- you're investing in a candidate and person. if your investing in a cause, a campaign to do more. you see your dollar -- the return on your investment will be not just like this measurable thing, it's that i'm helping seed an organization. i'm helping start these conversations as it goes through. but i would take that a step further when you look at the long tail when you're doing

donations at scale. trying to get a lot of people to participa participate. if we hit this one hot button item, that's how we'll raise a lot of money. fast and the furious. we're going to do everything we could. paul ryan came out aggressively against it. we sent an e-mail out to everyone. literally we all all of our e-mail list and we raised x. that was okay. five days later, we sent an e-mail for mitt romney being, i can win. here is how many phone calls i made. this is the path to victory and here is what your dollars could do and had 600% lift to the exact same audience five days later because he gave a vision. that was the biggest thing. too often these campaigns are too tactical. they think people are paying attention just like they are. that's one of the problems. we had to let our coms team stop writing your e-mails. no one in iowa knows what we're talking about. it doesn't matter because it's so reactive. you get so caught up on we got them on this one. they want to know where you're going. they want a vision and you need to provide that.

campaigns become so tactical to the strategic detriment and that's a real challenge. fund raising is one of the things that will be interesting to watch right now. these campaigns saying the sky is falling. this is the way to go. it's all these shock tactics which are working. the question will be does that work at scale and can you bring on new people as you're losing other people quickly because you're turning off -- it's easy to find when you're in the prospecting phase. when you get to the next phase that will be real interesting to see the scale they're doing it to see can you replicate that. i'm sure that's something i would be concerned if i was looking at how the committees are using the list. >> zac, i'm going to challenge you both to a three-minute lightning round and calm ate day. in three minutes, i'll ask you a couple of interesting questions, i think any way. one, prediction. what is the biggest single area where you think the technology will change or alter tactics or strategy in 2016? >> audience-based television buying withv. you will be able to start -- the efficiencies you gain from

television will free up the budgets to do everything else. what you will probably get to by 2016 is getting to literally set top type information. >> yours? >> active proximity based mobile community organizing. people being able to organize their own communities based on proximity in realtime. >> okay. in 2016, what will the role be or will there be a role -- of course there will be, how change willed it be for the traditional journalists with candidates now capable of going via social media, via digital media to everybody, anybody, anywhere, any time? >> i think the whole -- spent a lot of time at the center last year thinking about this with the folks of the community kennedy school that one of the things that journalism needs to re-imagine is the value of being first. that -- >> it's more important or less important? >> it is almost impossible unless you're talking about investive reporting for a reporter to be first. so if you're not first, what is

your job? and re-imagining that question is something that journalism has not yet done. >> i love that. that's great. >> i think that, yeah, the role -- individual reporters will have a impact in 2016 mostly because they're becoming their own brands and that will be interesting. the campaigns are going to have to figure out ways -- they are try to go around them but the marketplace will react accordingly. the media is not going away. our challenge as consumers we have to understand how to take that information. that's where the disconnect is people don't know what to do with this information, especially false information. that's becoming a real challenge. campaigns will continue to work with reporters, especially as they start to write longer, better pieces. that will be in their best interest. >> i think media is an important piece of graph we consume information, it's different. >> the need for historical understanding is huge. last question and the lightning round here. will your client in 2016 be

hillary clinton? >> so my company doesn't work for campaigns or candidates. >> when you are recruited from your company, will your candidate in 2016 be hillary clinton? >> i will not be working on the 2016 presidential campaign. >> if you're volunteering in the 2016 campaign, will you be volunteering for hillary clinton? >> if she's running, i'll be volunteering. >> i'm done. >> your turn. >> i mean, we believe we provide a product and service and we would be willing to work with any and all republican candidates. the more of them the better. unlike him, i don't take the hill larrys i'll take the others. >> fair enough. i would like to thank you both. i would like to thank mark and paul wilson for helping to make this event possible. like to thank mark kennedy and the graduate school.

and graduate students and of course abseff who is here in town attending this preconference and their gathering here. for our c-span audience, i'm frank sesno, you've been listening to a fascinating conversation from the jack morton auditorium and i would like to thank our guests here who have been unbelievable. michael and zac, thanks to you both. good luck and i hope that in all that you do, whether you're in politics or out, whether you're working with the candidates or merely volunteering, that in using these technologies and engaging people, you can put some meaning and some hope and some movement back into our political structure because it's not good enough to just come here and talk about it. and that's certainly not -- i don't mean that in any insulting way, but what we need to do in this country is we need to get our communication and our citizens and our politics working again. and that's a big task.

>> totally agree. >> thank you both very much. >> thank you for your time. appreciate it. thank you. [ applause ]. fbi director james comey will speak at the brookings institution about technology, privacy and public safety. you can see it live at 10:30 a.m. eastern on c-span. and right after that, tom freeden the director testifies on the u.s. response to the ebola outbreak. he'll be joined by anthony fauci. this hearing held by a sub committee live at 12:00 p.m.

eastern also on c-span. be part of c-span's campaign 2014 coverage. follow us on twitter and like us on facebook to get debate schedules, video clips of key moments, debate previews from our politics team, c-span is bringing you over 100 senate, house and governor debates and share your reactions to what the candidates are saying. the battle for control of congress. stay in touch and engage by following us on twitter @cspan and liking us on facebook at facebook.com/c-span. >> c-span's 2014 campaign continues with an iowa senate debate between democratic congressman bruce braley and joni ernst. this race is listed as a tossup. it starts live at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span.

now a discussion on demographic trends affecting american politics. we'll hear remarks from steve phillips a lawyer and fill lan troe pis. according to mr. phillips, the coalition that is likely to dominate american politics going forward is made up of minority groups and progressed with of whites. this city club of cleveland hosted this hour-long event. good afternoon and welcome to the city club of cleveland. my name is paul harris and i'm president of the city club's board of directors. i am very pleased to introduce today's speaker, steve phillips, president and one of the first 50 founders of powerpac. as stated at its website, power pac is a non-profit advocacy and political organization established in 2004, quote, to

champion democracy and social justice in states and communities across the country, end quote. before i comment on pacs, i want to say a few words about our esteemed speaker's background. mr. phillips grew up in cleveland, cleveland heights, so he's back home today and has a lot of friends in the audience gathered throughout this room. he attended stanford university where he majored in english and after row american stud disand it was very active in student organizations. he later earned his law degree from haigsings college of law in san francisco. he worked for four years with the public interest law firm public advocates and at the young age of 28 was elected to the san francisco board of education, thereby becoming the youngest elected official in san francisco history. he later became president of the board of education and served on the board for eight years. our accomplished speaker's appearance today is timely as we enter an election year that is certain to be a very active one

with pacs and super pacs playing a role in the political process. now, a brief bit of history on pacs. pacs exist at both federal and the state level. the federal level, the first pac was actually formed in 1947. in the 1970s, congress passed a laws governing pacs including establishing contribution limits. more recently in the wake of court decisions, including the united states supreme court's decision in citizens united which was rendered in january of 2010, so-called super pacs have emerged. now, they're prohibited from making contributions directly to a campaign, but they're able to make unlimited political spending independently of campaigns. the impact of money funneled through pacs and superpacks continues to be hotly debated. our speaker will present his informed views on that subject, as well as, of course, on another hot topic from the 2012 presidential election, the

impact of demographic shifts in our country on the 2012 election and on future elections. so, with that, i am very pleased to present on behalf of the city club of cleveland, steve phillips, president and co-founder of powerpac. [ applause ]. >> thank you, paul, for that introduction. very grateful to be here. just addendum in terms of the bio, one of the things that we created last year plus, they're going to be materials that pac plus.org i'll be referencing through the site and things on the table that we had had here as well. we were talking about how this is -- there are a lot of friends here and it's very touching and moving to me. made me think that if you ever -- this is probably the closest you can have of seeing what it would be like, who would come to your funeral without

actually dying. and hopefully this won't be a near-death experience for me as i try to deliver these remarks. and i do want to give a special thank you to shand ra who introduced me to dan and arranged this opportunity for me to speak here. a lawyer here in town, he and i have been friends since our days at stanford in the 1980s. and i always knew she was a smart guy who had great potential, but he really proved it when he decided to marry a woman from cleveland heights. and i'm very proud of the leadership that he provided around issues of equality and justice and was privileged to work with him around 2008 arnold lot of voter turnout to bring people of color to the polls in that election. i want to thank all of you for coming out today. it is good to be home. and it is great to see so many friends from my days at hawkins school and my days on dartmore road and i would like to dispel one rumor at the outset is that

i am not here to interview for the brown's head coaching position. so, although -- although as a long-time browns fan, my dad -- my brothers and i got season tickets when we were 7 years old, so i've been a passionate and long-time fan. eagerly following this process and as always looking forward to next season. but seriously, though, it's an honor to be invited to speak at the city club. this is a prestigious platform for anyone to speak from, but for a kid from cleveland heights this is a special honored and i'm humbled to stand here today. and as if the prestige of the podium wasn't daunting enough, my father who is here today and flew up from texas for this heard me he heard two people speak at the city club his whole life, bobby kennedy and martin luther king. so no pressure, dad. cleveland is the perfect place to have a discussion about brown

is the new white. the future of u.s. politics and the context of america's demographic revolution. long before america elected a black president, cleveland blazed a trail by becoming the first major american city to elect a black mayor, carl stokes, for those of you under a certain age, that was 1967. and i still remember my mom making a point to drive us by mayor stoke's house when we were children on the way to visit our grandparents. a lot has changed in america since 1967. but many in national politics have been slow to appreciate these changes. the fact of the matter is that there is a new majority coalition in america and that coalition is built on the solid foundation of the country's growing numbers of people of color. and that is what we mean by brown is the new white. to perhaps state the obvious for the past 400 years or so, the united states has been a majority white country. it is worth noting that the

continent had many native americans and mexicans prior to the arrival of europeans, thus we talk about the past 400 years. but for the purposes of understanding contemporary american politics, let's acknowledge that majority of the country and its voters have been white for a long time. consequently, addressing the needs of and responding to the interest of whites has been the central organizing principle of u.s. politics for a long time. when people talk about winning over swing voters or not alienating moderates, the picture they have in their head soft suburban whites, often women frequently in ohio. in the 1960s, it was nixen silent majority. in the '8 0ds, reagan democrats in the ' 0s, soccer moms and in the early 2000s x urban voters. these have been seen as pivotal and been the focus of politics and their consultants. similarly, public policy has

been hypersensitive. the polling and impression of what might alienate modern white voters. we've seen a lot of articles about how will americans feel about obama care. my first thought was that those americans who weren't getting haelt care for the first time in their life would feel pretty good. but the premise of the question as articulated is how will middle class whites react to the affordable care act. that premise is now outdated. one of the masters of american politics is willy brown, longest serving speak of the california asemily. there's a failed cue. i saw his speech and i remember him saying that the first law of politics is you have to learn to count. those who are most effective in 2014 and beyond will be those who know how to count. as bill clinton famously said in his 2012 democratic convention speech, it's about a rit ma tick. and so let's do a little math today.

as i mentioned that those who are following online or outside of the room that there's a document that we have that down loads the data of the statistics i'm going to run through available at pacplus.org if you have a paper of color that grunts through all this work. so the arithmetic. 29 plus 26 equals 55. that is the new equation for this new era. allow me to explain. the 2010 census confirmed if there's been a profound demographic revolution in america over the past 30 years, latinos, asian americans, african-americans, native americans and mixed race americans are now 36% of the entire u.s. population. the one response when i do these numbers that i hear from people is that not all people of color are progressive. believe me, i know.

i often shake my head wondering what these folks are thinking. the closest statistical measure we have is national exit polls. the presidential exit polls. and that data shows that the vast majority of people of color vote democratic. 80% people of color voted for obama. so all people of color comprise 36% of the pollation, 80% of them once you strip out the conservative of color, 29% of the u.s. population. now, you look at those numbers and think, well, the percentages of whites have shrunk, but still the majority. 60% plus the 7% who are conservatives of color. that would be correct. that would be good arithmetic. which brings us to another very important yet historically negligented and overlooked minority group in america, progressive whites. progressive whites are the rodney dangerfield of american politics. they just don't get any respect.

they are frequently be littled or dismissed as irrelevant tree huggers or vegetarians or both. the caricature of progressive whites was captured during the 2004 presidential campaign when conservative attack ad took aim at howard dean supporters by saying, howard dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi eating, volvo driving, new york city times reading body piercing, hollywood loving, left wing freak show back to vermont. now, i live in a very liberal city in san francisco and i must confess that some people do drink lattes and read "the new york times". they're still lovely people. but if we look back historically, we'll see that the role of progressive whites in american social change has been both heroic and vilified. from the abolitionists in john

brown in harper's fairly in 1859 to those who gave their lives in the 1960s civil rights movement, people such at reverend james reid. andrew goodman and michael shurner in mississippi. progressives have a long tradition of rejecting their privilege, refusing to stand idolly by and courageously standing with disenfranchised people who are struggling for justice, equality and dmomsy. this tradition has touched and improved my own life personally. as far back as 1964, when my parents couldn't buy the home they wanted on dartmore road in cleveland hiegtds because they were black bch but a progressive white lawyer bought the house for them, deeded it over to them, securing what became the childhood home that i grew up in. in terms of u.s. politics, people have always thought that there were too fu progressive

whites to matter. growth of latino and asian and black populations that is no long ter case. look again at the exit polls, going back to jimmy carter's election, we see that anywhere from 34% to 48% of whites have voted for the democratic candidate for president. some years that was a more courageous act than others. so that's an average of 41% of whites voting democratic. so back to the arithmetic. 64% of the country is white. of that population, 41% are progressives. so that means that the progressive white population in the country is 26% of the entire united states. so you take that 26% add that to the 29% who are people of color, gives you the 55% which is the new majority in america. this demographic and mathematical theer rum has now been tested and proven twice at the national level with the election and the even more importantly the re-election of president obama. so what does this mean for u.s.

politics going forward? the census data is also give us a gee graphic map that shows that the future of u.s. pom ticks is in the south and the southwest. the new battleground states are the old slave holding states and the southwest, land that used to be known as mexico that we now call texas, new mexico, arizona and colorado. two last numbers i'll throw at you. 19 and 24. 19% of voters of color is the threshold for whether a coalition people of color and progressive whites can win an election. the 2010 republicanic tidal wave, three states re-elected democratics to the senate. all three of those democrats who won the election lost the white vote but were able to prevail because of this koelation. we use that as the benchmark with colorado. and then this is where the

picture starts to come most sharply into focus. there are 24 states in america that will soon have 19% voters of color. and those states are overwhelmingly in the south and the southwest. arizona, georgia and texas are the new battleground states. yes, texas. one of the most important races in the country this year will be wendy davis's run for governor of the state of texas. if the democrats take texas, it will cut the legs out of the conservative political machine and make it nearly impossible for the republican to win the white house for the next 20 years. georgia, barak obama lost by 6 percentage points without contesting the race. represents the democrats best opportunity for senatorial pickup this year as michelle nun runs for the seat that her father once held. so these 24 states have 351 electoral votes. it takes 270. they have 303 congressional

seats, 218 is the magic number for majority in the house. these states have the power to elect the next president and secure control of the congress. jessie jackson ran for president, at the hands that once picked cotton and lettuce can now pick presidents, senators and governors. and so democrats were smart, they would be massively investigating in communities of color in the south and the southwest. conservatives have done the math and it's no accident that they are massively investigating efforts to restrict voting rights in the south and the southwest. now, while obama's campaign did spend considerable resources moeshlizing and turning out these new majority voters nk new york, virginia, nevada and florida and colorado, for several months in 2012, with the results to show for it. there is nonetheless still no lasting strategy, program, or leadership pipeline carried out by the democrats in these key

areas. apparently too many democrats have trouble with math. and there is a shocking underestimate in the communities of color as too many campaigns continue to chase the ever-shrinking block of moderate white voters instead of building up the coalition of the future. many republicans on the other hand are apparently better at math than democrats. admittedly on the surface it looks like the republicans are locked in a fierce internal battle. you have the tea party who i would submit is fighting the last losing battle of the civil war. desperately and destructively trying to tear down the entire government rather than let barak obama the duly elected president address the nation's problems. the early indications, however, are that the tea party movement has crested. with the implosion of the tea party challenger to govern cay sit, we see that happening here in ohio as well. and other more sophisticated republican forces are asserting themselves, forces who know arithmetic and know it well.

eight years after losing to the first black president, the republicans will likely feel the set of presidential candidates 30 to 40% of candidates of color. marco rubio, ted cruz are all running as fast as they can while the democratic bench is surprisingly empty. although chris christie has a new set of problems on his hands which i must admit i was enjoying watching, he has nonetheless spent the past few years distancing himself from the reaction air elements to the party, courting latino and black voters and made a point to sign immigration reform into law in the state of new jersey. so democrats run the very real risk of getting complacent in the face of republican internal squabbles and if underestimated the republican threat to their base. historically republicans have been so bad on matters of race and equality democrats have not had to do anything. soon, however, they will actually have to contest for the votes of people of color and

make an argument about why they are better than the republicans at addressing the needs of the communities of color and that is an argument that few democrats frankly are familiar with or comfortable making. lastly, what are the policy implications of emerging new majority in america? i tell my friends who spent a lot of time developing position papers and reasoned arguments to influence the public policy debate that as a general rule, elected officials will support any policy that they think will get them re-elected. who do they think are going the elected and unelecting and who will be the voters? let's look at health care as a case study. if you're primarily concerned about mod rad, middle class white voters. you might be nervous about bauchl care. some people whose premiums go up, albeit to pay for more robust coverage and that's lost in the hubbub sometimes. if you're objective to solidify

loyalty among the latino population growing in america, you should note that latinos have the least access of health care with 35% lacking health insurance. rather than ringing your hands and worrying about houd obama care is polled among whites, smart ones should be championing how many people are now getting health care, how many children can now see a doctor, how many sick people can finally get treatment. and then they should be smacking their opponents upside the head with ads asking why they think that the richest nation in the history of the world should deny people access to basic health care. how is that moral or right or religious? in one stroke you can win over your growing base, put your opponents on the defensive, and also win over church-going moderate whites by appearing to their sense of religion and moderate sense.

the bible does tell us to care for the sick. another example of the new majority is economic and inequality. look at a map of the distribution of poverty in america, you'll see that the heaviest concentrations of poverty fall largely along the same lines as the rising black and latino populations, the south and the southwest. although these regions are seen as conservative, they're what's called unnaturally conservatives and they have the least to conserve. a smart politician would champion the minimum wage increase, use that as an argument to win over low-income whites as well as people of color. the party who cracks that code will rule politics in this country for decades to come. brown is the new white, i call titled this to get people's attention. one way is to be explicit about issues of race and ethnicity. but part of why it gets

attention is because addressing race touches on deep-seeded fears and insecurities about how the country is changing. fears about how a cherished way of life is perceived to be disappearing. and in fact, you can't truly understand politics in america today without appreciating the inner play between the demographic revolution and the efforts by too many demagogues in congress who whip up fear and stoke insecurity in an attempt to opposition anything that's opposed by our african-american commander in chief. you have nothing to fear. you know that people of color like good food. you know we make good music and culture. turns out that many of us are sociable, smart, and share the same values as you. in fact, those of us who come from communities that have faced discrimination and oppression are actually often the most

hopeful and idealistic of all and dr. king's famous speech he said even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, i still have a dream. it is a dream deeply rooted in the american dream. so if you're worried, put aside your fears. and let's work together to build a better america. if you're a progressive white, your time has finally come. as my friend van jones said, if blacks don't vote, greens don't win. and if you're a person of color, let's grasp the role of responsibility that history has presented us. the bible says the rejected stone will be the cornerstone of the new order. let's use that cornerstone to build a new social structure in america that we can all be proud of. a structure of opportunity, equality and justice for all. thank you very much. [ applause ].

>> today at the city club of cleveland, we are listening to a friday forrum featuring steve phillips, president and co-founder of power pac. we'll return to our speaker in a moment for our traditional city club question and answer period. and i would ask that you storm formulating your questions now and try to keep them brief and to the point to get as many questions in as all of you are and those joining us via broadcast, wcpn and 104.9, wciv, or one of the many broadcast partners we have at the city club. broadcasts are made possible by cleveland state university and pnc and our live web casts are supported by university of akron.

one week from today, january 17, the city club will host a breakfast program with the city manager for florida who helped the city manage policies after the trayvon march ttin killing. we will have a luncheon. for a complete lift of our programs to make a reservation or to order a cd or dvd of one of our programs, please visit our website. that's www.cityclub.org. we welcome our many guests today. cleveland state university, hawkins school is his high school, policy matters ohio, the chandra law firm. thank you for your support today. we welcome students to today's program, student participation is possible by a generous gift

from the fred shul contribution. we have students from hawkins school. stand and be recognized. [ applause ] just a reminder that students get to ask questions. now we will return to our speaker for our traditional city club question and answer period. we welcome questions from everyone, including guests and students, holding the microphones are mike cromaldy and kristin pianca. first question, please. >> i want to thank you for being here. your presentation was wonderful. my question is, there's this

arrogance program with a lot of people who feel like they know everything. so even though what you are saying is really logical, it's still difficult to get some folks to say, you know, you're right. so i guess my question is, how do you move -- i'm speaking of, you know, democrats basically. how do you move them off of that, you know, my way is the best way and i know what i'm doing to begin to embrace some of your ideas? i know that's a really hard question. i just wanted to see what you're going to say. >> i was hoping would you have the answer for me for that. frankly, that is one of the big challenges. it's almost endemic to a certain extent to the proposition. if you help elect somebody to the president, you are going to think you're a big deal and that you know a lot. that's part of the challenge of people not actually appreciating that. i don't think frankly it's as much an issue of just making the

logical numerical argument. people know what they are familiar with. they tend to do that. a couple of things that we have been looking at trying to move forward, one is we have to think about what is the pipeline and the leadership development we're doing. identifying people from diverse backgrounds, encouraging them to go into campaigns and helping them move forward. it applies at every different level. wasn't to acknowledge and commend state senator nina turner who has an african-american woman running her campaign. we need more candidates who will do that. cory booker ran for his senate race, he had an african-american man run his race. i do think that we're doing to have to make the -- raise our voices. so if you look towards 2016 in particular, which is the next

major piece, we have to ask about this and push people at every level. i have seen now the career path. there's a who would used to work for me, we were doing our super pac work in 2007 in california who wanted to move to ohio doing the state-wide field campaign, jen brown. that put her in a position to be the executive director in texas. you move up from level to level. it matters to actually be asking at whatever level, county, region, state, asking the question, who are you actually promoting, who are you investing in? i think it's largely incumbent upon those of us who want to see this happen to both be a squeaky wheel as well as trying to be nurturing and elevating the next generation of people who want to do this kind of work. >> your statistics seem to be based on the last two presidential elections wh a