together, we can and the dysfunction and restore the american dream for our kids and grandkids. they are what this is all about. thank you for listening and have a great weekend. >> the communicators is next with a look at how technology and media are a factor in this year's election cycle. that is followed by republican congresswoman michele bachmann talking about the tea party's influence in american politics. later, discussion how the media recently covers events in ferguson, missouri were a teenager michael brown was shot by a police officer fatally. c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider.

>> this week on the communicators, the discussion of technology and campaign 2014. joining our rent table is stu trevelyan who works for democrats. defeooining us is chuck where he serves as chief digital officer. who is theane publisher of campaigns and elections magazine. let's begin with you, mr. trevel yan. what are the components of a digital campaign? >> i think it is evolving. the digitalorically tools were largely thought of as the e-mail tools and the online contributions, the website. i think it has evolved -- our company also offers tools that enable the shoe leather side of the campaign so the canvassing, the phone calling, the direct

mail. i think you are seeing many more marketing talents -- channels come on. tv ads, dress will online ads. you can do addressable interactions through social networks. i think now there is a pretty wide array of things you call digital. >> i think it starts with the data. we were2002, the rnc, the first committee to take a voter file and target ads to specific folks who we wanted to talk to on digital channels. we progressed that through the 2004 cycle. it always starts with the data. even when we are doing with socialchannels, through media and in sync with whatever you're doing online -- off-line as well. that is an effective strategy. >> how has it advanced from the 2012 election?

>> we are seeing a proliferation of use. it as a presidential campaign and what you end up seeing is you have a couple of campaign -- a republican and democratic presidential nominee that has million-dollar budgets and resources to do those things. is in there seeing statewide campaigns really embracing what was brought into that cycle. they can push it down into the to support races them with some of the cutting edge tools. >> stu trevelyan? interestinge more things happening this cycle that did not really happen in 2012 is around relationship data. obama campaign when they did their target sharing program, that was not something where they collected a lot of data about who contacted whom. we have a product we call the action center in 45 target races.

what that does is it allows people to leverage their social capital on behalf of the candidates and supporters that they believe in. i think that is a whole new set of data. lots of different channel data is interesting. i think we are getting to a place where, in addition to knowing who you need to target, you are being able to learn who you should target as a messenger to that person. ck to ask stu to ask chue do things anymore. i think it will be a very interesting area. >> picking up on this discussion in 2012 and what we are seeing in 2014 is this the question of how all of these tools and tactics scale. can you both speak to how that is actually occurring? our these tactics scaling down ballot races, congressional,

even below and how are you both actually involved? >> we support every republican race in the country. for newstood up symbols tools to actually motivate and move out voters who may not have turned out in previous elections. there is always been that base of who you know. if they are going to vote, they will consistently come out to vote. we are pushing boastful tools into other races to make sure they are showing up. there making sure that e-mail list they are using is actually being used, integrated with the voter file. there are number of tools to sync up of both digital and off-line and make sure those communications are in sync. i agree. we have moved from the broadcast era. we are at the tail end of what we have known from the early 1960's.

broadcast television has dominated. as we evolve into -- it is moving into a relationship era. we have known that in the sector. brandou build the advocates and you have someone advocating and influencing this fear of friends, how is it we move from just knowing not only the messages? we have gotten good at politics and knowing the right messages. we need to do a better job of making sure who the right messenger is to deliver that message. >> there are a couple of elements. productsdnc has used since 2007. that is something that is involved in all the democratic campaigns at this point. whether you are running for city council or senate or president, they are using it. advantagesd great are can move for one campaign to

another. over to planned parenthood, the dnc. that goes to the second point good numberre are a over organizations on the side who have done a fantastic job in training people. the new organizing institute has been one of those leaders in that area in terms of training skills withho have the digital products, data and are able to take those skills down ticket to state legislative levels. you also have -- the third piece is the analytics where the analytics, the obama campaign, that was a source of all the innovation. some of the analytics companies, blue labs, clarity campaign able toe been push that down so they reached small organizations and campaigns. even at the congressional level,

it is dealing with anonymous target universe. it is driven by scores at this point. >> we talk a lot about the tools and tactics, but really it is more about the people. that seems to be the real difference. the talent difference and the training aspect that stu talked about. what is the rnc doing specifically to close that education gap on technology and analytics is what we know out of the 2012 cycle is you have -- forget about organizations that have done a lot of that work -- we know now there are democratic operatives of that are all over the country that have specific experience applying these tools and doing this type of analysis whereas republicans are a bit far behind on that human element. how are you closing that gap? >> it starts with the more you do something, the more you will become people with it and better

at it. what we have done is put our ground game in place. this is a shift of what the rnc is. the chairman has turned the organization and focused it into permanent boots on the ground organization where we have people in multiple states that are embedded in the community and they know who their precinct is. it is about putting those tools in their hands and putting them to use. the more we can -- we can send them off to two-day training, but they will get better at it the more they use it. when we talk about these tens of thousands of volunteers we have that are permanent and made a asmitment to stay with us, they start to use the tools we put into their hands for months now, some of those folks as much as a year -- the more they use it and the broader that base becomes, the more professional we will be about it.

>> do you think republicans need an equivalent to it? is there anything that is an equivalent? >> has there always been some training program? i can go back to into the early 1990's when there is training. the state representative or house candidate and the staff to run campaigns. there is always been institutions in place. there are still. some of the democratic counterparts have gotten press. it has always been institutions that train our people. >> stu trevelyan, you talked about analyzing. what are you analyzing exactly online? >> there is so much data. how are you going to focus on the important things? there are all types of information about who opened what e-mail, who clicked on what piece of information, where people are coming from, which

advertising campaigns online are driving people? you know. i think one of the real important pieces is to intersect that with the off-line activity. for example, you may have a universe of people who are your target universe and you try to door knock on somebody three times but they don't answer the door. you want to make sure that person is in your online advertising universe because they are not interacting with you in the interpersonal way. they are all kinds of data like that. then, they are different consumer data. what newspapers you read, what magazines you have. all kinds of consumer information double -- income status. shopsgo into the modeling and come out with the score that says how likely are you to vote, how persuadable are you, are you

likely to care about the environment? is how the data ends up getting action. >> what about specific groups? seniors, ethnic groups, etc.? >> that is basic segmentation. that is not the modeling piece. you can basically go off the information. age ranges are wasteful way to target. necessarilydon't know that much about a person based on their age even at certain age rate is -- ranges. 60-40 at ais particular age, you will waste a lot of money targeting at an age range. >> a question about the obama 2012 data that the dnc has the bulk of it and then have talked

about the slow process of transferring that. can you walk me through it a little bit? how that data is being used? who is in charge of how that data is being used and what 2014 democratic campaigns are making use of that data? >> the ids from the obama campaign inform all the basic models. of the dnc vote builder which is a combination of our product van and the voter file and additional information -- that has a number of set models and all those models use the obama ids. that is important because there were more ids made by the obama campaign than any other campaign. there is an ability to look of peopleive swath and have information on them.

available toare everybody whether you are running for city council, congress, senate, governor. they are having a big impact on races because these models introduce a lot of efficiency. rly, it is revolutionary for the smaller campaigns. chuck was at the rnc in 2004. back in the day, it was $150,000 for a model or something like that. >> we were doing models to were three times in a cycle as opposed to continually recycling them. campaign, to be able to use a model, to determine who they should be modeling is amazing. >> this may sound like an obvious question, but what is the measure of success because with democrats are clearly hoping is that scaling some of these tactics that they can

overcome that traditional disadvantage they have in a midterm year in terms of the turnout dynamic. is the measure of success that they get closer or they don't lose the senate? what is the measure of success because we know there are a number of firms won the obama campaign that are doing this model. >> i think different companies are going to have different measures of success. are measure of success is did we have as much impact of success as we could've have? people are honest with you. if you are going to lose 55-45, your digital game when i put you over the top. you can control the victors. i am sure chuck will be out here after election day where you had a number of victories where you caught up on technology and data.

it will take a little more research to actually figure out if that was true or not. you are the deputy chief of staff over at the republican national committee. the digital campaign different than what we think of as a normal campaign? >> it is always been a reflection of what is going on offline. i manage the digital effort for 2004. i did other things in life. recognizing that campaigns have always been campaigns. it is about going out and finding out who your voters are, getting them to the polls and making sure they are casting the ballot for your candidate. historically,gns we went through a time where it was really a political organization that was knocking on doors. that was how campaigns were run when television

came online, we shifted our campaigns. this is the relationship era. that is not me broadcast and important,are not but as we moved to better understand who we are communicating with, who is the right messenger to communicate to, what we think of as a digital campaign is not just more than the e-mail in your inbox. you may see on your facebook newsfeed, it is what goes under line. it starts with the data, understanding who is the person we are talking about. we brought in a whole data science team inside the rnc. they help us build up that huge capability. starting with the observable data we have been building for do decades -- two decades, a lot of times campaigns make the

mistake of using that off-line or using that on the phone program or knocking on doors. we have integrated that approach into everything we are doing. our e-mail file is integrated with our voter file. the segments we're moving into an even more into one-to-one all of that is dependent upon of what we understand from people and who was the right person to communicate with. we brought in that out across all channels. >> give us a sense quickly of how digital technology and its use in campaigns has changed from 2004 two today. >> everything old is new. the2004 campaign -- we were first ones to build an app or you can go and download a list of voters and walked the neighborhood on your own. we were the first ones to do the concept where you can take that house party and expanded into people going and

knocking on doors. all of that stuff was really driven off the voter file. what has changed most is we were the most expensive presidential campaign by that day. forward --o moving the ability for other campaigns , the that kind of tactics cost structures have changed to do these things that we were doing 10 years ago. oaden it? brough will be talk about the community of republican campaigns and vendors, it is how do we make sure we provided that level at the republican party and within the party infrastructure to make sure all of that access is there. we need to do a better job of making sure no one knows that. if you are getting into a race, this makes a big difference. >> looking at that time from 2004 untiloday, do you have to

be the out party to create the innovation? desire what drives that to not only catch up, but surpass the goods it seems to have done that for democrats? >> i would say that is a correlation. i was a little depressed to see chuck go back to the rnc because he did a great job in 2004. they were ahead of us. being out of power -- it took a couple of things. obama in his primary was the challenger. he could not do the same things the normal way otherwise he would've lost the primary. it is more than if you are in or out. if you look at the 2012 campaign, by that analysis, romney should of been the one innovating but instead it turned analyticsriving

through every part of the campaign which was the real innovation of the campaign came out of the obama campaign. i think that may be a little too -- there are so few data points in these presidential elections that people draw a lot of causality when it is really correlation. >> chuck, the stated goal of the openness,encourage accessibility. not really terms most people in politics associate with national political committees. what i change at the rnc to create that coulter and hard fall along -- how far along are you? >> the chairman made that statement after the 2012 cycle. we move from a time moving into 2011, 2012, the rnc was not in the financial position to make the investments they needed to. looking at where we needed to go as a party. there were some changes we

needed to make. it translated into work in his age in silos but also technology, multiple technology decision-makers and data silos. that is what manifested. our main process is to actually level that. to say everyone will have access to the analytics, the scores they need. everyone will continue to have the best political data that is accessible. we will continue to provide the speedand bring it up to no matter what candidate you are. we are going to make sure those tools are available to you in a general election. we have to start that level basis and make sure people are actually accessing it. that is why we work very closely with our political department. we are talking about our field program and what we are doing online with the data to support that. how do we make sure that those

practices are happening in the 2014 election? this is not just a 2014 plan. this is a fundamental shift of what the rnc is. we have made the institutional changes we needed to do. we are at the end of year one in this program and we will continue. role tou think the close that fragmentation on the right when you look at data and technology, it is fragmented in comparison to what happened on the left. show the rnc be charged with fixing that? >> you can say -- you alluded to open source. when you look at what our job is. it is not to pick winners and losers, not pick one company that everybody has to use. our job is to set standards that basically says here is what we think. here's the level you need to operate on. it is available to everyone -- go innovate.

a certain level of candidates will not go without, we will make sure you have what you need. if you are company or innovator or entre nous are that want to take that level and take it up and actually innovate beyond what we are able to do, we want that. we want that competition. we want people to take it farther than we we could do. >> what are some of the drawbacks of the digital campaign? >> there are a few. you see a lot of people walking into the door that is a candidate or consultant and they say can we do the challenge? can we go viral? that is not how it works. those things either tend to be either be lucky or the byproduct of a lot of hard work. in our world, we don't try to go by luck. there is a lot of hard work of building up that supporter base, activating them and then maybe you will get -- you won't know

which exactly will go viral but maybe one will go viral. that is one of the elements. i think -- some of the other we are seeing it now, there are few barriers communicating. my friends have told me all is lost. there is a pretty healthy debate going on the democratic community -- is that the strategy? all i know is they are raising a ton of money so god bless them. of overe perils communicating that nobody had to deal with when you never had so many volunteers that you can over communicate at the door. >> same question. >> i think it is about understanding the tools. tools in the toolbelt. conversations with folks that aren't technology, they have different skill sets

-- if you want to hammer a nail, you don't get a screwdriver. if you want to turn a screw, you don't get a hammer. understanding what each one of these tools is the -- designed for. they are different types of tools and each of them you can get it how come are looking for that everybody wants a viral. outside of that, understanding what the tool is and that is our job to basically understand, get people to understand this is what this can do. tell me what you are trying to accomplish and i can apply some of the tools and tell you what you need to do. >> we have seen a tremendous amount of innovation over the past couple of years on the data and technology front both from partisan firms and nonpartisan companies. i'm interested in both of your perspectives on whether or not technological information in the political sphere should come

from partisan only firms? or should we be more broad than that? historicalthere is a fact that partisan companies have been able to partner more closely with the party organizations and the campaign's. therefore, they have been able to take the innovation of the obama campaign for example and drive that through the entire democratic universe. i would unnecessarily put it that should apart as or nonpartisan companies be driving innovation. everybody is welcome to play but i think it happens to be true that the partisan companies have innovated better and i think that is the responsibility on partisan companies like mine to actually do better because of those partnerships. >> a partisan company can have a business interest in innovating. at the end of the day, partisan companies are actually partisan for a reason because they have a mission oriented that most

have.ies do not the approach we have taken is we are for the best available product. we have taken our social media command center and everything they do. we are probably the only political client. we said this the best in class product available and we felt they are willing to work with us in the innovations we are looking for. we have one of the most surface -- a sophisticated social media programs that they have of any of their clients. we are willing to work with nonpartisan companies. we also work really closely with partisan firms. moment think about something like data science and the scores, people think it comes from a political background. so, that makes sense. when you think about the source of where people are come from, but also from a perspective --

we need somebody that understands campaigns and understands the rhythms of it because having worked in the private and political world, they are two very different worlds. when you're going out looking for products or services you need, you need a basic understanding of where the source of pacific -- sophistication will come from. chuck, is the technology growing accidentally when it comes to campaigns? are we at a plateau? adoption,it is understanding how to apply it and thinking through more about how you scale it. when you move into a presidential cycle, you will see a heavily funded campaign double look for that next renovation. my personal belief is that we are on the cusp of that relationship here. how do we take what has been a one program into a one-to-one

program. the campaigns that can do that more effectively are the ones that will start looking more innovative and will be seeing better results. there are multiple forms deck and take in. strategically we're going to see. we're going to show up really well this year. i have a lot of candidates desktop it is an arch candidates and campaigns, and we wanted to november 4. campaigns and candidates and we are going to have a good november 4. think -- >> i think you see the rate of change, you see the tv ads, that is not something that existed last cycle.