From Sputnik International:

US Big Tech is triggering mounting concerns over potential political bias in favour of left-leaning media sources. Sputnik has taken a look into the controversy surrounding Google’s aggregation algorithm with regard to the purported censorship of conservative political discourse by the Silicon Valley giant.

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Media Strategist Rory McShane interviewed on Sky News London about American politics and the Trump White House.

The post McShane On Sky News London first appeared on Revolutionizing Microtargeted Campaigns.

By Rory McShane

For years robocalls have been the bane of a voter’s existence and, for years, I’ve told candidates and campaigns the same thing about robocalls. While they’re effective to disseminate information and encourage behavior among people who already agree with you, they’ll never win a single vote.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to a candidate or campaign manager that a robocall about a candidate’s biography or issue positions is the equivalent of lighting money on fire. Maybe even worse because lighting money on fire doesn’t lose you any votes.

What robocalls were effective for at one point was activating voters who already agreed with you. Disseminating small, quick, bits of information to get a voter to take an action. Now, as fewer and fewer voters have landlines, and pre-election weeks are flooded with robocalls, they’re losing their effectiveness for even that.

In their place, peer-to-peer texting has become a great solution to activate the voters you need. In the 2018 cycle our firm handled P2P texting for the Colorado GOP, and candidates and ballot initiatives in Colorado, Nevada, and Maryland. Here’s what we learned:

GOTV, specifically mail-in ballot and early voting

As the nation and, specifically, the West moves more and more to early voting and vote-by-mail gains wider adoption, P2P should be used to encourage your voters to go vote or turn in their ballot. A competent campaign should have a well-defined and identified supporter universe.

Campaigns should then match supporters to their historical vote method. Are they early voters? Election Day voters? Mail-in voters?

States like Colorado even track which day voters historically turn in their ballots — something campaigns should note. If a voter in your supporter universe passes the day that they historically have turned in their ballot, without turning it in, send them a text reminder.

Turning voters out for events

A text message will never persuade a voter to vote for you, but it can put you in a room with a persuadable voter. There’s nothing more effective a candidate can do than meet a voter face to face. For 10-15 cents per text, texting every persuadable voter in a district, inviting them to a meet and greet to net a couple dozen votes in the final weeks of an election is well worth it.

Encouraging voters to contact the candidate

By the time you hit October, normally sooner, voters are so burnt out on mass media you reach the point of diminishing returns. Most often, especially in small races, the only way to win votes in the final months is direct contact with the candidates.

The problem is that a candidate can spend all evening canvassing to only actually talk to a handful of voters. With several of our legislative races, we texted everyone in our persuadable universe our candidate’s cell phone number, instructing them to call the candidate personally if they had any questions.

Our candidates talked to dozens of voters during the same time it would have taken them to meet a half dozen voters at the doors. Even to the majority of voters who glanced at the text and hit delete, it was a signal that our client was a regular person.

Text messages will never persuade voters. But they can activate and engage voters better than robocalls. As voters disconnect their landlines and hang up on choppy recorded auto dialers, P2P text messages are a tool that every campaign should budget for.

Rory McShane is a media strategist and founder of Las Vegas-based McShane LLC.

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Mueller and his inquiry are missing from the campaign advertising airwaves in the final sprint to November. Debates have all but ignored the story, focusing instead on kitchen-table topics like the economy, health care and taxes. Vulnerable Democrats in red states are actually emphasizing the times they’ve reached across the aisle.

That’s on purpose, candidates and operatives from both parties told POLITICO. Most Americans are barely following the Mueller investigation’s intricate legal movements, which have already ensnared a few top former Trump aides, alleged Kremlin-backed hackers and a cast of charactersscattered across both sides of the Atlantic.

Most important, voters don’t want to talk about it either.

“In our state, we’re losing 70 to 80 dairy farms a month,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, a Democrat whose reelection bid has largely avoided mentioning Mueller. “I can tell you in rural Wisconsin that’s what people are asking me about rather than something that is, well, just, it’s immediate to them.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), another in-cycle 2018 candidate, explained: “Washington reporters live in a different world from the American people. That’s been true for two years where the media is obsessed with the latest and constant slams on the president. People of Texas are interested in jobs.”

It’s a rare phenomenon in modern American politics to have a midterm election coincide with a major investigation that delves into anything related to the president. Even rarer is the phenomenon of voters going to the polls at the same time that an investigation remains active into questions of criminality tied to the winning campaign from the most recent presidential election.

That makes predicting the Mueller inquiry’s influence on voters that much more challenging, and why Democratic and Republican party operatives and candidates say the topic is best handled as mood music rather than as a primary argument to be used to drive turnout.

“It’s not the best thing for Democrats to be talking about right now,” said Robby Mook, the former Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign manager. “We just need to let Mueller do his job. Politicizing it even more isn’t going to help that.”

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is leading his party’s 2018 campaign efforts, said in an interview that the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents didn’t want to address the Mueller investigation because it would clash with their campaign strategy of showing deference to Trump’s White House.

“In states like Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, the red-state Democrats are running ads about how closely they work with President Trump,” Gardner said. “So, it’s difficult to talk about an investigation at the same time they’re trying to be his best friend.”

Mueller isn’t totally missing from the midterm discussions. Candidates say they’ve prepared responses to talk about the investigation if it comes up in debates. And while television advertisements have mostly avoided the Russia inquiry, a few campaigns and outside groups like the pro-Democrat House Majority PAC have spent a couple of thousand dollars on Facebook ads designed to increase their own small-dollar donations from blue-state bastions like California, New York and Oregon. Baldwin’s campaign, for example, last month bought a few Mueller-themed Facebook ads seeking campaign contributions.

Some candidates have even clashed over Mueller. In Oklahoma, Republican House candidate Kevin Hern went after one of his primary rivals earlier this summer with one of the rare television ads this cycle to mention the special counsel. In Virginia, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine took issue during one of his recent debates with GOP opponent Corey Stewart, who has mimicked Trump in calling the investigation a “witch hunt.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s the major note in the chord, but it’s definitely an issue,” Kaine said in an interview.

Trump is doing his part to elevate Mueller into the national dialogue in a bid to excite his own base amid fears that Republicans will lose their majority in the House and perhaps the Senate. The president’s team has made one of its central campaign arguments the prospect that a Democratic takeover in Congress would use the special counsel’s findings as a launching pad for impeachment proceedings. On Twitter, Trump has slammed the Mueller “witch hunt” nearly 50 times since the July Fourth holiday, and his “no collusion” riff is a recurring element of campaign rally speeches where Republican candidates are supposed to be the featured attraction.

Still, part of the reluctance of down-ballot candidates to embrace the Mueller investigation stems from the mixed bag of recent history.

The 1974 midterms came just three months after President Richard Nixon’s resignation over the Watergate scandal and amid soaring inflation, an energy crisis and the fallout from President Gerald Ford’s controversial pardon of his predecessor. That November, Democrats picked up four Senate seats (getting them to 60 overall) and won 49 House seats from Republicans, which left them just one seat shy of holding a veto-proof supermajority. The new lawmakers who campaigned on the ethical cloud in Washington were branded “Watergate babies.”

But Kaine, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2016, said the comparison between 1974 and 2018 doesn’t work, because Mueller’s probe is not finished.

“You didn’t get a Watergate election during the middle of the Watergate investigation,” he said. “You got a Watergate election after all was said and done and there was accountability.”

“That’s a once-in-a-century event,” added a veteran Republican campaign operative working with both House and Senate candidates in the 2018 cycle.

The 1998 midterms offer lessons of a different kind. That September, the Republican-led House voted to release independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s salacious report about President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affair with a White House intern.

Democrats fretted that they’d get killed at the polls as even more materials tied to the Starr investigation were made public in the ensuing weeks. “Death by a thousand cuts,” said then-Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), according to a Chicago Tribune report at the time. Republicans put both Clinton’s scandal and his potential impeachment out as a central plank of their midterm message.

It backfired.

Instead of the GOP meeting its projections for blockbuster gains cementing their House and Senate majorities, the president’s party for the first time since World War II ended up winning seats in the midterms. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had elevated the Clinton scandal into a midterm campaign issue, lost his leadership post and resigned from Congress altogether the next January.

“This was a Seinfeld election,” the analyst Curtis Gans, who was tracking voter turnout, told The New York Times after the election results had rolled in. “He said his show wasn’t about anything, and neither was this election.” The Associated Press cited exit polls showing just 5 percent of voters called the Clinton scandal the most important issue on the ballot.

Considering the history from 1998, Democrats are getting credit for their message discipline and not taking the bait to make this year’s midterm race into a referendum on Trump’s legal woes from the Mueller investigation.

“I think one of the problems Republicans face is that the Democrats quit harming themselves with Russia and actually started talking to voters about things that matter,” said Mike Shields, the former chief of staff at the Republican National Committee. “I would rather they went back to Russia.”

Political operatives say neither Democrats nor Republicans want to talk about the Mueller probe in no small part because it isn’t breaking through with everyday Americans already deluged by an onslaught of Trump stories.

“People are anesthetized to it,” said Rory McShane, a GOP strategist working on 2018 races in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada and Tennessee.

The special counsel’s lack of public commentary also hardly makes for good campaign material, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

“Mueller is the great sphinx so far,” Sabato said. “No one really knows what he’s thinking or how far his investigation has come. It’s hard to grab onto fog.”

Sabato noted that even he had lost track of the Mueller probe — a good example of why the topic isn’t front and center with candidates or midterm voters.

“I follow politics all day long,” he said. “Imagine how people who actually work for a living feel. Most don’t have a clue about what is really there. It’s a very, very complicated story that Mueller, one hopes, will eventually explain in a way everyone can understand.”

But, Sabato added, “he’s not going to do it in the next month.”

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By Rory McShane

Facebook strategy has been in flux for campaigns this cycle thanks to continued platform changes. Races on both sides of the aisle are now having to grapple with changing rules over content and targeting.

As campaigns’ tactics are evolving to cope with these changes, the fundamental goal remains the same: Facebook should be where you talk to the people who are likely to vote for you.

Posting your latest fundraising numbers on Facebook is nowhere near as important as persuasion content. Video content is king on Facebook, although not if the video is a clip of your candidate shot with an iPhone, at his or her kitchen table reading off talking points.

The best way to conceive of video content for Facebook is to ask yourself, Is this something a regular person would share with their friends?

If your candidate isn’t taking money from special interests, use video content to reinforce it. Maybe it’s a video showing all the money your opponent has taken from special interests in Monopoly dollars.

If you’re running against an establishment candidate, perhaps it’s a video of your candidate holding a $5 hotdogs-and-hamburgers fundraiser across the street from your opponent’s lavish country club plated dinner.

The best performing video right now being run by one of my clients, in New England, is a video of her young daughter in Red Sox apparel holding a baseball bat asking people to vote for her mom, because like the Red Sox, they’re both winners who bring people together. That video is getting views for less than one cent per view.

As a Republican consultant, one of the things I have to take into account is the possibility of a conservative shift away from Facebook in the coming years. If there is a backlash from the conservative community, it will be an even greater challenge for Republican strategists and their campaigns to reach primary voters, which is already difficult.

Facebook’s custom audiences, allowing you to match your target voter file directly to Facebook accounts, is an incredible tool. But be ready to monitor how many voters you’re actually reaching. Track your targeted voters reached, especially in Republican primaries. If you’re struggling to break 40 percent of targeted voters reached, you should think about moving your money into display.

Facebook allows you to pause any ad campaign, with the money still unspent. At the halfway point in your ad campaign, if you haven’t hit at least 40 percent of target voters reached, reduce your spend and move the money into display ads targeting those primary voter’s cookies and IP addresses.

Persuasion content is nowhere near as effective on display as it is on Facebook, but if you have 60 percent of your target voters not seeing your candidate on Facebook, it just makes more sense to shift that spend.

Under Facebook’s new privacy regulations, the ad platform will no longer tell you how many people in your custom audience you’ve successfully matched, so be ready to regularly check your unique reach numbers.

While some digital consultants will tell you they will match upwards of 80 percent of their voter file on Facebook, that seems wildly inflated. Among conservative primary voters right now, some of my clients are reaching as little as 40 percent of their primary voters on Facebook.

Facebook’s ability to target individual voters also has an inherent pitfall for the inexperienced digital advertiser. The smaller an audience becomes, the less Facebook inventory is available, so you’ll pay more for the same video view, from the same voter.

I’ve watched campaigns blow through their entire digital budget trying to create unique messages for each region, or even each county driving their video views from 4 – 6 cents to upwards of 15 cents or more.

Facebook’s ever evolving regulations, and the limitations of the platform, underscore the need to keep an even closer eye on the performance of your ad campaigns and adjust accordingly.

Rory McShane is a media strategist whose clients have ranged from statewide Constitutional Amendments to members of Congress, non-profits and corporations.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Most ardent supporters know where Beto O’Rourke stands on single-payer health care (he’s for it), legalizing marijuana (ditto) and a border wall (against). But anyone watching his Facebook Live feed as the Democratic Senate candidate tossed wet laundry into the dryer on a recent Sunday learned a far more intimate detail.

“Somebody asked, ‘Boxers or briefs?’” O’Rourke said holding up a wet, gray undergarment for the cellphone camera at a South Texas laundromat. “These are like boxer-briefs.”

In his bid to upset Republican Ted Cruz, O’Rourke livestreams constantly, highlighting how the technology has created scenes once unthinkable for candidates seeking national office, but is nonetheless increasingly popular among underdogs desperate for attention. Then little-known New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez broadcast from public transportation, an unsuccessful Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate evoked mermaid tales, a Michigan Democrat ran through the streets looking for last-minute supporters and a California congressional hopeful was on Facebook Live when she barged into a Denny’s bathroom.

Candidates have long livestreamed rallies, debates and question-and-answer sessions. But doing so at near junkie levels defies the increasing tendency among most top politicians to control all contact, from screening who attends public rallies to avoiding interviews with “unfriendly” media outlets.

For those facing uphill fights like O’Rourke, using Facebook Live is an easy way to get free media and make low-stakes connections with voters. It’s also fitting in the era of President Donald Trump, who is fond of shooting unfiltered thoughts directly to supporters at all hours — but uses Twitter.

“It shows the real person and, if that’s a good thing, that’s good for the candidate,” said Bill Jasso, a public relations professor at Syracuse University. “But campaign managers want to manage, and it’s very tough to control live because there’s no pause.”

Obvious dangers are misplaced curse words or offensive remarks. Also, anything that feels staged can alienate voters. Jazmina Saavedra lost her House bid despite causing a livestream stir by broadcasting forcing her way into a Los Angeles Denny’s bathroom because she said there was a man in the women’s room.

Still, Rory McShane, a Republican consultant who organized Facebook Live sessions with past candidates in South Carolina and Virginia, said he’d like to see more politicians scrapping traditional scripts, even though he’s “hurting myself as someone who writes those messages.”

“I’ve encouraged clients of mine to do full campaigns on livestream from the time you’re brushing your teeth to the time you’re going into your hotel room,” McShane said.

Embracing such a philosophy is O’Rourke, a one-time punk rocker and natural ad libber starkly different from Ivy League debate champion Cruz, who lacks easy charisma.

O’Rourke eats and jogs on Facebook Live. He’s gone bowling and gotten haircuts, offered Beatles trivia and skateboarded. Once filming while campaigning in remote West Texas, O’Rourke discovered two lost Labradors and urged their owner to “light me up on the livestream” to arrange a pickup.

Asked if this was vanity gone wild, O’Rourke said, “If you’re seeing too much livestream, turn it off by all means.” But in a state where a Democrat hasn’t won a statewide race since 1994, “We can continue to run the same campaign the same way and turn up the same result” or “we can make this about the people. As many people as possible in as many formats as we can.”

There have been some problems. O’Rourke said he supported instituting a year of required public service for young people, only to later recant. Cruz has made attack ads out of O’Rourke’s frequent use of the F-word on livestream.

But Suneel Gupta, who lost Michigan’s Democratic congressional primary despite frequent Facebook Live sessions — including jogging in search of would-be voters as polls closed — said misstatements shouldn’t be a risk for fervent live-streamers.

“If you’re being yourself consistently, then you don’t have to worry too much,” Gupta said “Because you were yourself the entire time.”

O’Rourke’s sessions are generally watched by hundreds live, but that climbs after they’re archived online. More than 36,000 people have since seen the laundry session, not all happily.

“He’s on there folding laundry now?” asked Kristine Shafer, an O’Rourke supporter in Austin. “Why do I have to watch him do that?”

But Facebook Live presents some bizarre and sometimes wonderful, behind-the-scenes corners of politics. Clay Tippins, an ex-Navy SEAL and failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate, did an all-night livestream and told a story about his wife turning up with Snickers bars and Gatorade during a 3 a.m. Navy water training session. She was mistaken by his delirious compatriots for a mythical sea creature.

“Sir, a mermaid comes out of the water in the middle of the night,” Tippins recalled being told.

The post McShane in Associated Press: Boxers or briefs? Beto O’Rourke livestreams his laundry first appeared on Revolutionizing Microtargeted Campaigns.

Published August 28th, 2018

After President Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, political journalists wrote an armada of stories about the brilliance of his online campaign. Obama’s nerds were hailed as geniuses for harnessing big data to create precise models of which voters they needed to reach, and of using cutting edge methods to get them to the polls. They helped boost African-American turnout in the key swing state of Ohio from 11 percent of the electorate in 2008 to 15 percent in 2012.

Yet just four years later, when Donald Trump won a surprise victory in the 2016 presidential election, the storyline — somewhat predictably — emerged that his technology team had created a modern-day Manhattan project for targeting voters on Facebook. In the ensuing two years, progressives have lamented that Democrats now lag behind Republicans in using data and digital tools to win elections.

The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle, according to political consultants and analysts who have worked in social media for years. Yet there does appear to be some indication that Democrats failed to capitalize on some of Obama’s early successes online.

“I think there was a misunderstanding of the fundamental ways that Facebook had changed. … There was a certain amount of complacency, to be frank,” said Cheryl Contee, CEO of Do Big Things, a digital marketing and advocacy firm, who has previously said that progressives are “10 years” behind in this area.

It’s crucial to point out that Facebook engagement is one part of a much larger universe of digital tools and tactics that campaigns can employ. And even in this realm, there is nuance and complexity that makes it hard to conclude that one campaign did “better” than the other.

What is clear is that Clinton and Trump had different goals on the platform, and that’s where critics can question strategic choices.

A Facebook white paper said that Trump outspent Clinton on Facebook $44 million to $28 million, though former Clinton campaign aides dispute they were outspent. And the Trump campaign and RNC created more ad variations than Clinton, through which they tested voter responses to their content. One white paper by a Facebook executive reported the ad variation disparity to be 5.9 million for Trump to 66,000 for Clinton. But a Bloomberg article weeks before the election reported the gap to be much smaller but nonetheless significant, at 100,000 for Trump.

Those numbers do show a heavier investment in a certain type of engagement. The Clinton campaign, however, says that the majority of Trump’s money spent on Facebook was to raise money, and that it invested more money in other types of fundraising that it says were more efficient and had a higher rate of return. And Clinton did end up distributing more sponsored posts than Trump on Facebook.

As for the ad variations, Clinton’s people say they devoted much more energy than Trump to figuring out how to persuade undecided voters on Facebook to support Clinton. The Clinton argument is that they weren’t just speaking to people they knew were supporters, but that they were trying to find new voters on the platform.

That strategy may have been a strategic mistake, however.

“There’s not a lot of evidence that when you’re trying to change someone’s mind about who to vote for or whether to vote, digital is a great platform on which to do that,” said John Hagner, a partner at Clarity Campaign Labs, a Democratic analytics firm.

The post McShane in Yahoo News: The Republicans are beating Democrats on Facebook, but by how much? first appeared on Revolutionizing Microtargeted Campaigns.