Tools and Weapons: The Promise and The Peril of the Digital Age

by Brad Smith

When Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination in the spring of 2016, his operation lacked the deep technology infrastructure of the Clinton campaign. To make up for this deficit, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, worked with the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, on a digital strategy that would build on what the RNC already had rather than create their own. Based on the RNC’s data sets, they had identified a group of fourteen million Republicans who said they did not like Donald Trump. To turn this group of skeptics into supporters, the Trump team created Project Alamo in Parscale’s hometown of San Antonio to consolidate fund-raising, messaging, and targeting, especially on Facebook. They communicated to these voters repeatedly with messages on topics that the data said were likely to be important to them, like the opioid epidemic and the Affordable Care Act. The Republican team described what their data operation revealed as the election approached. Ten days before the election, they estimated that they were down two points to Clinton in key battleground states. But they had identified 7 percent of the population that was still undecided about whether it would vote. And the campaign had email addresses for seven hundred thousand people who, the team believed, were likely to vote for Trump in these states if they went to the polls. They put all their energy into persuading this group to turn out.