Columbia Journalism Review: Unsettling Insights from Perry’s Eggheads and the "Scientific Campaign Method"

It’s interesting to look at the new trend of social-science political campaigning from the journalist’s perspective.  In David Leonhart’s recent NYT Q&A with writer and former reporter Sasha Issenberg, they talked about Rick Perry’s 2006 election campaign strategy. As Issenberg described, 

As the 2006 election season approached, the governor’s top strategist, Dave Carney, invited four political scientists into Perry’s war room and asked them to impose experimental controls on any aspect of the campaign budget that they could randomize and measure. 

…The eggheads controlled Perry’s schedule for three days and randomly assigned his travel across Texas. During that time, they conducted a massive volume of polling calls — large enough to discern significant movement in each city — and tracked contributions and volunteer activity. They found that Perry’s presence in a city had an impact: his approval ratings went up, and contributions and volunteer signups increased after he did a public event.

In other words, rather than answer media questions from a central location like Austin, Perry was much better off gaining favorable local press coverage traveling to the barbecues and grocery stores of small town Texas, despite the time and expense. 

Several reasons jump to mind about why local coverage tends to be more favorable — smaller towns often being more conservative, the subtle flattery and town ego-boost that accompanies a big-name visit, local reporters preferring more “softball” questions than the perhaps more cynical and experienced journalists in the state capitol, but all this is a little besides the point.

Greg Marx at the Columbia Journalism Review makes a good point when he writes that “it’s hard not to wonder whether politicians’ savvy in gaming the media ecosystem is racing farther ahead of the press’s ability to fight back.”

But the findings should prompt some soul-searching on the part of local reporters everywhere, to make sure that we’re appropriately skeptical when the big names come to town. The results suggest that even the stories that get told in smaller outlets really do make a difference. That’s encouraging—but it means that there’s a heavy responsibility to tell the truest, fullest, most revealing stories we can.