This election really threw me for a loop. The thing about the election that really got me was that it also threw a lot of institutions that I respect and trust for a loop as well. On Wednesday morning, I wasn’t feeling shell-shocked and, quite frankly, betrayed because the candidate I wanted to win lost. I felt that way because the indicators that I have been taught to rely on and the experts I thought were credentialed and judicious and careful, seemed just as surprised as I was. That’s what made me mad.

I think the collective we, and by that I mean the (at this point self-righteous and arrogant) liberals, really thought we were in the Epilogue of the Victory Lab – on the other side of the data-driven, analytics-ized, A/B testing, psychology game side of the political science learning curve. We had every faith that Hillary’s people were using every trick in the Obama book and more that we hadn’t even heard of yet. There’s no way that eight years later, we aren’t even more advanced, right? In this age, where every day we create more content and gather more information than was even created in the first 4-odd millennia of human existence, we must be pretty close to knowing everything about everyone, right? It’s just a matter of applying the now carefully cultivated analysis to it, and pulling the right puppet strings.

As I see it now, this presidential election feels much more like a quote from early in Issenberg’s book…”If you wanted to build a business designed to resist learning from itself…it would look pretty much like the American electoral campaign. Candidates, who effectively serve as chairmen of their corporate boards, tend to come in two types: those who have won their last race and think they have cracked the code, or those who have never done it before and understand little about the increasingly specialized work done by campaign professionals.” The internal conflict with the quote is the same as what that we find in the actual election. If you look at what the victorious candidates in 2008 and 2016 both had in common, in both cases, the candidates were actually the latter type – “those who have never done it before.” Obama and Trump are both basically upstarts who come from outside of Washington, both promising to shake up the status quo, both also bringing new approaches to campaigning and capturing the attention of the country.

Both Republicans (establishment at least) and Democrats completely failed to learn from that element of the 2008 election – we all just focused on the technology and the fundraising and the data. But what about the message? The core, foundational idea, which is actually more aligned with the technological disruption we see everywhere – that the old, cumbersome, exclusive institutions of our lives and our country need to make way for systems that are inclusive and agile and that give people access and a voice and validation. Because that’s exactly what this country is frustrated with in DC and we have clearly signaled that we don’t have the patience for politicians who keep ignoring that. Honestly, Issenberg found the perfect quote here: “’For many voters political preferences may better be considered analogous to cultural tastes – in music, literature, recreational activities, dresss, ethics, speech, social behavior,’ [Lazarsfeld], Berelson, and McPhee later wrote. ‘Both are characterized more by faith than by conviction and by wishful expectation rather than careful prediction of consequences.’” (pg. 120)

Trump, like Obama, harnessed the people’s faith and wishful expectations (as dark or as negative as you choose to interpret them – for the sake of our country, potentially somewhat naively, I’m hoping less racist than just desirous of change) and he did it with less money and staff than Clinton. So what does that actually mean about “the specialized work done by campaign professionals.” Perhaps it means technology in this age of political work allows you to shortcut it? After all, what does it come down to? Finding or persuading your likely undecideds and getting them out to vote. Shortly before the election, in a video teleconference with Trump’s head of media, he told us that he didn’t need ground game, that he could do everything he needed to with data from Facebook and by letting his candidate get his message out. And he wasn’t wrong. Both campaigns had piles of data and millions of dollars, but only one was able to truly capture the faith of enough people (in the right places) arguably through telling lies and promising pipedreams. So where does all this extra data and transparency and information and analysis actually get you? Just lie to the people and tell them what they want to hear.