Entrevista a Sasha Issenberg

El New York Times entrevista al autor de “Rick Perry and his Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America”.

Q: What makes Rick Perry’s approach to politics different from that of other candidates?

Mr. Issenberg: No candidate has ever presided over a political operation so skeptical about the effectiveness of basic campaign tools and so committed to using social-science methods to rigorously test them.

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. Over the course of that year, the eggheads, as they were known within the campaign, ran experiments testing the effectiveness of all the things that political consultants do reflexively and we take for granted: candidate appearances, TV ads, robocalls, direct mail. These were basically the political world’s version of randomized drug trials, which had been used by academics but never from within a large-scale partisan campaign.

The findings from those 2006 tests dramatically changed how Carney prioritized the candidate’s time and the campaign’s money when Perry sought reelection again in 2010 and will inform the way he runs for president now. (...) Continúa