Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy by Daniel Kreiss (review)

For a political party or campaign, figuring out what makes 200 million voters tick has always been a monumental task. The task is made easier—or maybe just made different—by the dramatic advances in technology in the last fifteen years. As Daniel Kreiss tells us in his new book, Prototype Politics, campaigns leverage technology "to define what twenty-first-century citizenship looks like." In this masterfully written work, a mix of history, sociology, journalism, and political science, Professor Kreiss walks the reader through how Democratic and Republican campaigns from 2000 to 2014 leveraged technology to connect with voters. The narrative is told, in large part, through the lens of some fifty-five key players interviewed by the author.

The story of the Obama years is one of uneven embrace of technology on the Democratic and Republican sides. Both parties, of course, are confronted with the same shifting media landscape. But in Kreiss's account, the Democrats were much more invested in technology than the Republicans. They hired more staff and built an extended network of organizations and companies that together worked on developing campaign tools. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, in part hampered by changing leadership at the Republican National Committee, did not embrace a tech-centered perspective between 2000 and 2012. Kreiss not only charts this difference between the two parties with a compelling writing style reminiscent of an investigative journalist, he offers an explanation of why it happened, building on a vast and diverse scholarly literature, which he takes in new directions.

Key to his explanation is the narrative that parties themselves create about why they win or lose. The 2004 election was a defining moment for Democrats. Not only did John Kerry lose narrowly in the general election, but the Democratic primary featured Howard Dean, whose pioneering embrace of technology was a major story. After Kerry's loss, the Democrats' narrative was that they could have won if they had run a campaign built around technology. Accordingly, between 2004 and 2008, the Democrats made big investments in technology. Having built the infrastructure, they determined in 2008 that these investments paid off. From the Democrats' view, the Obama campaign became a prototypefor how to win campaigns.

The Republicans did not create a parallel narrative around technology in 2004, when they won, or in 2008, when it was easy for them to attribute their loss to a bad economy or a demand for change after eight years of President Bush. No amount of technology would have saved the Republicans from their landslide loss in 2008. So they did not focus on building technological infrastructure. However, in 2012, after a narrower Republican loss, the party started to tell a story about how technology could get them an extra percentage point or two in a close election. Kreiss's argument is important in explaining that there is not a steady march of technology and adoption by political actors. Rather, political actors tell themselves a story that they could win if they adopted this or that approach.

Prototype Politicscontributes to our understanding of organizations and how they develop. It builds on research about the role of a political party and its relationship to candidates and voters. It offers a new explanation to a long-held question in political science about the nature of incumbency. Embracing technology requires constant attention and investment. This makes it hard for new entrants to compete against incumbent regimes.

Prototype Politicswent to press before Donald Trump won the 2016 Republican primary. Nevertheless, the book holds lessons for the future of campaigning. For one, the Republican Party did have a technology wake-up call after the 2012 election and began investing in data-centric campaigning. Future research will tell us how much of that investment found its way into the Trump campaign. But the other big lesson is that Donald Trump's 2016 campaign might become a prototype for future candidates...