42 United States The EconomistMarch 14th 2020
F
irst it wasSteve Bannon; then Jared Kushner; now it is Brad
Parscale. Ever since Donald Trump began persuading millions
of Americans to support him while behaving as no successful poli-
tician ever had, mainstream commentators have looked for the
evil genius pulling his strings. Messrs Bannon and Kushner were
both auditioned for the part, but rejected, after achieving little in
office besides notoriety. Now, as Mr Trump’s re-election campaign
starts going full tilt, Mr Parscale is being considered.
Tremulous profiles of the Trump campaign’s manager are the
latest thing in political reporting. They typically start by noting his
intimidating height, bullish demeanour and “Viking beard” (“I get
the Viking thing often,” Mr Parscale has acknowledged). Such attri-
butes are on-brand with a president fixated on central casting—as
are other features of the 44-year-old Mr Parscale’s rise from obscu-
rity in San Antonio, Texas, where he worked as an online marketer,
to command the heights of the politics business.
Like Mr Trump—who launched Mr Parscale by paying him
$1,500 to design his first campaign website—he is a political gad-
fly, rabble-rouser and dissembler. A sometime libertarian, who
has rarely voted, he is now a staple warm-up act at Trump rallies:
praising the president and attacking his enemies. A self-described
“farm boy from Kansas”, he in fact grew up in suburbia, the son of a
wannabe Democratic politician. But, again like Mr Trump, he has a
reputation for native cunning and outlandish success that can
make such foibles seem colourfully additive or irrelevant.
Mr Pascale’s reputation is based on Mr Trump’s 2016 digital
campaign, which he led. A Facebook executive described it as “the
single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen”. Heavily focused on
Facebook advertising, it was credited with micro-targeting thou-
sands of Trump voters in swing states with the half-truths and xe-
nophobic messaging that Mr Parscale has a gift for turning from Mr
Trump’s lips into ad copy. And sometimes the other way round: he
is also credited with persuading the president to swap “illegal im-
migrants” for “illegal aliens”, a more stimulating phrase.
The liberal commentariat fears Mr Parscale is about to repeat
his electoral feat. Mr Trump’s campaign is now awash with cash
and even more ambitiously digitised than it was in 2016. It also
stands to benefit disproportionately from his incumbency, be-cause digital campaigning is based on data-gathering, which he
has been doing non-stop. Perhaps a million people have attended
the hundred-odd rallies he has held since his election, and many
more provided their names and phone numbers to register for one.
At a rally in South Carolina last month one attendee, with phone in
hand, showed your columnist what happens next.
Every few hours she had received a text message, purportedly
from one of Mr Trump’s sons, demanding cash. “My father asked
me to reach out personally, friend...Don’t disappoint him,” ran the
latest from Eric Trump. By such means Mr Trump and his proxies
have raised over $200m, far more than their Democratic rivals.
That sort of money buys impunity as well as advertising.
Though Facebook has tried to impose a code of conduct on politi-
cal advertisers—for example, it vowed to block content ruled un-
true by a third-party fact-checker—the Trump campaign has often
violated its terms. And in response the platform has backed down;
for example, although the campaign recently pushed a lie linking
Joe Biden to corruption in Ukraine, Facebook decided to make po-
litical campaigns exempt from its fact-checking rule.
This is a promise of yet more disinformation and divisiveness.
Yet whether Mr Parscale’s digital knavery will affect Mr Trump’s
chances of re-election is moot. Academic studies of political ad-
vertising suggest it reinforces existing biases but is almost useless
at changing voters’ minds. Americans’ partisan affiliations and fa-
miliarity with advertising are too strong. “The best estimate of the
effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’ candi-
date choices in general elections is zero,” concluded the authors of
a recent meta-study of electoral research. Mike Bloomberg spent
half a billion dollars proving the same point in a primary contest. It
bought him some decent poll numbers, but the moment he faced
critical coverage after a bad debate performance, they collapsed.
Digital campaigning is fast-evolving. But, notwithstanding the
fears he is inspiring, there is little reason to think Mr Parscale has
anything up his sleeve that could alter this reassuring picture. His
main ploy in 2016 was to use Facebook technology to raise money,
according to David Karpf of George Washington University, an ex-
pert on disinformation. Mr Parscale was told how to do so by Face-
book staffers loaned to the campaign. Otherwise, the Trump cam-
paign’s digital strategy was not fundamentally different from
Hillary Clinton’s. Her campaign also spent heavily on Facebook.
The mystique surrounding Mr Parscale and his digital arts ap-
pears to be largely a product of vested interests. Political operatives
revere ads in part because many have got rich on them, including
Mr Parscale. One of his many firms has charged the Trump cam-
paign and related organisations nearly $35m since 2017, mostly to
pay for ads it has commissioned. This has also given
Facebook, the main beneficiary of Mr Parscale’s strategy, an obvi-
ous incentive to talk up his genius and the potency of digital adver-
tising—though there is no compelling evidence for either claim.Look at the data
Journalists who covered the 2016 election also have reasons to buy
the myth of Mr Trump’s digital mastery. It allows them to down-
play their own responsibility for his win by providing blanket cov-
erage of the Republican candidate and the many slanders he lev-
elled at Mrs Clinton, concerning her emails, alleged corruption
and so forth. It is also a means to avoid confronting the uncomfort-
able fact that 63m Americans heard who Mr Trump was from his
own mouth, unfiltered, and still voted for him. That is a better ex-
planation for his success than Mr Parscale’s dark arts. 7Lexington Digital myths and political reality
Donald Trump owes his election to the moral choices of millions of voters—not to Facebook ads