52 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
Shannon McGregor, wrote that embeds
“go beyond promoting their services and
facilitating digital advertising buys, ac-
tively shaping campaign communication
through their close collaboration with
political staffers.” (Facebook still offers
extensive support to political campaigns,
but it claims that this support no longer
includes embeds.)
The notes taken by the Project Alamo
staffer describe a tense office-wide meet-
ing, early in the campaign, during which
Parscale made it clear that he distrusted
the reps from Facebook and Google,
whose bosses presumably wanted Trump
to lose. Shortly thereafter, the Facebook
embed demonstrated his value: he de-
signed a Custom List of everyone who
had interacted with one of Trump’s Face-
book pages during the primaries, then
sent those people targeted ads asking for
donations. The ads cost three hundred
and twenty-eight thousand dollars; they
raised $1.32 million, a net gain of a mil-
lion dollars in a single day. After that,
Parscale started taking the Facebook em-
bed’s advice.
During the election, the embed did
his best to keep a low public profile. The
day after Trump’s victory, Gary Coby, the
campaign’s digital-advertising director,
tagged him in a tweet, calling him “an
MVP” of the campaign. The embed was
twenty-eight-year-old James Barnes,
from Tennessee. He responded to his
newfound notoriety by deleting his Twit-
ter account.
Barnes recently told me that, although
he grew up in an evangelical family and
had long considered himself a Republi-
can, “I despised Donald Trump from the
moment I knew anything about him.”
On November 8, 2016, after spending
months working overtime to help Trump
win, he and a few Facebook colleagues
went to the polls in Washington, D.C.,
and he cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton.
“My attitude during the entire campaign
was, I’m a professional, I’m here to do a
job, my personal preferences are irrele-
vant,” he said. Last year, “after reflecting
on a lot of things, including my personal
sense of duty,” he quit Facebook. He now
works at Acronym, a left-wing nonprofit
that is using social-media marketing to
try to defeat Trump in 2020. (Acronymis also the main investor in Shadow, the
company behind the app that broke down
during this year’s Iowa caucuses.)
In December, I spent an afternoon
with Tara McGowan, Acronym’s founder.
At one point, she met with Barnes and
other staffers, most of them former
Facebook employees, in a conference
room. They were interpreting the re-
sults of a large survey they’d just con-
ducted on Facebook—fifty thousand
voters across five swing states—sort-
ing the voters according to dozens of
metrics: race, gender, media diet, knowl-
edgeability (measured by whether they
knew which party controls the House).
This was part of a “persuasion-analyt-
ics project” that Barnes is calling Ba-
rometer—his attempt to reproduce the
power of Facebook’s political-market-
ing tools, now from outside the com-
pany. The goal is to gather data on
which kind of anti-Trump ad—which
subject matter, slogan, tone, and so
on—will be most persuasive to each
type of potential voter. “If we get even
a small percentage of these people mo-
tivated to move in our direction, we
win,” Harry Hantman, an Acronym
employee who left Facebook in Octo-
ber, said. I asked McGowan what made
her hopeful that Parscale’s tools could
be turned against him. One of her an-
swers was “James’s brain.”
In 2016, while Trump was accepting
help from Facebook, Google, and Twit-
ter, Hillary Clinton was offered equiva-
lent services, but her campaign turned
them down. “In my experience, the reps
don’t add all that much,” a Democratic
digital strategist told me. “They may be
lovely people, but their job is to sell ads
on their platform, and it’s sometimes too
many cooks in the kitchen.” Mike Shields,
a Republican consultant and a former
chief of staff of the Republican National
Committee, told me, “Hillary’s people
were constantly reading articles about
how fucking smart they were, and they
let it get to their head. They must have
just thought, We’ve got this, we don’t
need anyone else. It was hubris.”
Parscale spent Election Night in
Trump Tower, poring over returns, be-
fore finally heading to the campaign’s
victory party at a Hilton around the cor-
ner. At 3:45 A.M., as the party was wind-
ing down, he tweeted the word “Digi-
tal,” followed by “#WINNING.” A few