THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 53
days later, he tweeted, “My goal was to
show that digital is the future of cam-
paigns. Check.”
I
f Aaron Sorkin ever writes a sequel to
“The Social Network,” he might set
its first scene two days after the 2016 elec-
tion, when Zuckerberg attended a tech
conference at a Ritz-Carlton near Sili-
con Valley. “The idea that fake news on
Facebook, of which it’s a very small
amount of the content, influenced the
election in any way, I think, is a pretty
crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said during an
onstage interview. “Voters make decisions
based on their lived experience.” But Face-
book’s business model is premised on the
assumption that there is no solid bound-
ary between social media and “lived ex-
perience”—that what people see online
affects what they buy, what they believe,
and how they behave. “For a decade, our
pitch to everyone, especially advertisers,
was ‘We can target the exact people you
want and make them behave in the exact
ways you want,’ ” a Facebook employee
who is concerned with the trajectory of
the company told me. “Then Trump hap-
pens, and it’s, ‘Who, us? We don’t have
any power, we’re just a place to share pic-
tures of your dog.’ It was bullshit, but they
tried to have it both ways.”
After the election, Parscale attempted
to promote himself without upstaging
his boss or making the voting public feel
that it had been manipulated. “What hap-
pened here?” Lesley Stahl asked him on
“60 Minutes.” “You’re, like, the secret
sauce? The magic-wand person? You’re
the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain?”
Parscale made a few modest noises,
more demurrals than outright denials.
“Nah, that’s a big statement,” he said. “But
I— Do I think I played a big role? Yeah.”
Shortly before the segment aired, Par-
scale bought Google ads that would di-
rect people searching for his name to a
new Web site, TheParscaleEffect.com.
It featured three gruff-looking photos of
Parscale, a few bumper-sticker slogans
(“Data drives strategy”), and a contact
form (“Find out how the Parscale strat-
egy can advance your business’s success”).
If he was hoping to drum up new con-
tracts without getting into trouble, it
seems to have worked. In 2017, he ap-
peared before the House Intelligence
Committee, behind closed doors, to an-
swer questions about Russian collusion.
He didn’t reveal much. (“We got nothing,”
Mike Quigley, a Democratic congress-
man on the committee, told Politico.)
The Mueller report mentions Parscale
only once, citing a retweet of an account
called @Ten_GOP, now known to have
been the creation of a Russian troll farm.
After the report came out Parscale falsely
claimed, “President Trump has been com-
pletely and fully vindicated by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller.” Later, when
asked whether he’d read the report, Par-
scale said, “I’ve read some of it.”
Ever since Trump began his long-
shot candidacy, in 2015, his campaign ral-
lies have given him momentum, press
coverage, and an excuse to get out of
the house. Since 2016, one of Parscale’s
shrewdest innovations has been to turn
the continuing rallies into data-mining
opportunities. Tickets are free, but they
can only be claimed by a person with a
valid cell-phone number. The campaign
now has a huge database of mobile num-
bers belonging to people who are moti-
vated enough to attend a Trump rally,
many of whom might not have shown
up on a voter-registration roll or any
other official data file.
“We have almost two hundred and
fifteen million hard-I.D. voter records in
our database now,” Parscale claimed last
year, although his definition of “hard I.D.”
is not clear. Even if Trump were banned
from every social network, his campaign
would be able to reach supporters by text.
According to Parscale, the campaign is
on track to send “almost a billion texts,
the most in history”—and texts are far
more likely to be opened than e-mails,
social-media posts, or news articles.
“We’ve been working on this around the
clock for three years,” a senior official
who works on the 2020 digital campaign
told me. He acknowledged that the cam-
paign doesn’t have the same scrappy, sub-
versive energy as in 2016—“It’s hard to
feel like a total underdog when you have
the White House”—but, he added, “we’re
not slowing down. We’re ramping up.”
In October, 2019, Thomas B. Edsall
wrote a long Times column called “Trump
Is Winning the Online War,” listing sev-
eral of the “technological advances that
have allowed Trump and the Republi-
can Party to leave Democrats in the
dust.” If money were no object, some of
these deficits could be overcome quickly;
others might not be surmountable by
November. “The Trumpies have been
really good at persuasion work—being
relentless in hitting their target audience
with their messaging,” Colin Delany, a
digital consultant, said. “That’s most
effective when you can repeat it over a
long period of time.”
Last year, the Trump campaign spent
far more on Facebook ads than any of
the Democratic campaigns. Since Janu-
ary, the trend has been reversed, mostly
due to two cash-rich and charisma-poor
ringers, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg.
Bloomberg is currently building a digi-
tal operation that could come to rival
Parscale’s. His unusually large and well-
compensated campaign staff includes
Gary Briggs, formerly Facebook’s chief
marketing officer, and Jeff Glueck, the
former C.E.O. of Foursquare. Sabrina
Singh, a spokesperson for the campaign,
said, “In comparison to Trump’s opera-
tion, Mike Bloomberg is the only Dem-
ocrat positioned to compete with him on
every single digital platform.”
Bloomberg has spent nearly fifty mil-
lion dollars on Facebook this year, and
has given his digital staff an unusual
amount of freedom. He wasn’t onstage
during the Democratic debate in Iowa
in January, but his campaign’s official
Twitter account posted incessantly and
absurdly (“Mike can telepathically com-
municate with dolphins”; “WHAT IS THE
BEST PART OF THE BODY TO GET A
BLOOMBERG 2020 TATTOO?”). Recently,
the campaign paid more than a dozen
Instagram influencers, including Tank-
Sinatra, FuckJerry, and MoistBuddha,
to run pro-Bloomberg sponsored con-
tent. Viral stunts like this come at a cost,
both in dollars and in personal dignity;
and it isn’t clear whether the Instagram
ads, which winkingly portray the can-
didate as a stiff plutocrat interested in
buying an election, will appeal to the
target demographic. But the Bloomberg
campaign is an interesting test case: if
enough well-placed memes can turn a
mediocre hair product or a boring pop
song into a hit, then why not a Presi-
dential candidate?
For years, there was no Demo-
crat-affiliated counterpart to the Repub-
lican-affiliated Data Trust. In early 2019,
the D.N.C. announced that it would
partly address this asymmetry, launch-
ing an information-sharing operation,
the Democratic Data Exchange, to be
