44 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
THE POLITICAL SCENE
WINNING
Brad Parscale used social media to sway the 2016 election. He’s poised to do it again.BY ANDREW MARANTZ
I
n September, at a resort hotel in the
Coachella Valley, the California Re-
publican Party held its fall conven-
tion. Brad Parscale—forty-four, six feet
eight, balding, prolifically bearded—
walked onstage in shirtsleeves and tilted
the microphone upward, mumbling a
self-deprecating joke about being “awk-
wardly tall.” Parscale has lived in a red
county in California and a blue county
in Texas, and he now splits his time be-
tween Washington, D.C., and two lux-
ury properties in South Florida, yet he
still speaks with the neutral accent of
Topeka, Kansas, where he grew up. He
was one of the top staffers on Donald
Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I was the dig-
ital-media director,” he said. “So, yes, all
that crazy Facebook stuff was my idea.”
Other former Trump-campaign officials
fill their calendars with paid speaking
gigs, padding their remarks with jingo-
istic platitudes or rapturous accounts of
Trump’s improbable victory. Parscale ap-
pears in public less often. When he does,
he gets to the point.
“We have turned the R.N.C. into one
of the largest data-gathering operations
in United States history,” he said. He
was referring to the Republican National
Committee, which has raised two hun-
dred and sixty-three million dollars for
the 2020 elections. (The Democratic
National Committee has raised just over
a hundred million.) As Parscale ex-
plained, the Trump campaign has been
operating more or less full time since
2016, continually improving its “tech-
nology and data operations.” During this
period, the campaign and the R.N.C.
have essentially merged, sharing staff,
voter data, and other resources. The
Democrats do not yet have a nominee
for President, and some of their systems
for acquiring and sharing data are con-
sidered outdated by comparison. “You
cannot just build an app, or build out
data, in the few months you have from
the Convention,” Parscale said. “The
Democrats will have that problem this
time. As they all interfight, we are build-
ing for our future.” Two years ago, Par-
scale was named the manager of Trump’s
2020 campaign. “I know everybody wants
me to do it from my laptop,” he joked
to the audience. “Not possible. I’ve al-
ready done that once.”
Before Parscale worked for the cam-
paign, he was a digital marketer in San
Antonio with no political experience. Re-
ferring to his work for Trump in 2016, he
has said, “I was thrown into the Super
Bowl, never played a game, and won.”
But it might be more apt to compare
Parscale to the technicians who operated
Watson, the I.B.M. supercomputer, while
it successfully competed against two hu-
mans on “Jeopardy!” Machine learning
and social-media algorithms are upend-
ing most aspects of contemporary life,
including politics. One of Parscale’s ad-
vantages was that he recognized this fact
and didn’t hesitate to make full use of it.
In previous elections, Presidential cam-
paign managers tried to be strategic about
where to hold public events, which slo-
gans to emphasize in which media mar-
kets, when to give an interview to Elle or
to Esquire. These were forms of target-
ing. We are now in the era of microtar-
geting, which began, arguably, in 2012—
the year of Facebook’s I.P.O., then the
largest in Silicon Valley history—and will
continue, inarguably, long past 2020. It’s
no longer good enough to run one radio
ad in Scranton and another one in Pitts-
burgh. These days, campaigns can carve
the electorate into creepily thin segments:
Gold Star moms near military bases,
paintball-playing widowers in the Flor-
ida Panhandle, recovering addicts in
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. And, for
anyone who wants to reach a specific au-
dience with an actionable message, there
has never been a platform as potent as
Facebook. No matter how many bad press
cycles or localized boycotts the company
endures, the number of users keeps ex-panding; on average, those users are grow-
ing older, and that presumably redounds
to Trump’s advantage. “I understood early
that Facebook was how Donald Trump
was going to win,” Parscale said, in Oc-
tober, 2017, on “60 Minutes.” “Facebook
was the method—it was the highway
which his car drove on.”
The instant a Presidential election is
over, everyone who worked on the los-
ing campaign is recast as a dunce, and
everyone on the winning side is reborn
as a genius. In 2016, three weeks after
Election Day, Harvard’s Institute of Pol-
itics hosted a panel discussion featuring
leaders of Hillary Clinton’s campaign
and Trump’s campaign—the first public
reunion of the now dunces and the now
geniuses. It got heated.
“I would rather lose than win the way
you guys did,” Jennifer Palmieri, Clin-
ton’s director of communications, said.
“No, you wouldn’t, respectfully,” Kelly-
anne Conway, one of Trump’s campaign
managers, said.
Later in the discussion, Mandy Grun-
wald, another Clinton adviser, rephrased
Palmieri’s rebuke as a backhanded com-
pliment. “I don’t think you guys give
yourselves enough credit for the nega-
tive campaign you ran,” she said, allud-
ing to “the fake Facebook stuff, or the
great dark-arts stuff you were pumping
out there.” Turning to Parscale, she went
on, “I’m fascinated to hear all about that,
because it’s so hard for us to track.”
“I’d agree,” he said. “That’s the beauty
of Facebook.”
Another morning-after-Election Day
tradition is the postmortem. Every polit-
ical demise has a hundred etiologies. Still,
when it comes to the 2016 election, we
can’t seem to help ourselves: Was it the
Russians? The letter from James Comey?
The weather in Wisconsin? These days,
the culprit many people settle on is the
Internet. “There’s a tendency to turn it
into a catchall explanation,” David Plouffe,
a Democratic strategist who was Barack