Precision Politics: How Microtargeted Political Campaigns Impact Elections
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Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field. Sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. My guest today is Stephen Hilding. We're going to talk about political micro-targeted campaigns, which I think will be really interesting. Steve handles the RMC's internal operations and serves as a right hand to the founder, Rory McShane, and he also advises clients, you know, I guess helping them develop a

strategies and targeting that they need to get the votes they need. So welcome, Stephen. Hey, Richard. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Tell me a bit about your background. Were you always interested in political matters? And how did you get involved in the work you're doing today? Absolutely. Yeah, I've been involved in politics my whole professional life. I had my first paid job on a political campaign when I was 17 years old and still in high school.

You know, throughout college, worked on political campaigns as well. Owned my own firm for a time, you know, couldn't survive the off cycle and came on with then McShane LLC, now named RMC, revolutionizing micro-targeted campaigns. I serve as our vice president, oversee all of our staff and help advise our clients. So you said no off season, meaning in between the four year presidential cycle or what?

Just in between a two-year election cycle. Having your own firm in this business, everything that you do in this cycle is cyclical on a two-year cycle. Everything you do in the whole business is based on that cycle. You plan your whole life in two-year segments at a time. Came out of an off cycle with my own company, it was really hard to survive that off time when you don't have a lot of busy elections. It makes sense. Things go quiet for two whole years. That's

I would think that candidates would always be scheming and building and working on stuff. And that's definitely true. And that's one of the things as a larger firm. We're very busy right now, and we're only just almost done with the first quarter of the off year of an election cycle.

What some people might even consider an off election cycle because it's not a presidential year. And we're very busy. I mean, we've got clients across the country that are running for 2026, some 2025 races that we have as well. But most of them are 2026 races. OK. And I mean, there's a lot of people out there for races that cover a whole state or the whole country. Why would you need micro targeting?

You know, that's a really good question, Richard. This comes from on the Republican side of campaigns. You know, Republicans have always been kind of behind the ball on modern technology when it comes to political campaigns. So you really saw in the 2008 election cycle, the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign start to use big data in

in a real way for the first time. And it took Republicans a few election cycles to catch up to them. So now this is widely used by, by both sides. It's all about finding the right voters, uh, the voters that, that you need. Say, say you're one of my clients and you're running in a Republican primary. That's what you have to do before you get to the general election. Um,

you know, there are, say, you have 100 voters in a district. Of those voters, maybe only 30 of them will be registered Republicans. Of those, maybe only half of them will vote in Republican primaries, right? What we're looking to do is basically putting as much lead on as few targets as possible. Well, I would think that this goes into the theory of swing voters and people that have made up their mind have made up their mind. So I guess if you look at it from like an 80-20 perspective, I guess that

the vital few is what will swing an election or why is there again, micro-targeting? Yeah, that's exactly right. It's about those vital few that are going to make a difference, right? In a competitive race, say a competitive congressional race, you know, these races are going to be decided by one, two, three percentage points. So, you know, it's a bigger question than why just micro-targeting. So what I kind of want to do is dive into what

What is micro-targeting for political campaigns? And simply put, it's the process of using big data to make informed decisions about your voters. This is taking the kind of consumer data that big companies, Fortune 500 companies that are making large-scale corporate decisions are using. And we're taking that same kind of corporately available data and using it on political campaigns.

So historically, when you had, say, information on a voter, data on a voter in the old school days, when we had voter rolls, when they were quite literally rolls of of the voters. There's a famous picture of Karl Rove working on then Governor George W. Bush's campaign in Texas, standing with the voter rolls of the campaign. And it quite literally was a couple library shelves of Texas voters.

within these data roles. And so the kind of information that we had at the time was things like name, phone number, mailing address. You know, maybe there was some information about which elections you had voted in the past, but there was nothing like that. So the kind of data that we use today is over 200 commercially available data points, pairing that on top of all the elections data, you know, party registration, frequency that they vote, and then taking this consumer data, you know, taking things like do you

rent or own your home? What kind of vehicle do you drive? Is it an American made vehicle? What kind of credit cards do you carry? How much equity do you have in your home? You know, all these different, all these different questions that when you look at them once at a time, say things like going to the movie theater, eating fast food, you know, you can't really make a picture of a voter. You don't, you know, you don't,

doesn't really make sense to look at just one data point. But when we're able to put all of these together, we're able to make large, broad scale decisions. So we're able to tell with a high degree of certainty that voters who feel about a certain issue have all of these socioeconomic data points in common. So we can say with a high degree of certainty, we know which voters say support president Trump or support, supportive vice president Harris in the last election, which voters are pro second amendment and which ones maybe aren't so much. Um,

You know, which voters are pro-life and which are pro-choice. And so with these, we're able to make very strategic targeting decisions. But how do you know that all these micro features would add up to a vote for a certain individual? And what if one of them are off or two of them are off? Then what?

Certainly there's going to be some off, but you know what? I would rather feel confident in this data knowing making these broad scale decisions. Sure, there's always going to be folks that maybe aren't modeled correctly, right? Maybe we think someone supports a certain issue when they feel a different way, or maybe we send a mail piece to a household where we're trying to target one voter and another voter in the household looks at it.

But what I can certainly say is that you're better off to, if you're thinking about a voting audience of 100 voters, I'm going to go back to this 100 number just because the math is easy. If I know that there are essentially five voters out of that 100 that are going to make up the election, I would be much better off hitting those 510 voters

10 times over than I would be hitting all of the voters once. There are voters that candidates can reliably count in their camp. You know, Republicans who always vote Republican, Democrats who always vote Democrat. You know, those we can count as either supporting our candidate

or not supporting our candidate. And what the goal is to do is constantly be identifying the voters in our ecosystem, which ones are supporting us, which ones are supporting our opponent, and then kind of bringing it down to the very last one. So what we're trying to do is put as much lead on as few targets as possible, trying to make the most informed decisions as possible versus wasting campaign dollars, wasting resources, wasting time, targeting folks whose votes we're never going to win.

Well, I know secret sauce is, you know, major at this, but what can you say? Like what factors, maybe even one that, you know, if a factor changes, then you think the vote will change or, you know, is key to someone voting a certain way? Um, you know, generally we're making broader scale pictures than this. We're, we're not looking at one individual factor, um, in these, we're just making broader scale pictures. So we can say, you know, let's say we have 250 available, uh, data points on these folks, you know, are, uh,

will say they're likely to agree with this issue if they agree with a range between X number and X number of these things. They have X number of these things in common. So generally, it's more broad stroke than that, right? We're generally looking at a larger audience and not narrowing down into the individual as much.

Yeah, but you are. I mean, you're going after a vital few. So I would think if you're spending so much time on a vital few people, you must be able to see when things change. In this recent election, recent presidential election, it looked like the black vote changed a lot.

Latino vote changed a lot. Like, were you able to analyze and find out why? You know, a lot of, I'll answer that one. You know, that one is less something that's determined in consumer data, right? What they were able to do is, it's certain, like you said, the black vote, it was really black men that moved over.

You know, black women did not did not move. They kind of stayed as a strong Democratic base. It was the black men that moved over. And it was less than that. It was black men that did not turn out for Harris than than it was that did turn out for Trump. So targeting those, that's a low propensity voter.

Those are voters that aren't very commonly targeted. And so you had outside spending groups that... So the 2024 election was the first time that a presidential campaign kind of outsourced its field operations. So President Trump's campaign was not as focused on knocking doors as it was in 2020 and 2016. It had groups like America PAC, Elon Musk Super PAC, and other groups like that that kind of put in the work in the field in turning out those low propensity voters.

So with that, again, it's certainly more of a broad stroke decision. You're talking, you know, certainly it's a select percentage of the population, but you're talking in a statewide, even in a lower population swing state, like here in Nevada, where I am, you're talking tens of thousands of votes that are making the difference. There is no way to be as granular as going down to each and every individual voter. All right. So if you look at it as a

curve, you're not focused on, I mean, what percentage of the voting public are you focused on? Like 1%, 10% at most? Like how small is the sea at large? You know, that's a really interesting question. And it totally depends on the race. It totally depends on the geography, right? Say, for example, if I'm running a congressional race in a presidential year, you know,

the voters in the middle are certainly going to be a much larger percentage of the voter electorate than say a special election for a municipal race.

Um, so, so it depends on the race, but, but generally I would say that in, in a swing district, you're probably looking at really heavily targeting in a general election, uh, probably about five to potentially 10% of the electorate, very heavily. You'll do some, some smaller targeting and stuff to, to groups outside of that, but that's going to be the base of, of your kind of turnout and mobilization, um,

of kind of marginal voters. Oh, okay. All right. So it's, it's typically what thousands, tens of thousands, like what is the ballpark range, you know, small to large for a cohort that you will study? Um, in a, in a congressional race and primaries, we're generally targeting depending on the, and again, this is, it's really hard to say because even, uh,

All congressional districts are supposed to be about the same size, but some of them, the primary base is so different compared to others. So it's really hard to say. I would say if you're looking at our standard kind of Republican congressional primary, we're probably targeting between 30,000 and 60,000 voters, depending on the district. And then when we get into a general election, we're going to be targeting a bit more than that. So, I mean, that's still a lot. Are you able to do...

more advanced statistics? I mean, it sounds like you still have a very large number of people. It'll be statistically significant. I mean, what's the benefit of operating in this range versus operating with a lot more people? Sure. I mean, you essentially what you're doing is just spending your campaign dollars as wisely as possible, right? Say if you're a Democratic candidate,

You know, you're never going to spend your money targeting the Republicans who are voting in every single Republican primary because they're just never going to vote for a Democratic candidate. That just isn't going to happen. So and then there's same if you're a Democratic candidate, you also know that you've got the vote in the bag of the Democratic voter who voted in every of the last four Democratic primaries and every of the last four general elections.

Right. So there are folks that we know for sure in most races, we can say for sure that at least 60 to 70 percent of the voters, we know exactly where their vote is going. All right. So, I mean, a lot of elections, the it'll be along county lines, state lines, you know, et cetera. So you go for, I guess, what the like, do you look at these individual people on multiple levels? You know, do you look at someone on a city level that's part of a special voting group where,

Like how far down do you look? How close do you look? How far away do you raster out? How do you decide what to look at? Or do you look at, again, cohorts just in many, many different ways? Sure. I generally base it on the geography of the election. So if it's a countywide election, I generally don't focus, say, as much on an individual city, right? If I'm running a countywide election, my candidates are from an individual city. Generally, I wouldn't target that city heavier. Generally, what I do is I say, I basically start with,

who are the voters that I want? Are they primary voters? Are they general voters? Depending on what the race is. So say it's a general election. I say, okay, I want my general election voters. So give me people that are likely to vote in general elections. So we're going to assign a turnout score to them of one to a hundred, a hundred being the people that they turn out in every single election. You know, there could be a bomb go off and they're still going to vote. Um,

And zero being people who have never voted. They're registered to vote, but they've never cast a ballot once in their life. So generally, we're going to look to target the higher propensity voters because those are the folks that are turning out. And unless you're a presidential race or maybe a U.S. Senate race, you don't really have the resources to turn out low propensity voters. That's just not something that campaigns have the resource to do. Now, President Trump had the advantage of

All of the super PACs and the presidential campaign kind of funding that allowed his campaign to do that this this cycle. But most campaigns don't have that. So we're looking at higher propensity voters, depending on the circumstances. We're generally looking at voters that have a score of 60 to 70 or higher. So so a higher likelihood of voting.

Right. Seventy percent, 60 to 70 percent or higher likelihood of voting. So we're going to start with those individuals and then we're going to refine from there. So if I'm a Republican candidate, the very first thing I want to do are eliminate the Democrats that are never going to vote for me out of that voter pool. So I'm going to take out all of my hardcore Democrat voters. So I'm going to take out all of the Democrat voters who routinely vote in Democratic primaries.

And then I'll probably keep all of the Republicans as a separate universe. And then I'll take what I'll call the weak Democrats and the independent voters, and then I'll issue model them. So what we're going to do is there are, you know, what we would say as a Republican candidate, you know, more traditionally conservative issues that

that some Democrats and independents will agree with. So what we'll do is we'll do an issue model. So an issue that might be popular in a place is economic anxiety, right? So what we'll say is target Democrat and independent voters who have some economic anxiety. And we'll tell them that our candidate is the one who's got the fiscally conservative message that's going to get them through or any number of issues. If we have pro-gun voters, we're going to put pro-gun content in front of those voters.

So the goal is that we're putting issues that we know this small pool of voters already agree with and putting that in front of them and letting them know that our candidate is the candidate that supports the issue that they already agree with.

It seems like an interesting cohort would be people that don't automatically vote down ballot along with the top winner to influence them. Like if you feel like they're lost, but you still have a candidate that's down ballot that you want to win, you know, that might be an interesting group to go after again.

Absolutely. And that's that's going to be a critical voter base for this upcoming election cycle. So there are 13 Republicans who underperformed President Trump in their congressional district. So there are now 13 Democrats who are sitting in Trump performing districts.

that the Republicans were not able to win, though President Trump won in their district. And the key to that is mobilizing these down-ballot voters, whether it was that they didn't agree with the House candidates down-ballot, whether it was they didn't vote. That's going to be key in mobilizing voters for this election cycle.

Control of the House is going to be determined by a handful of seats. You know, the Republicans have a pretty good Senate map, but the Democrats are certainly going to try and make a play and they're certainly going to be on the defensive. It's certainly going to be about those voters. And then which of those voters can we then turn out in a midterm election cycle? Is the net effect that you guys are able to get more people to vote that otherwise wouldn't vote at all? Or, you know, what?

What do you think? So generally speaking, campaigns do not have the resources to engage with voters who do not usually vote. The highest likelihood and the highest indicator of someone's voting performance is their past voting performance. So it's very, very difficult to take a voter who's never voted or has maybe voted one of the last four general elections, getting them to turn out. That's very difficult. So what we're really exerting our resources on are the people who we already know are going to come out and

vote in creating our voter base based out of the folks that we know are coming. Gotcha. Again, can you share any stories? I mean, react as much as you like, but what's some juicy details on, you know, a group of people you were able to influence? Yeah, you know, there are all kinds of interesting circumstances. I'll do a little bit of bragging on, you know, one of our clients this past election cycle. So we work with the Wyoming Freedom Caucus and their associated PAC, the Wyoming Freedom PAC,

We worked with their candidates. We had 19 successful victories that we delivered for their candidates, all members of the Freedom Caucus. Some of those were protecting incumbents, some were electing new members. And so what we did, we had some nasty articles written about us in the state of Wyoming. There were articles that

said that basically what I'm telling you, that we're using big, scary data. And so we have the advantage of races in Wyoming tend to be very inexpensive races. A state house campaign expends maybe $10,000 as an entire campaign budget as compared to a larger state like

Florida, Texas, you know, it's not uncommon for these campaigns to expend quarter million dollars plus. So what we were able to do is bring this kind of data in targeting that used to only be available to big races, to really congressional races or higher, any race that's going to spend over a million dollars.

was kind of who this data was available to. So how we've kind of made our mark in the industry is bringing this kind of data down to these smaller races. So what we were able to do is deliver those 19 wins for our clients. We took out a 20 year incumbent

committee chairman, um, you know, 19 victories across state just by using this data. So once we did this data, we were targeting these folks with, with pretty traditional methods, right? We targeted them with mail and we did a little bit of digital and a little bit of text messaging. Um,

very traditional methods. But what we did is we knew the voters that were going to turn out and our client, you know, being the Freedom Caucus, the conservative. So we wanted to only target the most conservative voters in each of their districts. And there aren't a whole lot of voters in a Wyoming state house district. And that's how we were able to be so successful. So what we were able to do after that is Wyoming is the first state that didn't have a majority of their

Republican caucus as Freedom Caucus. They had a majority of the House of Representatives as Freedom Caucus. Craig, how is this reshaping elections and, you know, the electioneering around them? I don't know, what are some ways that you found that you were able to target people? Are you using a lot of social media? Are you able to get data from social media because, you know, you deal with political campaigns that other people wouldn't? Like what...

what data is available to you, I guess, that isn't available to others? And, you know, how do you see this reshaping elections now going forward? You know, that's a really good question, Richard. And that's one that I'm really excited about, too. You know, it's not as much, you know, what data are we getting from social media or anything? It's kind of what data are we feeding to social media? In the old ways of campaigning, right, a traditional campaign was who can put as many points on broadcast television as possible?

And that's how kind of old school congressional races were won. And that's how that's how congressional races were won in the in the 1990s and early 2000s. And, you know, some folks who have made a name in this industry and might almost be close to household names. That's how they made their market campaigns. And that's how campaigns were won. And in this day and age, what we'll do is we'll take our target list of voters and we'll target them on all kinds of different mediums.

So all of the streaming ads that you see, all of everything from watching a free streaming service to one of the paid ones, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Roku, any of those, we can target just to individuals on there. So you're going to see campaigns change.

you know, a campaign, if they have a hundred thousand dollars that they would normally put on television, they're going to say, let's put it on streaming service ads targeted just to our individual voter, right? Television is, is moves numbers, regular traditional broadcast and cable television move numbers faster than just about any other, uh, form of media that there is, but it's also incredibly expensive and it's not targeted, right? You'll, you'll be very hard pressed to find, say a congressional district that, that, uh,

is entirely within one broadcast zone. Um, so what you're going to see is, is campaigns becoming more and more targeted. They're going to be targeted with anything that can be one-to-one targeted to an individual voter. Uh, anything like a text message, a robo call, um, streaming service ads, social media ads, uh, browser ads, uh, mail, still traditional methods like mail door knocking, uh,

you know, volunteer phone calling, those methods are still going to be utilized. They're just going to be more targeted as to who they're going to. What about instead of only targeting someone directly, you know, like there's mavens, there's like super connectors, there's influencers within groups

Do you also identify those people and then have messaging come from them as well? You know, Richard, in my opinion, those folks don't really exist anymore. You know, you have some folks who might be kind of a digital influencer and such these days. But if you were to look...

Even as recently as the 1970s, in the 1970s, as many as 70 percent of Americans were civically engaged. Right. These were the folks who went to political party meetings and were members of the Moose Lodge and the Elks Lodge and the Rotary Club and the Kiwanis Club in all these kind of civic organizations.

the JCs, you know, whatever it might be. And in the time, right, in call it as recently as the 70s, you know, people would go to their friend, you know, their friend who was in the Rotary Club and attended all the local Democratic Party meetings or Republican Party meetings. And they knew they knew all the candidates. And they said, hey, I want your opinion. I don't know who to vote for for tax assessor or I don't know who to vote for for Congress. Can you tell me what you think?

In this day and age, less than 2% of Americans are civically active. You know, if you were to, I always tell my candidates this, you know, my candidates, they want to go to all these events and shake hands and meet all of these people. And at best case scenario, in a primary, you're going to meet 2% of your primary electorate because Americans just are not as civically engaged as they once were. Well, that's an understatement. You said it went from 70% to 2%? Yep.

At its highest, it was at 70%. It stagnated at 50% and then started to rapidly decline. So there are about 2% of Americans who are actively and civically engaged. That's crazy. Yeah. And that's what it goes back to is targeting the individual voters, right?

we don't have the budget to turn these folks out. We don't have the campaign resources to go and shake every single hand, right? There was a time where you could win a state house seat by truly going and shaking every hand. You could go to every event in your district and you would meet 70% of the voters because they were so civic engaged. And in some parts of the country, it literally became a

sport, right? You know, it was the most exciting attraction around when a political candidate would come to town on, say, a train stop or something like that. And you just don't see that in today's day and age. Hmm.

So what moves people then? Just personalized ads or, you know, I mean, I don't know. How do you sway people if they don't ask friends? And I guess if they don't really, you know, there's no, unfortunately, there's no like, you know, Google five-star ratings for politicians, which I don't know if anyone can get above like a half a star. But how do you...

How do you sway people now if they don't seem to listen to anybody? I usually talk to them directly through their device, and that just controls everything they do, say, think, and yeah, it's weird. So what we do is it's all a process, right? So we know who's going to vote with a high degree of certainty. We know how people feel about certain issues with a high degree of certainty. Now it's all about putting –

simple equation. My candidate agrees with you on this issue, vote for my candidate. And it becomes very simple like that. And even on issues, if I'm not working a traditional political campaign, a candidate for office, say I'm working a ballot measure. We did some work on ballot measures that a

opposed rank choice voting here in Nevada. So when we're talking about that, we know through data modeling with a high degree of certainty who cares about rank choice voting, right? Who's opposed to it? Who supports it? Who's not going to vote for it no matter what happens? And it's turning those folks out. It's a turnout game at this point. You already know who's going to be there. It's about getting as many on your side as possible.

Yeah, it's just strange. It's amazing what has happened to people. Have you found that, I would guess, in studying all these factors, that you would not only know who someone's going to vote for, but products they're going to buy, places they'll go vacation. I mean, there's a lot of probably side or ancillary data.

What happens to that? And that's that's the data that I, you know, don't care as much about. Right. Because I'm using mine to make election decisions. And now if I'm, you know, Coca-Cola or some some large Fortune 500 company, that's absolutely right. I can, with a high degree of certainty, tell them if they're going to use my product. If I'm a movie theater, I know who goes to the movie theater.

um, you know, all of, all of everything, everything that you do is sold, right? Every, every magazine you subscribe to, every newsletter you subscribe to, every store that you go and sign up to their email list, uh,

all of your credit card purchase history, all of this stuff is sold, right? There is nothing that you do that's in secret these days. And so what we're able to do is if I'm selling a certain product, I can literally say, I want to purchase data on people who purchase this kind of product and target all of my ads towards just that individual. You know, companies have gotten so high tech with this kind of thing that they know that if you're in their store,

because they've kind of geo-targeted you within their store. And then they match it with credit card purchase history. And with a high degree of certainty, they can tell that you were in their store without purchasing something. And then the next thing you know, you get on some kind of social media platform or wherever you might see an ad, and you're going to have an ad from the store that you were just in offering you a coupon for 20% off. So what's more powerful to say that

candidate X, you know, supports your issue or to say that candidate Y, you know, that devil in the, in the blue dress or whatever, um, doesn't support your issue. Like, have you found a negative or positive approach works better with people to sway them? It totally depends, right? It, it totally depends if there's a circumstance to go negative, right? If you're, uh,

you know, challenging, say an incumbent elected official, you're going to generally have to go negative, right? There's, there's not going to be any way, you know, people don't really like changing the status quo. There's, there's, you know, a reason that over 95% of incumbent elected officials get reelected. You know,

giving them a reason. So that's, it depends on the race, if it makes sense to go negative. And that's what kind of what our polling data would tell us is if it makes sense to, to attack a certain candidate and essentially what you asked, which one is more powerful support for candidate X or candidate Y is, is the bad guy.

I guess the best thing to do is both. You know, my candidate supports this and that. And this one, here's the devil incarnate, doesn't support that. And if you if they get into office, they get to take away all the things that are important to you. I guess you hit it on both fronts. I don't know. That's that, you know, again, it depends on what our polling is, right? Because we never just want to rely just on this data. We also want to rely on polling data.

Right. What is the polling telling us about these voters that we want to talk to? And so it depends. Some races, it's only positive. Some races, it's a mix of positive and negative. Some it's 75 percent negative, 25 percent positive. It just totally depends on the race and it totally depends on the candidates and the issues of the individual race. What do you notice about the races when they're negative or positive? How does that change how you guys have to operate? Are you, you know, right?

I guess if a race is very negative, yeah, then you'll do negative stuff to match it. Is it easier to find out or to sway people when things are very negative or very positive? You know, that's a hard question to answer. And so what we'll see in our polling data is sometimes we might see – I'll reference a race that we worked on a while back. The incumbent elected official –

was known to have had an affair with an intern who later went on to work for him, carried on this affair on his wife for about a decade before telling his wife, he told his own lawyer, his own wife was on social media calling for him to drop out of the race. It's a very high profile race. But what we found out is that as backwards and say what it says about society as it might be, that very, very, very few voters

cared that the candidate had had an affair on his wife for over a decade. Very few voters cared about that. But what we did see is that women over the age of 55, it overwhelmingly moved their vote against the incumbent when it didn't really move anybody else's vote. So when we were using negative messaging, talking about his affair, we were only talking to just a very small portion of the voters.

But why does the media try to tell me still what to think and what to feel? Why are they so invested in doing this when it's just stupid? Or does it work? You know, they just keep hammering on someone. Let's say, you know, Billy Bob had an affair and no one cares except the small group that you find. But you see the news, they hammering and hammering and hammering every freaking day constantly. Are they stupid or what's going on? So here's what it is. And we see this in polling data.

Right. There are there are two kinds of effects of attacks and positive messages. There's stated effectiveness and there's actual voter regression. Does it actually move a vote? So what we do when we test an issue, when we when we first test it, everyone says, oh, of course, it moves my vote that day.

that this candidate had an affair. Yes, of course it moves my vote. And when we look at that overwhelmingly, the voters say that, but when we actually go, does it actually move their vote? No, it does not. So again, like the mainstream media, are they dumb or they've just dumb dinosaurs or is what they do effective or what's, what's the deal with them? I mean, you know, the,

The media on every side of the spectrum is pushing some kind of agenda. There's very little unbiased media in today's day and age. And they all want to push their side and they want to appeal to their base, you know. And it's just kind of the constant fear mongering and, you know, appealing to their own base, right? You know, their own base is going to be motivated. And that's kind of what it boils down to. Well, it also could be, I guess, their advertisers supported media.

And the advertisers are not going to know what you know. So they're like, oh, yeah, you know, just keep attacking this candidate and we'll keep supporting you. I guess they don't have to. They don't really have to change their model. It works fine. So they don't care. I don't know. I just wonder what like why has it become so partisan? They must think it works better.

Are they misinformed or like, what have you seen? Is it, I would think you have an inside eye. You see the media, I would guess in a much more intelligent way than most people do because of what you do. So if you can say, what do you see? I mean, it's every side is, is trying to push their own agenda and it's very, very difficult to stay in the middle. I mean, um,

you know, I, I don't, I don't want to, I'm going to stay, stay as, as neutral and bipartisan as I can here, but, but each side is, is going to push an agenda in each side gets their base fired up. And quite honestly, that's, that's what drives viewership. And that's what drives ratings because it's, it's, you know, in the, in the day of 24 hour news, right? This isn't the days of Walter Cronkite where you maybe had two hours of news a day. You know, this is constant 24 hour news. Um,

And they have to stay interesting and they have to stay relevant and they have to appeal to the people that are going to watch them. And that's what it boils down to. Okay.

What do they do to your campaigns, though? You know, if you watch the media, I don't know, bringing up an issue that you wanted to bring up. Are they a useful piggyback? Are they are they useful idiots for you guys where you can watch what they're doing and say, oh, great, this will support this or because they keep hammering on this one thing. Now it's in people's minds. So we got a chance to to talk about that. Everyone's talking about X, Y, Z lately the past week.

So now we're going to change our messaging because, again, thanks, media. You made it such a big issue that now we could piggyback on it. Yeah, I mean, we certainly have to. I mean, I think it's fair to say one of the big issues that Republicans won on in the 2024 election cycle was immigration. And it got to a point where even, I would say, traditionally more left-leaning news was admitting that our country had a problem with illegal immigration, right? We had a problem with illegal border crossings.

So certainly, you know, the media will feed into an issue. And the more the media dwells on an issue, the more it can become a talking point of a campaign. And, you know, just with the way the news cycle works, sometimes that's going to be an issue that is beneficial for you. And sometimes it's not.

Republicans got a huge boost in the media with immigration in the 2024 election cycle, but Republicans were just as equally damaged by the coverage on abortion and the Dobbs decision in the 2022 election cycle. Okay, let's see. Can you tell, like, is your activity being watched? Not you personally, but, you know, the political activity and the targeting and all that, right?

How do you avoid one agency watching the other and then copying that? And you put things out there and then you see that your competitors are changing based on what you're doing. And how much of an incestuous kind of operation is this for the company that do this? You know, the kind of data that political campaigns are using is not nearly as, how

how would you say invasive or intrusive as, as what corporate advertisers are using, right? You know, everybody is, is using this, this kind of data these days. And it's, it really is not a coincidence that when you go and Google, uh,

you know, baby cribs that the next thing that you go on your Facebook, you've got an ad for baby cribs or whatever it might be. I mean, this is not a coincidence by any means. Everything that you do is sold, right? I mean, there's a reason that Facebook and everything is a free platform. Google is a free platform, but they're some of the most valuable companies in the world. It's your data that makes them valuable. And certainly there are folks out there who say, well, I don't want my data out there exposed like that.

well, don't, don't use the internet. Don't have credit cards. Uh, you know, don't sign up for any lists anywhere. Probably don't have a phone number, uh, in, in you'll be safe from the data targeting, but now you're certainly starting to see, um,

you know, in, in Europe, you have a, uh, you know, European union has a lot more data privacy. Um, there are some States in, in the United States that are starting to push more data privacy laws. Now these are generally political campaigns, at least in the United States are, are kind of exempted from a lot of those, but, but for the, for the corporate consumers, I think maybe there will certainly be a little bit more of a push for data privacy in the future. Uh,

But as of now, there's kind of no way to avoid it. Okay. I guess last question, what do you see changing over the next few years? Where is all of your efforts going and how are they changing and being shaped? You know, Richard, I'm always looking in the best interest of my client. I'm always looking for a way that I can target a voter more precisely and for less money. So I'll say the biggest change that I've seen in advertising is

at least for us and for my campaigns, is a switch from more traditional television, your cable and broadcast television, switching over to the streaming services. You know, in most races that we're working, at least 40% of voters are cord cutters. They no longer have access to traditional cable or broadcast television. Like myself, everything I do is from some kind of streaming service.

in giving ads to voters right on their streaming service targeted to individuals. That's been one of the biggest things. So I think what we're going to see is further levels of targeting. You know, what we're starting to see is, you know, as as kind of cable and broadcast television viewership started to slip, more advertisers going on to streaming service. Now you're starting to hear, you know, see radio listenership start to decline and you're starting to see more advertisers looking to do ads on things like podcast platforms.

So I think you're going to see some more advancements in data targeting. I don't think that in the next, call it five years, you're going to see these leaps and bounds in political data targeting. But I do think that we're going to find more platforms to target these individuals and

um, and just find more precise ways to make sure that, that we're putting as much lead on as few targets as possible. Okay. Well, very good. So where can people find out more about your efforts and, uh, you know, talk to you about hiring you if they need for their campaign and just more information. Yeah, absolutely. You can find our website at rmcstrategy.com. That's rmcstrategy.com. Uh, feel free to look on there, find a little bit about, uh,

a little bit about us, a little bit about us as a firm, some of the races that we've worked on and some examples of our work. Okay. Well, very good. Well, Steve, thanks so much for coming on and sharing all this info. And I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Richard. I appreciate the conversation. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes. You've been listening to the Finding Genius Podcast with Richard Jacobs.

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