Almost as soon as last month’s political disaster was clear, I identified the cause. I also wrote about what must be done next. (Image courtesy of Google’s Gemini.)
A cloud, by itself, is not competitive in an AI world. You can’t just have data on your supporters and polls of the public. A party must data on every member of the public. It must know who thinks differently, why they think that way, and what might motivate them to change their minds.
The data is available. Census data can tell you who is where. States know who is registered and whether they voted. Demographic data is easy to come by. Psychographics can be calculated from sources like Facebook. Large companies do this all the time.
None of this is cheap. But Republicans were able to afford all this, thanks to the experience of men like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. If Democrats want to ever be competitive politically, they must have a similar machine.
What Can the Machine Do?
In 2024, the Republican machine was able to identify small subgroups within the electorate, approachable for very specific reasons. They ran message tests on those groups, then delivered the correct messages at the correct time.
The message I remember was a picture of the Democratic candidate alongside a white man with a drawn-in mustache, wearing a dress and a smile. This hit directly at the sexual insecurity of many young men, the idea that Democrats were emasculating them. You probably remember similar messages. They disgusted you but they attracted others, much like the “hands” commercial in the 1990 Jesse Helms campaign.
I don’t care what you think of the tactics. They worked. The point is, the science of those tactics, their specific design, came from data collected long before the campaign.
I remember when this began in political science. It was in 1975, when I was studying the subject at Rice University. My teacher was Ken Meier, now at American University. He talked about statistics and surveys, he tried to get us to write and run a computer program, and at the time it went right over my head.
The task before the democratic movement should be to fund the political machine necessary to become competitive. I can name a half-dozen Democratic AI billionaires off the top of my head. So can you. The good news is that all you need is one. Because the same machine that will be used by the party can be used in any application requiring mass buy-in. Chances are the base technology already exists, in several places. It would be profitable to bring all that together, lowering its costs and making the party just one customer.
A Permission Structure
The second necessary ingredient is a permission structure. The Republican permission structure has gotten more publicity than its tech efforts because it took a half-century to build, going back to the mailing lists of Richard Viguerie and the creation of Fox News.
You can probably identify many members of this structure on the democratic side. News channels, interest groups, and movements are all part of it. The problem is they’re all ad hoc, unstructured. They also reject the label of propagandist. They’re all standing for objective truth.
The proper analogy is to the Cold War. The Republicans are the Soviet, a top-down propaganda organization in which “Pravda” lies are truth, because Pravda means truth. American policymakers at that time stood up the Voice of America and Radio Liberty to challenge this propaganda. I don’t think it made the difference, but it at least made us competitive in the information sphere.
Democrats need to get the idea they represent truth, and the other side represents lies, out of their head. Understand the nature of the game you’re in.
The permission structure has two purposes. One is to tell your followers what to think. The other is to figure out what to tell them, learning the causes that motivate people, those issues that can gain traction, so that the political machine can test them and be ready when the time comes.
Some of what must happen will be informal. But some of it must be intentional. You need people who understand the problem, and who have access to the technological and information machinery necessary to fight the war we now find ourselves in. You need to listen to them.
Because politics is war. Only one side can win. For the next several years at least, that winner won’t be you, or anything you can care about.
