Rick Perry and the Science of Campaigning

Worth Clicking: Blasts from the past wound Romney

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August 22, 2011

Rick Perry and the Science of Campaigning

The New York Times interviews Sasha Issenberg about his new e-book out tomorrow, Rick Perry and his Eggheads: Inside the Brainiest Political Operation in America.

Over the course of Perry's 2006 gubernatorial race, Issenberg says "the eggheads, as they were known within the campaign, ran experiments testing the effectiveness of all the things that political consultants do reflexively and we take for granted: candidate appearances, TV ads, robocalls, direct mail. These were basically the political world's version of randomized drug trials, which had been used by academics but never from within a large-scale partisan campaign."

The bottom line: "No candidate has ever presided over a political operation so skeptical about the effectiveness of basic campaign tools and so committed to using social-science methods to rigorously test them."

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Taegan D. Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country, including the Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Christian Science Monitor.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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August 22, 2011