Eric Wilson 0:04

Welcome to the Campaign Trend Podcast, where you're joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Eric Wilson. My guest today is Katie Harbath, my friend and founder and CEO of Anchor Change and author of the new book Out Now, Disrupting Politics, a front row seat to the collision of technology and democracy. You can get that wherever fine literature is sold. Before she spent a decade at Facebook running global elections policy, Katie was one of us. She built GOP.com, ran digital for the Rudy Giuliani campaign, and led digital at the NRSC. So she's really had a front row seat to both sides of that collision that she writes about. And so on this episode, we're talking about her book, the time period that it covers, and one that we're going to see in a new movie out soon, uh, and what we can do with the lessons she learned along the way. So, Katie, most of our listeners are probably familiar with your background, and many have already probably worked with you over the years. So I want to drive, dive right into asking you, what is this book really about? Is it memoir, setting the record straight, an argument, tell all or something else?

SPEAKER_01 1:23

It's it's a little bit of everything, but not definitely not a tell-all. But I, from from the moment when I was thinking about leaving Facebook and starting Anchor Change, I knew that I wanted, I didn't want anybody else telling my story. And that became even more true as you had Francis Haugen and then my colleague Sarah Wood Williams putting out careless people. But there was a lot of discussion about what had happened, especially during the Facebook years, right? And but I also, having gone through the early social media days, felt that other than Sasha Eisenberg, who's kind of documented sort of how digital campaign has looked, nobody's really shared like the story from going from 2003, where Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, none of those exist, right? To now this cusp of a new AI era. And I thought that being able to do it through sort of my lens, it's definitely memoir, uh, of being inside those rooms would help to give people, even if they still disagree with the decisions we made, can at least go, huh, that was a little harder than I thought, or I hadn't thought about it from that angle. Or it's, you know, being interested in knowing what was being discussed inside those rooms.

Eric Wilson 2:36

Yeah, my copy got delivered from Amazon yesterday. And so I'm really excited to uh dig into it. Obviously, this was going on uh at the time when when we were working together, uh, you were at Facebook, I would have been on a few campaigns at the time. And and I'm thinking back to the period sort of before that. And we had some really high hopes. I'll include you in this. We had some high hopes for what the internet, including social media, could do for politics. And I think we can honest, be honest and and and say it didn't really pan out. So, for example, instead of being a new way of connecting candidates uh and voters with causes they believe in, digital fundraising is now this sort of scam-laden rehashing of direct mail. Uh, social media was supposed to be about giving everyone a voice and then they could make a difference. And and we got well, not that. Uh, and I think the most generous thing I could say about the state of social media in campaign politics right now is that it's a new way for candidates to put out press releases. So what happened? Were we just young and naive back then? Or or was there some sort of original sin we might call it? Was it advertising, anonymity, algorithms? Where do you put the blame?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Well, I think the blame goes across to all of us, right? From like the tech companies, those of us in campaigns, like everyone. And I will say too, I think there were still some good glimmers that came out of this. I don't think it's all super negative of what of what we've seen. But I think, I mean, you like you were saying, I remember when our joint goal on both the D and R side was you wanted the president of the United States using these platforms to directly talk to people. And we saw that we've seen how that works out, right? Um, but I think that for me, one of the things I thought about, I'd be curious what you think about this too. But I remember at the RNC the first time I was able to go to the communications director and the press secretary and show them analytics analytics on the website that I could show them in real time how many people were watching what we put up, how many people were clicking on it. Whereas before, if they got an earned media piece, put out a press release, put up a TV ad, you'd have to do very expensive polling to kind of know, or you'd have a general sense of the readership of that new news publication, whatever it might be. But now we had real-time analytics. And we thought that, right, like more clicks were better. So let's keep doing whatever gets us more clicks, whatever gets us more engagement.

SPEAKER_02 5:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

And kind of like the proverbial frog being boiled, like in a campaign, right? Like you're just doing whatever you need to do to win. But I think it was very much over time. It wasn't an overnight thing, but over time, because we're measuring all that, you move more and more to the extremes to what will ever get you clicks, because then that's where the algorithms come in. The algorithms, human nature, whatever gets covered in the press, right? Like we're all responding to incentives that were being given. And those incentives caused us to get more and more extreme the the longer we kept doing online campaigning.

Eric Wilson 6:00

Yeah. I I I think that's right. I I hadn't included that on my list, but the the idea that we could measure everything, there was never a question of should we, uh, but we could, because it was it was now on computers and we could look at what what's hitting the server, uh, really changed the the incentives. And and this is something that uh I I have to sort of help candidates and campaigners unlearn in all of my trainings. Is they're they're the making the graph go up and to the right is not our goal in politics. The winner is not the person with the most likes or the most follows or the most views, but the candidate who gets the most votes. And we did lose sight of that.

SPEAKER_01 6:40

Well, I was just gonna say, you mentioned fundraising too, and I do think fundraising is a big part of this as well, because particularly saw this in the 2010 cycle, right, with the NRSC, where you had the Tea Party candidates um, you know, winning primaries over incumbents, people that were not backed by the national party. And now that you had candidates who could start to fundraise all across the United States, they no longer needed the national party infrastructure to help them. So they had no incentive to also then necessarily work with the broader Republican or Democratic apparatus for everything. And so I think that that also um I think that may have also been something that that harmed this as well. Rather, so they were now playing for a national audience, not just the constituents that they were trying to serve.

Eric Wilson 7:30

Yeah. And and you bring up a another confluence of events that had nothing to do with social media. And that was campaign finance reform. So when McCain Feingold gets passed, uh, which sort of weakened the party structure, they had no idea what was coming with with social media that that sort of these insurgent type candidates were were then going to be able to have the infrastructure that didn't exist when they were writing this. So it's a really interesting kind of confluence of of events where you say, okay, well, the parties are weaker and the tools for being on the outside are are better and and sort of just comes together at a at this interesting time. I think we're now starting to swing back to stronger parties. There's some you know recent Supreme Court decisions. Um but but the the interesting thing on the the analytics is that that colored so much of what we did in digital campaigning. Because we could say, look, well, you know, you run TV ads and it's gonna be wasted. I can show you who who got every view of this digital uh And I can test your messages before you actually spend the money behind it, right?

SPEAKER_01 8:41

Exactly. Because you can do all that A B testing, yeah.

Eric Wilson 8:44

And and and we we we we're gonna guarantee you that there's no re waste and it's reaching only the voters you want to persuade. And and the the tail started wagging the dog a lot.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

Yeah, it really did because you were and it was how you were at least I'll speak for myself, it was how I was trying to justify more budget. Exactly. Like I remember too, in both Giuliani and NRSC, I oftentimes had to like, I basically had to pay my own lunch, meaning I was having to fundraise for whatever I wanted to do on digital.

SPEAKER_02 9:15

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 9:15

And so then you're trying to get creative around it because you're still in that time period, we're still trying to prove this, right? Like it's still pretty early days of digital campaigning. The iPhone is still relatively new. Mobile was just starting to take off in that 2010 cycle. And so there was still a lot of convincing we had to do of those TV, right? Of the consultants and everyone who's wanting. I mean, heck, even still today, we see so much going up on broadcast. But um, but yeah, those analytics were the way that you did it.

Eric Wilson 9:46

Yeah, and and and we finally caught the car. It's like the dog that catches the car. And and now people say, okay, yeah, digital's a thing. And you you see sort of this overcorrection where we're, you know, we're doing things like uh targeting ads too narrowly. Um so I think I think that's probably the the so so would you say uh I don't know. Well, would could we say that one of the mistakes might have been putting those analytics forward-facing, right? When you can see someone else's YouTube views going up or someone's likes on a post going up, that I wait if we took all of those off, I wonder if we might get back to the that open social web we used to have, or or it could be lost forever.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

I'm sure we would still try to fight find a way to have competition and get those metrics, right? Like I think that there's when you're in politics, you can't help it with the competition. But I do agree. I remember actually just jogged a memory in my brain. I remember back in when I first started at Facebook, I asked Mark if we would ever remove likes from the like count from pages because my theory was that like that didn't really indicate how many people were seeing your content on there. So, like, is it what does that vanity metric do? And I pretty much got laughed out of the room. It may not have been my best, my best first question to Mark, but it was something I was super curious about because I think that's another thing too about the analytics is there's what you can see forward facing. There's what you can see on your own analytics, but then there's also what the companies themselves know about who they're showing your content to, et cetera, um, that we're pretty much blind to because they're guessing who might be interested in our content that isn't already following us.

Eric Wilson 11:31

Yeah. It really uh created a lot of headaches. I I mean, I I think um this idea that we could measure things, um, I I a big frustration I have, I would say it with with sort of digital campaigning writ large is sort of dashboard culture. Uh this idea that, well, you know, what is a dashboard? It's the thing in my car that I look at to decide, do I pull over and get gas? Am I going too fast? That kind of thing. But if if if we had dashboards on our car that look like what these social media platforms provide us in terms of analytics, we would crash. Um and so it it does seem like we we're losing the forest for the trees in many ways.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Well, and I think too, the dashboards that we have don't like on online to continue that metaphor. I think in an ideal world, there would be something where you can say, please bring this the check engine light on if this kind of thing's happening, right? Like if I'm if I like to be able to set, like I don't think we well, I know I'll speak for myself again, didn't set values when we started to do this. Because again, the goal was just to win. It was not thinking about how is it do I want to approach this? What are my values and what I want to be putting out there? What do I think is going to be best for both, you know, me as a user, but also society writ large, but also for, you know, this campaign professionals profession profession, sorry, bad words there, but you know what I mean. Um, around it, uh in a way that I wish we still have time to do right now as we go into the AI era, but that window is closing as we go into the presidential cycle.

Eric Wilson 13:12

All right. Before we dig into AI, I uh uh I the I I see a lot of similarities be between what's what's going on, uh, but but let's park on on social media for for just a little while longer, which is um I I I think you're right. We we were focused on how how do we win and and for campaigns, uh we're really focused on quarter by quarter. You know, what's our what's our fundraising, where where are we? Uh and and there is no, and this is by design, by the way, there's no one thinking about the long term of campaigns and the political industry and careers. I'm trying to change some of that now with the Center for Campaign Innovation, but there's just no money for it, right? When you're you're limited on what you can raise, there's a hard deadline on when the election happens. And so there's this interesting thing where we were focused on our incentives. The there were companies out there that that sort of saw what was going on and maybe didn't think about the implications. Uh, and then you've got regulators who weren't really competent enough to to sort of see around the corner. So it's a again, setting that up. That's the mirror that we're we're looking back at.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Well, and so you think back, so both on the quarter by quarter, I'd argue the companies are the same way with their product roadmaps. Like it was very hard to get Facebook to think long term about what because they're also in a quarterly financial like reporting type things that they're worried about and trying to think what products they need to get out there, et cetera. And I'd argue, again, I know we're gonna talk about AI, but like that feels to get compressed a lot more. And then on the regulator side, I think you went through this too when the FEC decided not to regulate bloggers and basically and didn't really kind of regulate online ads, but like the last time they did that advisory opinion, ads were still on the side of the Facebook desktop. They weren't even in, they weren't even in the news feed. And so, and now of course our FEC is pretty much defunct um um with how it's operated for how long? Quite quite a bit of time. And so, yeah, it's it's from the very beginning, it's been as we keep using the word the wild, wild west, but it really was.

Eric Wilson 15:30

You're listening to the campaign trend podcast. I'm speaking with Katie Harbath about her new book, Disrupting Politics, a front row seat to the collision of technology and democracy out now. And Katie, during several of those years, I think it's fair to say that you and I were on opposite sides of the divide. You were at Facebook, I was on these campaigns trying to go right up to the the line. Uh thankfully, I hope we can still call each other friends. Uh oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

And and you were doing your job. I was doing my job.

Eric Wilson 16:01

Like, yeah. So, what was it like being on the inside? So you had this really cool big job at a huge company going all over the world. And meanwhile, the the political team that you had been rooting for was, I think, at odds from time to time. Um, what was that like?

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Um, oh my gosh. I mean, it was it got more challenging as the years went on, for sure. I think, you know, when I initially started at Facebook, um, there were only, you know, six or seven people in the DC office. The only person they had hired before that was Adam Connor, who came from Democratic politics, right? And so I was purposely hired for my Republican background. And I remember going to things like CPAC and other things, and they're like, wait, Facebook hired a Republican? Like they were kind of shocked that, because Silicon Valley was seen as very, very liberal because of how many people had gone and helped Obama over the years and stuff like that. And I talk about that a bit in the in the book. And so initially it was sort of like trying to, trying to just be that point person so that when you and others had problems, like I could help to escalate those throughout the company versus you all just, you know, complaining on a listserv that you can't find somebody on Facebook to help you to do that. Um, and it was, it was, and from day one, I was playing this bridging person between folks like yourself and the company and trying to explain to the company how politics worked, but then also trying to explain to you all why we as Facebook were making the decisions we were. Um, and then that got trickier as, and then, like I actually would say earlier on, right? You had things like the young guns who came in for a live stream, which was Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Eric Canner. And coming to headquarters and coming to Silicon Valley was a thing that a lot of politicians wanted to do because they wanted to look cool and techy, and, you know, and they wanted that picture at the Googleplex or at Facebook campus and stuff like that. So I was spending a lot of time bringing people to campus out in California or having them over to the DC campus to talk about that. And, you know, then we had a big presence at the conventions, which was so much fun, um, where we actually were able to do live streams and have events and be able to have, you know, help showcase the company both on the left and the right. Um, but then we also continued to have challenges like the trending topics controversy, which happened in May of 2016, where a conservative um contractor uh claimed that. So we had like just like Twitter had, right? Like, what are people talking about the most on the platform? Um made the accusation that we were suppressing conservative content in there. And that undercurrent on the right, that Silicon Valley and Facebook's liberal just kind of broke out in the open. And we had to do a big meeting at headquarters with folks like Tucker Carlson, Jim Demint, Glenn Beck, et cetera, about all of that. But one of the things that came out of that meeting was then the company decided to get rid of the editors that were deciding that. That was kind of the start of some of the issues around fact-checking and some of the stories and stuff that were coming up around all of that. And then, and I'll pause after this point because but to because there's a whole nother chapter after the 2016 election. But like then the 2016 election happens and we start to institute a lot more hurdles for people like yourself to have to go through to use the platform.

Eric Wilson 19:23

Yeah. It it it it is interesting. The arc was very much hey, we gotta work really hard to get people to start using this, and we're gonna we're gonna get them to use it. Uh oh, but don't use it like that. I mean, that that was sort of what it felt like. Um, so I'll just give a very specific example with um in 2012, the Obama campaign had this thing where you could connect your Facebook profile and see your friends that might be registered to vote, and their analytics team had modeled one way or another. On the so that's 2012, 2014, I'm working for Ed Gillespie's campaign for Senate. We're looking at, okay, well, we've we we were given a target by Facebook of, you know, because a little bit of history here, you weren't able to target ads to someone who didn't have a friend who didn't like your page. Uh oh, I forgot that. And so we had we invested a lot in making sure that we got about 1% of the electorate to like our page on Facebook. So we would have a good chance of being able to advertise them. But then we also implemented this thing where we said, hey, reach out to your friends, ask them to vote for uh vote for Ed if you know we think that they're a likely target. Well, by the time 2016 comes around, so again, we're in the we're looking at the span of four years. That was Cambridge Analytica, that was the end of democracy, that data shouldn't have ever left Facebook. And so it's just kind of a whiplash on our end of like, okay, it was brilliant when this team did it, yeah, and then sinister when we did it. Uh, so there's a little bit of whiplash there that was kind of frustrating.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

I I hear you. And it was for me too. And in fact, I opened the book with me driving down Constitution Avenue the day after the 2016 election, not knowing what future I'm driving into, because the thing I spent 15 years building that everybody loved and was praising and was showcasing and loving turned villainous overnight. And now all of a sudden, it is the most horrible thing I could have done in all the land was to help, you know, candidates learn how to learn how to use this. And so it was a big whiplash for for me and my team internally too, because to try to navigate that. And we were navigating that even I talk about in the book in 20, it was probably 2018 after Cambridge Analytica. Um, I had a meeting where Cheryl was deciding if my team was gonna exist anymore. And I remember talking to the head of the sales team, and I was like, we're either digging our grave or building our next mountain. I don't know which one we're doing. And what we're walking into because there were so many conversations about maybe we just shouldn't do this at all. And internally we were trying to fight that this was still important to do.

Eric Wilson 22:10

Yeah. My read on it, and here's what I I think that the the social media platforms, not just Facebook, I I don't think they understood the power and influence they were wielding when it came to politics, or they lacked the courage to accept that responsibility until it was probably too late and the cat was out of the bag, the the harm had been done. But looking at AI today, I don't think anybody learned the right lessons. And and so I I think, and I'm curious if you agree or where you might critique this, that we're overreacting in the wrong direction when it comes to AI, in insofar as, and I'll give one very concrete example. So Facebook, you know, didn't have any political policies for years and years. Open AI from the very outset has this policy. You can't use Chat GPT for politics. And we're now working on trying to claw back. Well, can we use this? Can we use this? Can we, you know? Um, and so they now have this policy that I think is is is fairly nonsensical. You know, you could uh research a policy about education and use chat GPT to brainstorm that, but you can't use it to draft a press release announcing that. And so it's like, all right, we we overcorrected the other way. How's that read from your perspective?

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. And they've twisted themselves up into pretzels, trying to be like. So I usually, when I talk to these companies and talk to the folks inside these companies, they'll be like, what do we need to do? So so nobody gets mad at us. And I'm like, that is the wrong question. The question you need to ask yourself, yeah, is what risk tolerance do you have? And where are you willing to withstand pain? Because no matter what you decide, you will have people angry at you. And what you're seeing is, and and to be clear, like just like at Facebook, inside each of these companies are people who do understand how politics works and they are trying to push back on some of this or trying to find a way through. But then there's a lot of others who end up getting involved and you get this pretzel where you on the campaign can't figure out what it is. I keep asking them, like, what are the clear rules? Like, just tell the campaigns what they can do, but they can't get people internally focused on it until, like, from from an engineer standpoint, they think election day is just November 3rd. Right. But as we all know, or it didn't early, I mean, early voting started like a couple of weeks ago.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:48

So you need to have it a lot sooner. And that is they are, they have not learned some of those lessons or they're not prioritizing it because they're also like, eh, it's a midterms, like it's not the presidential. And so it's just harder to get, it's harder to get resources. And it's really frustrating because I can just see the same things playing out again. But to your point, from the opposite end where it's starting super restrictive, and now they're trying to figure out what they what they open up versus it being super open and then slowly like putting guardrails around it.

Eric Wilson 25:20

It really is uh it's it's sort of the pendulum swings, you know, um uh from one direction to the other. And and I I I think one of the I the the thing I would just say to people is like this time is not like last time, right? I I think they're and and applying the learning the exact well lear yes, learn the lessons from what happened with social media and politics. Um but this is different. This time is different, and it's a it's a new ball of wax. I I think and again, I I totally take the perspective of uh, and I wonder if this isn't why, you know, we're we're both kind of solopreneurs now, because we don't have to deal with other people um uh trying to squelch what we're we're talking about. But um this idea that you know politics and Facebook would that was my life, you know, of every day. That because that's where the voters were, that's where the grassroots is, and and that was the kind of, you know, when you're on a campaign, that's the center of your universe, nothing else matters. Uh if you're Facebook, you're a multinational, multi-billion dollar company, you've got so many other things going on. So uh I I that that's a key perspective of, you know, there were smart people inside trying to make these arguments, but there might not have been the uh the bandwidth or decision-making capacity to to handle that in the world.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

We also were really we also were really, and I use the Royal We as Facebook there, very much responding to what was happening in the press. And so I remember, you know, multiple times when campaign professionals like yourselves or the parties really like for political ads, for instance, the number of people who came up to me and were like, please, please, please, Facebook, do not get rid of political ads. Like, please, please, please, do not. And I'm like, okay, then I need you all to give me some cover externally on this because I need, or I need something that I can take to leadership to show this, because they feel they felt like they were just getting hammered. And they're like, this in the grand scheme of things, this isn't that much money. Right.

SPEAKER_02 27:31

So not worth the headache. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

Why is it worth the headache to even do? And that was a challenge as well, because you know, for I understood it, like if you're a campaign, on one hand, your your person might be a senator who's trying to push for, you know, something like the Honest Ads Act, but then they want to use the same stuff on their campaign. And it's like, all right, which one? Like, you guys gotta decide like what this is gonna look like. And I think that's part of the reason we haven't seen regulation is we're asking them to regulate themselves.

Eric Wilson 28:02

Yeah. And and that's always hard to do, especially when, I mean, you and I, I think are are digital natives and we're we're fairly senior digital natives, and and people like us are just now starting to be in in Congress. And so I think that that is, you know, one of the challenges. Again, uh, there are AI natives. That's not me. Um and so I'm sure people are cringing at the way we talk about AI regulation and things like that. So um, well, I I I'm so excited to dig into this book. And just I know it's been a number of years uh laboring to get this here. Uh, and and it should be a fun uh walk down memory lane. Um any any closing thoughts for for folks about what what's the what's the lesson that that you learned um that we should not make the same mistake again in the future, whether that's AI, whether that's another social media question.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Well, there's there's two things that I I end the book on. One is especially for for for folks working in AI, but I think that's very broad, right? Like I think we're all kind of working in this AI space. Yeah but I really think early on we like good intentions are not safeguards. Just because you mean well, it's not a good safeguard. And scale is not a strategy. And I feel with AI, we are in that same mode again, where it's just like, well, I mean well, maybe people will believe that. And it's like they're gonna go off your actions, not what just what you say. But I also talk about and I end with my phrase panic responsibly, because I think that it's important for all of us to remember as individuals, we still have agency. We still have agency over the tools we choose to use, we still have agency over what we choose to scroll, click on, consume, like put into these AI tools. And I think that that's important to remember that us as a voter and a citizen have a role in this conversation too. And we can't get paralyzed between, at least at the moment, we're being told if you use AI, it's cheating, but if you don't learn how to use it, you're gonna lose your job. And so it's we're in this uncomfortable spot where we're going to be in for a while, of this messy middle where you can only, you got to figure out what's the best step for you today, but understanding that you may have to pivot in a week or two of what that looks like, and that there really isn't a playbook for us right now. And it just reminds me a lot of the post-2016 world. And even before that, we didn't have playbooks. And maybe we don't, like you said, we can't copy that playbook from before, but we can learn the lessons of what we wish we knew when we were creating a new one.

Eric Wilson 30:47

All right. Well, thanks to Katie for a great conversation. Her new book, Disrupting Politics, is out now. Go order it. Link is in the show notes. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, you know that all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. You look smart in the process, more people will learn about the show. It's a win-win all around, and you can visit campaigntrend.com to check out our newsletters and past podcasts. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is produced by Advocacy Cut, a media production company.