Chapter 31 Further Reading

Foundational Texts

Kreiss, Daniel. Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. Oxford University Press, 2012. The definitive account of how the Democratic Party built its digital and data infrastructure from the Dean campaign through 2008. Essential for understanding where modern campaign digital programs came from and why they look the way they do.

Kreiss, Daniel. Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2016. A follow-up examining the 2012 campaigns and the emergence of the professional class of campaign technologists. Covers the organizational sociology of digital campaign work, not just the technology.

Green, Joshua, and Sasha Issenberg. "Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go." Bloomberg Businessweek, October 27, 2016. The must-read account of the 2016 Trump campaign's unconventional digital advertising operation — including extensive use of voter suppression targeting against likely Clinton voters — that reshaped how campaigns and researchers think about political digital advertising.

Email and Fundraising

Eimantas Balciunas, "The Evolution of Political Email Fundraising." Various reports from the M+R Benchmarks Study, published annually. The M+R Benchmarks Study surveys hundreds of progressive advocacy organizations and campaigns on email performance metrics, providing the best industry-wide data on open rates, click rates, and conversion rates.

Hersh, Eitan D. Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Examines how campaigns use voter file data to make decisions, including digital targeting. Particularly useful for understanding the implications of the data campaigns hold and how they use it to make assumptions about voters.

Social Media and Platforms

Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press, 2018. A rigorous empirical study of how political information spreads across the American media ecosystem, including social media. Challenges both "social media is uniformly bad for democracy" and "social media democratizes political communication" narratives with actual data.

Bail, Chris. Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make Our Platforms Less Polarizing. Princeton University Press, 2021. Social media researcher Chris Bail examines how social media reshapes political identity and polarization, with implications for how campaigns should think about what they are actually doing to the political environment with their digital strategies.

Freelon, Deen, Charlton McIlwain, and Meredith Clark. "Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice." Center for Media and Social Impact, 2016. A key text on how social movements use digital platforms — relevant for understanding the differences between movement digital strategy and campaign digital strategy.

Digital Advertising and Targeting

Ghosh, Dipayan. Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley Is Destructive by Design. Brookings Institution Press, 2020. A former Facebook policy advisor's account of how digital advertising business models create incentives that distort political discourse. Essential critical reading for anyone working in campaign digital advertising.

Persily, Nathaniel, and Joshua A. Tucker, eds. Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform. Cambridge University Press, 2020. A collection of essays by leading scholars examining what we know and don't know about social media's effects on democratic politics, including political advertising.

Academic Articles

Karpf, David. "Digital Politics After Sandy Hook." Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2016. Examines how digital organizing responds to crisis events — relevant for understanding rapid response strategy in digital environments.

Broockman, David, and Donald Green. "Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates' Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments." Political Behavior, 2014. One of the few rigorous experimental studies of the effectiveness of online political advertising. The findings (more modest than the industry claims) are important context for evaluating campaign digital ad spending.

Ridout, Travis N., Michael Franz, Kenneth M. Goldstein, and William J. Feltus. "Separation by Television Program: Understanding the Targeting of Political Advertising in Presidential Elections." Political Communication, 2012. Though focused on TV, the analytical framework for understanding targeting strategy translates directly to digital advertising environment.

Industry Resources

CMDI Campaign Finance Trends. Data and analysis on campaign digital spending from the technology vendor that processes a significant portion of political digital transactions.

M+R Benchmarks Study (annual). The most comprehensive industry survey of email and digital program performance metrics for advocacy organizations and campaigns. Available at benchmarks.mrbenchmarks.com.

OpenSecrets (opensecrets.org). Comprehensive FEC data analysis including campaign digital ad spending, vendor relationships, and fundraising performance by channel.

Ad Observer (NYU Tandon School). Research tool that collects and analyzes political advertising on Facebook, allowing researchers and campaigns to study ad creative, targeting, and spending across the political spectrum.

Podcasts and Ongoing Resources

"The Campaign Workshop" podcast. Industry professionals discussing practical campaign digital and field strategy.

"How I Built This" (NPR). While not political, this entrepreneurship podcast frequently covers the digital campaign veterans who have transitioned to building political technology companies.

Democratic National Committee Tech Summit (annual). Proceedings and presentations available on campaign technology, data, and digital strategy.