Eitan Hersh, “Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

Eitan Hersh is the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hersh is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University.

We’ve come to think of political campaigns as highly sophisticated data-processing machines, capable of precisely targeting voters based on the last item they bought on Amazon. Hacking the Electorate suggests something very different about how campaigns actually target voters. Hersh argues that political campaigns vary greatly in how detailed their data actually are, at the whim of whether the state collects detailed or more general information about voters. Campaigns typically use the best available public data to design targeting strategies. As a result, strategies vary across the country based on how campaigns perceive voters in different information environments.

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