... after Trump locked down the GOP nomination by winning Indiana’s primary, {Trump's son-in-law Jared] Kushner tapped [Brad] Parscale, a political novice who built web pages for the Trump family’s business and charities, to begin an ambitious digital operation fashioned around a database they named Project Alamo.So Steve Bannon, who wants to expand the Breitbart media empire, and Jared Kushner, a real estate investor who also publishes The New York Observer and who's linked to Trump-branded businesses, have been amassing all this contact information about Trump zealots. The information that's collected, obviously, would be valuable for future Republican campaigns, Trump's or otherwise. Collecting this sort of data is a standard part of any major political campaign.
... Powered by Project Alamo and data supplied by the RNC and Cambridge Analytica, [Parscale's] team is spending $70 million a month, much of it to cultivate a universe of millions of fervent Trump supporters, many of them reached through Facebook. By Election Day, the campaign expects to have captured 12 million to 14 million e-mail addresses and contact information (including credit card numbers) for 2.5 million small-dollar donors, who together will have ponied up almost $275 million. “I wouldn’t have come aboard, even for Trump, if I hadn’t known they were building this massive Facebook and data engine,” says Bannon. “Facebook is what propelled Breitbart to a massive audience. We know its power.”
Since Trump paid to build this audience with his own campaign funds, he alone will own it after Nov. 8 and can deploy it to whatever purpose he chooses. He can sell access to other campaigns or use it as the basis for a 2020 presidential run. It could become the audience for a Trump TV network. As Bannon puts it: “Trump is an entrepreneur.”
But here's what's not standard:
... neither Trump’s campaign nor the RNC has prioritized registering and mobilizing the 47 million eligible white voters without college degrees who are Trump’s most obvious source of new votes, as FiveThirtyEight analyst David Wasserman noted.Right -- Team Trump isn't bothering to reach out to the unmotivated in the hope of persuading them to be Trump voters. That's what you do if you want to win an election. But maybe that's not what you do if you're really more interested in building a list of Trump hero-worshippers who might be the target market for future Trump-branded products. That may be what Kushner is thinking. Bannon may be thinking that he's interested only in those who are passionate believers in Trumpist politics.
I'm not saying that Trump doesn't really want to win the election. I think he desperately wants to win it. He's wanted to win it ever since it became clear that he could win it because winning the presidency would be the ultimate ego trip; now he wants to win just to save face.
But I'm not sure what his team really wants. And Trump's many detours from the campaign trail to promote Trump-branded properties, including the one this week at his D.C. hotel, suggest that Trump is quite ready to move on as well if he can't win the big prize.
The digital operation has made some effort to build up Trump's voter base:
Parscale was given a small budget to expand Trump’s base and decided to spend it all on Facebook. He developed rudimentary models, matching voters to their Facebook profiles and relying on that network’s “Lookalike Audiences” to expand his pool of targets. He ultimately placed $2 million in ads across several states, all from his laptop at home, then used the social network’s built-in “brand-lift” survey tool to gauge the effectiveness of his videos, which featured infographic-style explainers about his policy proposals or Trump speaking to the camera. “I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Parscale says. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”But this isn't what you limit yourself to in a campaign. In campaign, you try to identify everybody who might vote for the candidate and work as hard as you can to get them all registered and drag them into the voting booth on the candidate's behalf. What the Trump team is doing is just an effort to find more enthusiastic Trumpers.
I don't think the long-term post-defeat plan is to build a political movement. I think Trump-branded products will increasingly be marketed to Trump admirers. And I think Steve Bannon has big Trumpist media dreams. But Trump as an ongoing political force? Not if he never reaches beyond his base.
