How to win an election.
Because the rules have changed. Completely.
Trump didn’t win on policy — in fact, Trump didn’t really win it at all.
Elon Musk & Peter Thiel won this election. They did it to put Musk into cabinet and put former Thiel employee and investee, JD Vance, next in line to the White House throne … and they succeeded.
They didn’t win with policy points. They didn’t they win with a better vision for the economy. They won by making a very precise incision into the minds of a tiny number of key voters and inserting a slightly different world view that drove behaviour at the ballot box.
In the end fewer that 275,0001 votes, just 0.08% of the population, decided the election.
That’s one person out of every 1,200 Americans deciding for the other 1,199.
🗳️ Three tricks to put an 𝕏 in the box.
So how do you ensure votes? There are three key techniques at play:
Basic Instincts
Short Stories
Reality Distortion
Basic Instincts: Resistance is futile.
There’s a reason old car adverts showed a beautiful woman in the first three seconds.
Your basic, emotional, subconscious brain is much stronger and faster than your more complex conscious intelligence. You want the car long before you see the price… and your brain remembers that feeling even after you calculate it’s unaffordable.
“Their eating the cats” is the same technique as the supermodel in the car. By the time your brain has time to work out how ludicrous the statement is, your body has already felt and recorded the fear and revulsion.
By repeating that your opponent is “lazy as hell” or referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” again and again and again, the emotional reaction becomes deeply embedded — irrespective of how ludicrous your brain knows it all to be.
You can’t escape the subconscious programming. Resistance is futile.
Short stories: No-one gives a fuck about facts.
Storytelling is about the most basic function2 of the human part of your brain. It is more basic even than language. It synchronises social bonds, correlates time and emotion and defines our memories and identity.
When we hear stories, even if we don’t believe them, they are deeply memorable on a level we don’t understand. We don’t even notice the feelings the story inspired, still lingering the next day.
Facts, on the other hand, have no longevity, no potency and no value in politics. They are just not processed by the brain in the same way.
It’s why orators matter - and intellectuals don’t. It’s why insurgents win and incumbents fail. It’s never about policy or performance, it’s always about the narrative.
The intellectual approach is to tell facts and then expect (or help) the recipient to fit those facts into their story. It’s remarkably presumptuous on an intellectual an personal level and it’s not effective.
When MAGA supporters tell stories about strangers “eating cats”, about monsters under the bed, and then confidently say they will fix the problem, we remember that narrative without realising.
They don’t say how they’ll fix the problem (they don’t offer policy facts) but nevertheless you remember the narrative — the sense — that somehow they will.
Democrats meanwhile talk about facts… and then gives facts about their policy… and no-one gives a shit, no-one forms an emotional connection… and when voters hit the ballot box their hearts want to tick a box their heads simply don’t understand.
Reality Distortion: How to gerrymander a brain.
But here’s the kicker: you don’t actually need either of those two techniques when you control the environment. You can change some people’s vote without even attempting to change their mind3.
Ultimately, our survival instinct to conform to our tribal world view is more potent than our cognitive, rational individuality.
Under normal circumstances these two desires are not at conflict with each other, because we socialise with like-minded people and our people perpetuate like-mindedness.
But what if I could artificially distort your crowd? What if I had a list of all of your friends, had a list of things they’ve said … and I only showed you the things that fit a particular world view? I would change your understanding of your tribe and your instinct to fit in with the crowd would start to override and alter your individual beliefs.
Well that list is exactly what any social media platform has: endless amounts of content from people you follow and an algorithm that slices just a tiny selection to show you — content which defines your perception of social and political norms.
🎯 Precision guided munitions.
For these techniques to be effective they need to be carefully guided to target. You need to get the right message in front of the right people. How does this happen?
Musk and Thiel are uniquely well positioned to do just that.
Musk owns Twitter and therefore has total control over the algorithm that defines the feed, full access to analyse everything that’s ever been posted on the platform and a purpose built AI model (Grok) plugged right into the back of it. If you’ve ever been on Twitter he already knows more about you than you do.
Thiel is cofounder of Palantir — an AI research and development company with numerous dark US defence & civil government contracts. In the UK, where procurement is marginally more open, we know that they hold - or are in talks to acquire - contracts to process our NHS patient data, police & crime data and income tax and benefits data.
Thiel and Palatir have been tied to Cambridge Analytica, either through staff consulting or funding of PACs that enabled Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in Trump’s 2016 campaign.
With all of the data and technical skill they command between them, modelling the electorate precisely enough to give the right message to the right people seems trivial.
Where Kamala Harris’ campaign ran on a monolithic, often vague policy platform more reminiscent of the 20th century approach, Musk’s super-PAC was precisely targeting voters with often diametrically-opposing messages, tailored for specific audiences.
Even off Twitter, Musk was able to target people down to the ZIP code.
This example shows two adverts found running on SnapChat: one aimed at mainly Arab residents, the other at mainly Jewish residents…
Just hours after the election, Black people across the US started receiving text messages “telling them that they had been ‘selected’ to pick cotton and needed to report to ‘the nearest plantation’” — and while Trump’s campaign has sought to distance themselves from the affair it’s a stark reminder of just how known every individual really is. How tightly they had their eye on the ball.
Game, set and match.
And indeed their game was so tight that at 22:30 Eastern on the evening of the 2024 election, Elon Musk tweeted: “Game, set and match”.
He wasn’t kidding. He knew he’d won.
… and with a confidence that illustrates the exacting control over the narrative of a precisely targeted audience, presumably in only a tiny number of counties.
When you know your data well enough, you can extrapolate outcomes from small amounts of new data with a very high accuracy.
In just 10 years the Republican party has been replaced with a new, apolitical industrial machine run by Musk and Thiel and if anyone (Democrats or Republicans of old) wants to supplant the new MAGA machine next cycle they have to understand what battlefield they are actually on.
When you’re competing against a team that knows the intimate story of a each individual electorate’s lives, can reach every person and tailor a message specifically for them — with no qualms about the truth of the message — can wrap that voter in a cocoon of noise that fundamentally shifts their world view… and has endless resources and skill to do all of this without breaking a sweat…
… no amount of policy introspection is going to make a blind bit of difference.
The rules of war have completely changed, forever.
Feel free to check my maths … of course.
This is a whole fascinating subject: paper here, quick summary here.