Focused on the television so political advertising became focused there. Technology has changed so that now when you walk into a room of 60yearolds what are they looking at . Their phones. For folks in the political world who want to reach into the future understand what the future of political advertising will look like, things like candy crash or the latest game there is a voice something new popping up. Finding ways to get your message in front of people where they are paying attention is important. For a lot of folks who have been doing this for a while, they are used to advertisements on tv, which is fine. Lots of folks still watch tv. Understanding the future of politics is understanding where attention is being paid. Brian i did you write this book . Kristen as someone who is young and republican, i came to discover in 2008 that no longer was it weird that i was a young person interested in politics, it was weird that i was a young republican. I wanted to get at the heart at why our generation thought that being republican wasnt for them. They thought the conservative ideas were not for them. It began as a masters thesis at johns hopkins, and eventually began to evolve into something bigger. As more and more republicans came to the realization that it would be hard to open elections if they are not reaching the next generation. Brian you grew up in florida. You talk about being a member of a Computer Club. Why did you get involved in a Computer Club . Kristen my dad is an electrical engineer. He was always focused on teaching his daughters about science, math, technology. None of us became engineers but i always had that exposure when i was young. I loved playing computer games. When i was a teenager, i was taking my magazine and programming the quizzes like, what kind of prom dress should you wear . I would program them in basic into my computer so that instead of writing on my magazine, i would add up the score on a computer. I was always interested in technology. That has continued now. Brian best salon insights is what . Esselon insights is what . Kristen it is a Research Firm they try to predict who will win and they get it wrong. They dramatically overestimated mitt romneys chances. During the midterms, it was the democrats who got it wrong. They underestimated the republican landslide. I am somebody younger and i want to know what his next. They are not answering cell phones when we called so we have to find new sources of data that understand Public Opinion. Echelon is all about that, merging that traditional Opinion Research with the things we can learn from analyzing social media, analyzing consumer data. There is so much information that we give off when we go to a store and swipe the credit card or tweet, and that information can be analyzed. To give us clues about what people think, like, and believe. Brian are you representing any existing politicians . Kristen we are focused mostly on nonprofits and clients dealing with ideas. We have done work in the past four campaigns and party groups, but at the moment, we are waiting to see which candidate in 2016 are going to be interested in using data. Brian you went to the university of florida, what did you major in . Kristen political silence political science. I already had a job waiting for me and washington, d. C. They hired me the summer before i graduated and it got me the exposure to the world of polling and research i originally wanted to be a press secretary i watched too much west wing and that was where my interest was. I was directed toward, hey, you should check out polling because i was good with numbers and spreadsheets and data but i loved communication so polling is the synthesis of those worlds. Brian we have some video that will trigger something you have written about. You can tell us why you think this particular person is important and good at what he does. [video clip] lets level the playing field. Programming is not so foreign. It is something most of us can do right now with just a bit of guidance. Programming is about telling a computer what to do. You need to be looked to express yourself distinctly and tersely and specifically because computers are dumb devices. It can only do what you tell it to do. So if we were to pick you can tell a computer to do something Say Something. This would represent a statement. You can tell a computer to do something conditionally if something is true, go in this direction. You can tell a computer to repeat its self multiple times and do something again and again. Brian who is that man . Kristen he is a professor of Computer Science at harvard. He teaches an introductory Computer Science classes that huge numbers of graduates are interested in taking because they all want to be the next mark zuckerberg, or they understand that getting the world of technology and Computer Sciences critical in any field in which you want to succeed. I had the opportunity to take ca 50 during the fall, and they encourage us to take courses with undergraduates. You can take courses in art history, but i signed up for cs50 and everybody told me i was crazy but i enjoyed it and i completed the class and got a certificate in the way i got the certificate was through something called edex or folks can take Classes Online cup i get as much as the real experience as possible without actually being there in cambridge on harvards campus. I write about it in the book because cs 50 we understand how technology and data is going to be playing a role in the future of politics and a host of different industries. It is an interesting way of delivering skills and knowledge. It is a model of a Fouryear College degree where you spend a lot of time in the classroom and live on campus that is no longer the norm. The nontraditional Student Experience is now the norm, is the condition. I think that republicans and democrats have not really addressed the question of, how do we deliver skills effectively to people who want to learn about Computer Science, who want to learn how to become a nurse who want to learn about any industry where you can pickup skills . So i really think that on this question of, who is providing Affordable College education . You are going to hear a lot of discussion about that. I think particularly from democrats will talk about the issue of student loans. In the book, i suggest that focusing on the loan issue is pretty narrow, that is about debt management. Think there is an opportunity is focusing on how we deliver skills and education in a costeffective, nontraditional way. Cs 50 is proving to be a great example of how folks hundreds of thousands of people have access to taking this class and gaining skills and getting jobs in the technical World Without having to take out tens of thousands of dollars of loan debt. It is a model i would like politicians to Pay Attention to. Brian harvard is not known to be a bastion of republicanism. Kristen they were very nice to me. Brian why did you go there and what did you find among the students . Any republicans . Kristen there are some republicans. I was assigned six students to work with me, all of whom are very gracious and helpful. Harvard has a republican club. I was very honored to be able to speak with an early on in the semester. I think what is interesting about being a republican at harvard is, your beliefs are constantly being challenged but i think that makes you stronger i think the fact that you are constantly having to battle do ideological battle with the folks in your dorm i think it makes you better. Brian between two ferns, here is a clip you refer to in your book. [video clip] zach what did you come here to plug . President obama i would not be with you if i didnt have something to plug. Heavy heart of the Affordable Care act . I heard about it, that is the thing that doesnt work. Why would you get the guy who created soon to create your website . It works great, and millions of americans have only gotten Health Insurance plans and what we want is for people to know that you can get Affordable Health care. Most Young Americans right now are not covered. The truth is that they can get coverage for what it costs to pay your cell phone girl. Is this what they mean by drones . A lot of young people think they are invincible. Did you say invisible . No, no. Not invisible, invincible. Meaning that they dont think they can get hurt. I understand that nobody can be invisible i understand that. Brian why did you refer to this . Kristen this is a video of obama going on a video podcast with Zach Galifianakis where he tries to encourage young people to sign up for Health Insurance. When the Affordable Care act was launched, one fear was that younger folks were not enrolled in Health Insurance because they think, i dont really need it. The odds of getting sick or low. If the insurance pools were only older americans, it could become financially unsustainable. The administration was focused on young people. This is one of the ways president obama went about doing it. This show gets huge viewership. After he went on this web show, it was the number one driver of traffic to healthcare. Gov. It was important that the president do this because the website had a rocky rollout. The website kept crashing. He had to go convince young people, im sorry, please try again to make sure that the law could succeed. He wasnt just doing an interview on the sunday morning talk show, he wasnt doing an interview on the network news. He was going to this really silly comedy podcast and trying to deliver this message and millions of people saw it. Brian what was Zach Galifianakis up to when we watched . Kristen luckily, you are being much kinder to me. It is part of the joke, he is a comedian. He is kind of pretending that the president is boring, giving him a hard time. It is a variation on the stick at Stephen Colbert used to have. Putting on this persona like, he is unimpressed with the guest and needles them over things they believe. Brian what is your message to republicans . Kristen my message is that it is ok to be funny it is ok to put yourself in situations where you can take a joke or in here, the president was ok with jokes about the website being quote, created by the guy who made the soon. That is a tough interview. The president knew that being able to poke fun at yourself, acknowledging imperfection rather than putting up a front was the better strategy. Brian what is a soon . Kristen it is microsofts version of the ipod that did not sell particularly well. Brian lets go back to the debate to 1996. Bob dole, who is a funny man but this is not a funny moment. [video clip] this is important business, this election. I ask for your support, i ask for your help. If you want to get involved, cap into my homepage, www. Dole camp96. Org. Thank you, god bless america. [applause] brian one interesting thing is that bill clinton left. Last rid laughed. Kristen that was the first time a candidate mentioned a web url in remarks, he was directing people to his website. He missed the dot. On one hand, it is an incredible historic moment. I a did an interview with one of the tech consultants for the Dole Campaign who said, as soon as he saw that clip, he knew the website would not be able to handle the traffic because this was 1996. He also talked about how because doles website missed the dot it was marred with this mistake. I mentioned some of the News Coverage at the time was, dole tried to do something to reach out to the internet generation but failed in the execution because of that misspeak. Brian was his team not ready . Kristen they did not know that that was coming. That moment of panic i describe in the book where he and his colleagues realize they are about to get a whole bunch of traffic. We have come such a long way in terms of campaign technology. I write about this very basic they had to get a backhoe to put a t1 line into the house, and get Internet Service for 1000 a month. Nowadays, you dont get a gold star for having a website, or even being on twitter and facebook is in cuttingedge anymore. Campaign technology in the last 20 Years Technology has come such a long way and the campaigns had to adapt. Brian how would you grade president obama and mitt romney from the last campaign . Kristen president obama set the standard for what campaigns need to be like in the future. In addition to being very effective at marshaling support through social media and organizing, the obama team was also very effective at collecting data and using data to pinpoint and turn out voters. In a way that republicans were not. The romney team there is a man who is now the director of Data Analytics for jeb bush. One of the smartest folks on the right, but he was understaffed. It was him versus the obama team. I think the Obama Campaign set the standard for what campaigns need to look like in the future. Brian what about mitt romney . Kristen he tried, and i think he ran a conventional online campaign. He wasnt doing much revolutionary stuff that the obama team was. I mentioned that the obama team was using online games as a way to reach folks, putting advertisements in need for speed and nfl. It is using things like xbox live, where people are playing games all over the country, to feed ads. There are tons of technological opportunities. Republicans are beginning to catch up a little bit or they are beginning to use social media more effectively. In 2012, if you looked at mitt romneys facebook page, it was a lot of fundraising pleas, how many people were at the rally. As soon as the election ended qb and seeing pictures of him on the beach with grandkids. Him taking selfies with people in airports. It became more personal. I am hopeful that republicans will take away a lesson that you should be using social media as a way to show your personality. Pull back the veil, pulled back the curtain. Help build that trust. Brian i want to ask you what you think of the next video we are going to show, these are College Republicans from youtube talking about republican millennials. [video clip] they still think guys in d. C. Can govern the economy. The old way isnt working. It closes down innovation. It makes us feel stuck. Now it is our turn. We dont have to accept the another double we have an opportunity to better ourselves. The next generation of leaders, and educators, whether one or whether we want to go about old ways or if we are ready for fresh ideas. We are republicans because our principles getting Old Washington out of the way of ideas that have the power to grow our economy we know our generation can do better than washingtons feelings. We know it because our generation has changed the way our world works. Brian as you know i know more than you politicians have been running against washington forever. What makes them think that this is going to matter now . Kristen this generation is more distrustful and frustrated than previous generations. Running against washington has always been an easy go to. We have seen a sustained level of the percent of americans who say we are on the wrong track. The percentage of americans who feel economically insecure, particularly the Younger Generation who is coming of age in an era where the idea that they can immediately get a job that will pay them enough to buy a home and have a car and live the american the old American Dream is fading. They have so much student debt they cannot get the jobs they wanted with the career paths that would help them advance to make the money they want to lead the life they want. There is all of this frustration and i think what College Republicans the reason why you see as like that republicans have been unfairly branded as the party of old, the party of the past, the party of the American Dream that doesnt exist, the party of what has artie been. In order for republicans to win, they have to prove that they are the party of what is next. What is next is not centralized planning in washington or big bureaucracy, what is next is innovation. He saw liftyft this was technology responded to the problem of inadequate transportation and urban areas. This is showing that the free market came in to solve a problem. I think that is why you see young republican saying, we are not about what is old, we are not about washington running everything. We are about putting power in individuals hands. They can disrupt the status quo. And try something new. I think pull after poll shows that there is an appetite along among millennials for something new, something that doesnt look like it has always been. Brian here is this is also from youtube, from an Organization Called republicans are people too. Com. [video clip] kristen like cats and dogs. Brian do you know the group . Kristen it is an outgrowth of a campaign that was done in the western u. S. Around mormons that was all about trying to change the perception of the church of latter day saints the idea that you put ads on buses showing a diverse set of faces to break the stereotype of what folks thought of when they heard the term, mormon. I think folks looked about and said that is a successful campaign, lets try that republicans because republicans are misunderstood. What i have seen whenever i talk to young people is they do have this unfortunate perception of what republicans are. They think republicans are older, predominantly white religious, conservative, living in rural areas. A lot of data suggest that is not completely wrong, but there are different ways to be republican. I think one of the big challenges the party has is the need to demonstrate that being republican doesnt ju