This is how The Walking Dead helped Donald Trump win the election

(Image credit: Frank Ockenfels 3/AMC)

published 22 November 2016

Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been credited with winning the president-elect the White House. "Unschooled in traditional campaigning, [Kushner] was able to look at the business of politics the way so many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have sized up other bloated industries," Forbes reports in a profile on the Trump team's unlikely hero.

But if you ask Kushner, there was no magic to it. Trump's win came down to just one thing: Data. But not just any data — the kind of data that understands that, for example, if you live in a certain neighborhood in Ohio and like The Walking Dead, you are also worried about immigration and want to hear Donald Trump talk about it:

Kushner's crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee's data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration, or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions — say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations — even the topics of the speeches. "He put all the different pieces together," [Trump campaign digital director Brad] Parscale says. "And what's funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn't pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well." [Forbes]

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.