Ben Shapiro calls The Lincoln Project an 'incredible grift'
Radio host Ben Shapiro, author of 'How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps,' joins Laura Ingraham on 'The Ingraham Angle.'
A new study revealed that The Lincoln Project wasn't nearly as effective on the electorate in the 2020 election despite the hype the anti-Trump group received from the mainstream media.
The Daily Beast reported on Wednesday about the findings from a study conducted by the Democratic Super PAC Priorities USA, which looked into the effectiveness of the Lincoln Project's ads, which frequently went viral on Twitter and received plenty of fanfare on MSNBC.
"They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden," the Daily Beast explained. "A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for."
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According to the Daily Beast, the study wasn't meant to criticize the Lincoln Project, though it has plenty of critics on the right as well as the progressive left, but rather "see if Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing" with the effectiveness of the group's ads, perhaps Priorities USA could then use Twitter as a "quasi-barometer" to test their own ads.
"But that didn’t turn out to be the case," Daily Beast wrote. "According to Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics—likes and retweets—and persuasion was -0.3, 'meaning that the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.' The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested."
That ad, which was released back in June, received over 12 million views on Twitter.
According to the Daily Beast, Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen "didn’t dispute the conclusions. In fact, he said they made sense."
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“We were pretty clear from the get go about the lanes of our strategic outreach. The first one, which made the most noise, was for the audience of one," Galen explained, referring to President Trump and the Lincoln Project's hopes of making him, the White House and his campaign angry. “The second one, is a lot of the stuff we did in Electoral College states, a lot of times we didn’t even release it on Twitter. But we understood, nobody better than us, that Twitter was a bullhorn that from our perspective drove what we did against Trump, sometimes into his head, and sometimes into the narrative that the press was observing and creating, and gave our 2.7 million people on Twitter the energy they craved.”
Ahamed of Priorities USA did acknowledge that the Lincoln Project was more effective in motivating "predisposed Biden voters."
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“Our takeaway is that we as political operatives or people online on Twitter a lot, aren’t necessarily a good judge of what is persuasive,” Ahamed told the Daily Beast.
Among the founders of the anti-Trump PAC, which launched in 2019, are ex-GOP operatives Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, John Weaver and conservative lawyer George Conway.