A presidential election is about finding PMF for a candidate; if the product is bad, no one can save it
An election team is the fastest-scaling organization in the short term, but the product — the candidate — is already set. All you can do is product-market fit that product to the whole country's environment.
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An election team is the fastest-scaling organization in the short term
Kevin directly analogizes an election team to a tech startup: in 2007 Obama was just one of seven or eight Democratic candidates, and the team had to hire people, rent offices and find volunteers in an extremely short time, scaling up field capacity. The core job of field members is not to make calls themselves to canvass votes, but to develop local volunteers, train them up, and amplify the whole capacity. He specifically notes this playbook is very similar to the BD teams and station-chief systems at Didi and Meituan when they were fighting — pushing an app and pushing a candidate are the same underlying motion.
— KevinAn election team is easy to manage because there is only one goal: win
Kevin says an election team is "both hard and not hard." Hard because the processes are immature and for the vast majority of people, doing it more than two years makes you a veteran; not hard because the goal is extremely aligned — a company will want to do this product one moment and that product the next, it has to pivot, but in an election framework you just win, there is no other purpose. Strategy can change, but the product is already set, it is your candidate, and all that remains is how to product-market fit that product to the whole country's environment.
— KevinThe first step in field organizing is grabbing voter registration, not votes
Kevin lays out the specific tactics: in the US you must register before voting, and when registering you can choose Democrat, Republican or independent, so the team's strategy is first to find locals and get them registered as Democratic voters, expanding the pool of people you can influence, then canvass vote by vote. The second move is to push key states to lengthen and expand early voting options, because working-class people cannot get time off on election day and queues take four or five hours, so more voting windows bring in the people you want to pull in. This playbook of voter registration plus early voting was also used by Trump's team this year.
— KevinIf the candidate product is bad, no team can save it
Kevin says the key to winning is first that the product must be good — the candidate himself has to be a product worth pushing to society, and that is very hard to change. Obama's early debate level was average, he talked too much and explained too finely, and only later did he develop delivery and storytelling ability, but the product's foundation was good to begin with. Beyond a good product, a bad team also won't do; you need both. He also points out the difference from startups: a company has no finish line and can go on forever, an election has a very clear finish line, which is whether you win on election day.
— KevinTrump's win was within expectations, just too fast and too stark
Kevin says this result was absolutely within his expectations; the only thing beyond expectations was the margin of victory and the speed of the result — he had originally judged it might drag on for one or two weeks, with disputes at swing-state polling places and lawyers from both sides litigating. He attributes the cause to a resemblance to 2008: economic problems, the public lowering its expectations for personal and family economic prospects, inflation and the wealth gap, plus Trump being the "no-war candidate" while the US was heavily invested in both Ukraine and Israel, and public sentiment was "why spend so much abroad and not take care of things at home."
— KevinHarris's team not embracing podcasts was a strategic loss
Kevin believes the Democrats this time were still stuck in the old-school playbook on media strategy. Podcasts are already very mainstream in the US; a host like Joe Rogan, who comes from stand-up comedy, has no fixed political lean, and does two- or three-hour episodes, represents exactly a lot of ordinary Americans, and the long format actually builds trust; traditional cable TV is at most twenty-some minutes and has ads, and public trust in traditional media is at a historic low. Trump went on Joe Rogan and talked for three hours, and also did the 45-minute Lex Fridman episode; the Harris team did not embrace this channel well.
— KevinIt is the Republican Party following Trump, not the other way around
Kevin says Trump himself is not a product produced by a party; he himself is the product, and everyone is adapting to follow him. He used to be a Democrat, and only borrowed the Republican framework and internal party process to become the official candidate; if the Democratic mechanism could work, he could have gone that route too. Ideologically he is generally more inclined to traditional Republican views, but he has also overturned the Republican Party's core creed — the Republican tradition champions free markets, free trade and no tariffs, while he started adding tariffs in his first term and may add a lot more in his second.
— KevinTrump's biggest promise to tech is deregulation
Kevin says the market has very high expectations for Trump's positive impact on US tech development, and the core promise is reducing regulations. The best example is energy, and energy is tied to AI development: building new power plants in the US, especially nuclear plants, is very difficult, with all kinds of regulations blocking it, and developing AI infrastructure requires a lot of energy, so he says he wants to cut many regulations and let people build infrastructure faster to feed tech development. Another is embracing crypto and web3. The risk is uncertainty — he may want to do something today and drop it tomorrow, while companies care more about stability, and "the government doing nothing is actually the best."
— KevinIn their own words · checked verbatim
Of course if you lose, you're unemployed; if you win, actually you're also unemployed.
当然你如果输的话 你就是失业嘛 你赢的话呢 其实你也失业
Kevin14:11
I think first your product has to be good, the candidate has to be good — though the definition may be very fuzzy, it's something you can see when you see it.
我觉得首先你的产品要好 这个候选人好 虽然可能定义上很模糊 但是你也是你能看到就能看到的
Kevin15:12
He himself is not a product produced by a party; he himself is such a product, and everyone is adapting to follow this product of his.
他本身不是一个党派产出来的一个产品 他自己就是这么一个产品 而大家在跟着他这个产品去适应
Kevin26:24
Trump is actually the Republican Party following Trump; Trump has nothing to do with the Republican Party, Trump is just Trump.
特朗普其实本身是共和党跟着特朗普走 特朗普和共和党没有关系 特朗普就是特朗普
Kevin33:29
You doing nothing is actually the best — I mean, for a government, I very much prefer, if I were, say, just a random CEO running a company, what I like most is the government doing nothing.
你什么都不干 其实是最好的 就是说一个政府来讲 我很prefer 如果我是个 比如说就是一个random CEO 去run一个公司的话 我最喜欢就是政府什么都不干
Kevin40:44
Promises made, promises kept — meaning the things I promised, I absolutely must do.
promises made promises kept 意思就是说我承诺的事情我一定要做
Kevin50:57
Figures
| Charlotte office size | At its largest about 100 people, the second largest in the country | 6:07 |
| Call time calls per night | 100 to 200 | 11:11 |
| Length of Trump's Joe Rogan appearance | Three hours | 28:26 |
| Length of Trump's Lex Fridman appearance | 45 minutes | 29:27 |
| Number of elections Kevin worked on | Four in total: 08, 12, 16, 20 | 32:28 |
| State-level approvals needed for autonomous driving deployment | 50 | 49:57 |
Glossary
- Product Market Fit
- The state where a product matches market demand well enough to grow organically; here it means the match between the candidate and the country's environment.
- Voter Registration
- In the US you must register before voting, and when registering you can choose a party affiliation; it is the first step in field organizing to grab turf.
- Early Voting
- Voting windows opened before election day; the length and number of polling places vary by state.
- Tracker
- A role on an election team dedicated to following and filming the opposing candidate's public events and collecting material.
- Deregulation
- The policy position of cutting government regulations, one of Trump's core promises to the tech industry.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in the analogy between politics and business, especially those who want to see how election field organizing and media strategy map onto tech company growth and government relations.
The opening self-introduction and the few minutes on the share of Chinese Americans in politics can be skipped.