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The strategist of small things: does Mark Penn's relentless focus on microdemographics really make a broader liberal agenda impossible?
Washington Monthly, Nov, 2007 by Ed Kilgore
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Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne Twelve, 368 pp.
If Microtrends had been published under the name of coauthor E. Kinney Zalesne rather than Mark Penn, it would probably have been a quiet best-seller with a cult following. Instead, it's being evaluated, for better or worse, as a glimpse into the mind of Hillary Clinton's chief strategist and pollster. And in many progressive circles, Penn is often thought of as exemplifying the dark side of Clintonism. The reasons are legion: his corporate background and current position as CEO of a massive public relations firm noted for union busting; his association with Dick Morris and the alleged "triangulation" strategy for Bill Clinton's reelection campaign in 1996; his penchant for media-friendly catchphrases for key voter subcategories (e.g., soccer morns and office park dads); and his informal reputation among rival pollsters for opaque and questionable methodologies.
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A sprawling book like Microtrends, which purports to identify seventy-five distinct subcategories (sixty-four American, and eleven international) of people who have yet to get noticed by corporate and political marketers, provides plenty of targets for Penn detractors. In a review for In These Times, Ezra Klein cherry-picked some of the sillier and sloppier sections of the book, and constructed a demolition not just of Penn, but of political pollsters generally.
But it's important to understand that Microtrends isn't primarily a political book; it's classified as a business book by the publisher, and by most bookstores. And truth be told, it is probably aimed at that book-consumer sweet spot occupied nearly a generation ago by its obvious model: John Naisbett's Megatrends, which for a couple of years in the early 1980s was required reading for business executives, politicians, and pretty much anyone who wanted to appear well informed. It's a niche book about niche markets, destined to become, in its "quality paperback" iteration, a staple of airport bookstands.
Moreover, the book isn't a compilation of gleanings from Penn's own polling. Some of the "microtrends" are derived from census data, some from election and business reports, and some from surveys conducted by other polling firms. The mixed sources are compounded by mixed interpretive themes that aren't always of equal sophistication or seriousness. Klein's review, for example, dwells on an item entitled "Southpaws Unbound," and quite properly mocks Penn's suggestion that more left-handers could mean more creativity in our society. But that item really seems aimed at telling corporate readers they can make a bundle customizing products and services for the growing "southpaw" population, and that's almost certainly correct.
As it happens, only five of the microtrends in this book are described as being about political preferences, and of those, one ("Newly Released Ex-Cons") is actually about crime policy, while another ("Christian Zionists") is very old news, and a third ("Militant Illegals") is clearly out of date, given this year's backlash against illegal immigration. A fourth political microtrend ("Swing Is Still King") is really an effort to refute a trend identified by others: the supposed disappearance of swing voters. And the main value of Penn's analysis here has nothing to do with trends, macro or micro, but flows from his commonsense but often ignored observation that "turning" a swing voter has much greater pound-for-pound electoral value (producing a net gain of two votes) than "mobilizing" a nonvoter (a gain of one net vote, or perhaps less if your effort helps the other side mobilize a potential voter as well).
That's not to say that the nonpolitical microtrends in this book don't sometimes have considerable political import. At its best, Microtrends helps debunk outdated stereotypes of how Americans live which are often the foundation for outdated political judgments. One example is "Second Home Buyers," which illustrates the increasingly middle-class nature of multiple home ownership, and warns that efforts to curtail tax subsidies for second homes will offend a lot of people who aren't necessarily Republicans. And a whole host of sections on gender roles, work-family balance, and commuting patterns challenge a multitude of common assumptions about family, workplace, and transportation policies.
Indeed, one clear object of this book is to show the increasing irrelevance of one stereotype--the suburban soccer mom--that Penn himself famously helped create during the 1990s. In this respect, Penn is reminiscent of the great statistics-savvy baseball analyst Bill James, who often shrewdly noted that his numbers-averse "traditionalist" critics were defending ideas about how to win baseball games that were based on limited or outdated statistics. Penn's critics often fear that his goal is to undermine broad progressive political themes by encouraging an unprincipled slicing and dicing of the electorate to identify various swing targets. But there's nothing inherently wrong with understanding the electorate in all its complexity, and forswearing microanalysis guarantees willful ignorance but does not guarantee a macropolitics of progressive principle.
