Eitan Hersh is the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Hersh is an assistant professor of political science at Yale University.We’ve come to think of political campaigns as highly sophisticated data-processing machines, capable of precisely targeting voters based on the last item they bought on Amazon. Hacking the Electorate suggests something very different about how campaigns actually target voters. Hersh argues that political campaigns vary greatly in how detailed their data actually are, at the whim of whether the state collects detailed or more general information about voters. Campaigns typically use the best available public data to design targeting strategies. As a result, strategies vary across the country based on how campaigns perceive voters in different information environments.If you just haven’t had enough podcasting for the day, click over to my good friends at the Scholar Strategy Network and their new podcast, No Jargon. Listen to their first podcast featuring my new book, Tea Party Divided (Praeger, 2015) and learn about how the Tea Party is shaping the contentious politics of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.