That’s Interesting Interview: America Rising Corp. CEO Joe Pounder
I talked to America Rising Corp. CEO Joe Pounder by email about how he built America Rising and what the future of opposition research looks like. Joe is a veteran researcher and communicator, having served on presidential campaigns, Capitol Hill, and as research director at the Republican National Committee. American Rising is an opposition research and communications firm that works with Republicans up and down the ballot. You can get more information like this by subscribing to my That’s Interesting newsletter here.
Geoff Embler : It’s just after the 2012 election and America Rising doesn’t exist. How did you go about building it? What problem were you trying to solve?
Joe Pounder : This is a big question. By 2012, we had begun to realize that the scale of opposition research had grown to the point where you couldn’t ramp up and ramp down an operation every two years. There was too much information becoming accessible every single day, especially on the presidential level. Unlike 10 years earlier, social media alone was creating massive data files on candidates to go through every day. At the same time, we knew that institutional memory was invaluable, and we were losing too much of it to other fields. So often angles that define a race in the present can be found in past campaigns. Finally, we needed a permanent institution that could build a professional tracking network, war room operation, and greater resources to invest in doing research. Moreover, narratives about candidates were starting earlier than ever before. In 2011, I didn’t become research director at the RNC until May, 5 months into the cycle. Realizing after November 2012 that we needed a new solution, we started to socialize the need with people, drew up the concept, and then launched in March 2013 with our first few clients. The process wasn’t easy, as you will remember. There were countless days where our office was a living room couch. There were days we wondered if the concept was right. But then it started to click, the operation grew, and in the 2014 midterms we put a lot of points on the board. Since then, we’ve started to solve some of those fundamental problems we saw in 2012. We’ve built real scale that can invest more resources into opposition research than ever before. We’ve built a real tracking network where video is analyzed and saved for future use. We’ve built real institutional memory, a home for researchers. Some candidates we have faced over the history of America Rising we’ve actually researched in past cycles for different offices. It’s certainly not perfect but we’re always evolving and introducing new concepts and solutions.
Geoff Embler : What innovation in opposition research is being done right now or needs to be done?
Joe Pounder : We’ve actually begun the process of making significant investments in technology. There are a lot of on-the-shelf tools that don’t quite fit our needs. So now we are building them ourselves so we can search faster, connect more dots, and see angles that might not be apparent on the surface. There’s so much information to look at that we need more technology than ever before. At the same time, one thing I strenuously believe is there might be no such thing as “opposition research” anymore. We are in the era of Big Content. Everyone needs facts. They need angles. They need messages. While for different purposes, it all goes back to the same data sets to draw connections that lead to different outcomes. Research is finding that content that drives everything now, paid media, communications, digital, polling, grassroots, mail, positive messages, and so forth.
Originally published at https://www.geoffembler.com on September 23, 2020.
