A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called “Moneyball for politics,” journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigners are navigating the era’s most pressing new challenge: how to deal with disinformation.

 

The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years, told through a cast of strategists and tacticians on the front lines. There’s Jiore Craig, a globetrotting young digital expert who invented the job of counter-disinformation operative for American campaigns despite never having worked on one, and Cheri Bustos, a congresswoman from a Trump-supporting district who struggled to convince her colleagues that not every lie targeting them online amounted to an electoral problem. There’s Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, whose emergence as one of the American left’s biggest donors has forced his adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn into the role of moral compass for a movement still wrestling with whether it should counter fake news by producing its own, and David Goldstein and Jehmu Greene, who are confronting “the Big Lie” in the vernacular of online conspiracy theories, with gifs, memes, and ugly graphics of their own. The Lie Detectives presents a vivid snapshot of a political class trying to come to terms with an exploding social media landscape, and using every weapon in its arsenal to counter the biggest threat it has ever faced to its way of doing business and winning power.