Chapter Four: How Thiel Did It

Harris Never Had a Chance

The story of the 2024 election is obvious in hindsight.

It’s a tech story. AI beat the cloud.

Democrats ran a cloud campaign. They used cloud technologies to build their support, then sought to activate the support through the fall. This is how Obama won in 2008.

But tech has changed. The “tech wreck” of 2022 saw old-style cloud plays fall hard, replaced by AI stocks, which have been on a tear ever since.

What most people know about AI is based on pictures that never existed, films that never were, or detailed answers to database queries. But that’s not what AI is about. AI is about building databases around databases, becoming their master rather than their servant.

To understand this, and how it relates to what happened on November 5, you need to know more about Thiel and the company he and partner Alex Karp created, Palantir Technologies.

Meet Palantir

I last wrote about Palantir less than a month ago. At the time I neglected to connect the dots between what they do and the 2024 campaign. I only saw them as an interesting stock, a government contractor.

But, when I first wrote about Palantir, in 2021, I called them the “God emperor of data analysis.” This is a better description of the company than the “AI” designation which has made them the hottest name on Wall Street.

The difference was explained by Nabeel Qureshi, a former Palantir employee, just a month ago.

Thiel built Palantir to run military applications. Militaries have vast troves of data, but they usually get minimal insight from it. Palantir connected the dots between applications and data sets, all its systems proprietary as the military prefers. (You don’t want enemies to know what you’re doing.)

In 2024, Democrats became the enemy.

Palantir has a mission-oriented mindset. We associate that with the war in Iraq, but it’s also the mindset that won World War II and put a man on the Moon. It’s how the tech industry was built, through military contracts. David Packard was an assistant secretary of defense under Nixon. Most of tech’s earliest leaders, including Gordon Moore, were conservative Republicans.

Inside Palantir

As Qureshi explains, Palantir hires young programmers who commit to its mission. This means accepting that there are good guys and bad guys, and that the software you write may get people killed. That’s Thiel’s attitude, too. Qureshi describes his former co-workers as “hyper-aggressive,” the kind who will do 100-mile bike rides for fun.

Programmers are divided between “Forward Deployed Engineers, (FDEs)” who work with clients, and “Product Developers (PDs),” who work at the central office.

The FDEs learn what clients are trying to do, on a practical level, and how the flow of data keeps them from doing it. Then they fix those problems using “Agile” development techniques. They write quick solutions that provide a dopamine hit of value to the client. They don’t go chasing “waterfalls,” trying to complete solutions that look good on paper but need months or years to deploy.

These mini solutions create client loyalty. They deliver productivity. They build trust.

The solutions are shared with Product Developers. PDs use them to build tools that other FDEs can then use to deliver even faster improvements for clients. In this way the wheel an FDE makes need never be reinvented. Magritte takes data into Palantir’s system. Contour is a data visualization tool. Workshop makes web apps. All this software becomes a system, the Palantir product. The commercial version is called Foundry.

What About the Election

Now back to politics.

Political campaigns have two jobs. Find your people and get them to the polls.

In 2024, Democrats used big campaign events to build a database of supporters. At the same time, it seemed Republicans weren’t doing much of anything. Trump was a clown. His events were a circus.

All this is true. But Trump wasn’t so much a clown as the magician’s assistant, the person who provides the misdirection the magician uses to do his act.

Behind the scenes, Republicans were using a version of Palantir technology. All publicly available data on voters went into a system. This included personal information from voter rolls, demographic data from the census, psychographic data from commercial web sites, including those of the party.

Tools like those at Foundry massaged this data, identifying all possible supporters. Likely supporters would be “tickled” with e-mail, a technique that goes back over 50 years to the days of Richard Viguerie’s e-mail lists. (Viguerie is still around, age 92.) The result is that Thiel knew who the entire voting universe consisted of months ago, at a fraction of the cost Democrats were paying just to find their own people.

It was then a matter of getting Republican leaners to the polls, and since the first job cost so little there was plenty in the budget for that. (Musk’s $1 million giveaways were a giveaway to what the campaign was already doing.)

Thiel’s system was much, much deeper and much more useful than what Democrats built. He didn’t just know who was on his side, he knew precisely what those whom Democrats called “no voters” needed to get them voting his way.

The Lesson

Harris never had a chance.

The lessons of Thiel’s AI campaign can be applied by Democrats, but it will be difficult.

There is no Democratic version of Palantir. I can see some Democrat building one. Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com comes to mind, because the business advantage of the Palantir way is clear and he’s an obvious competitor. Maybe they can build something using Meta’s Llama tools.

But getting the party to commit to a single vendor will be difficult. Democrats all want to lead a parade. Republicans just like a parade.

Even if Democrats accomplish the technology goal, they have a mountain to climb. As I wrote nearly a decade ago in “The Jim Crow Project,” Republicans have been at this game of power for a long, long time. The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been around for 50 years. They have a clear ideology – destroy the state, destroy all liberal thought, and bring America back to the conditions of its founding, when women, blacks, and other minorities were slaves to the white man and his idea of “freedom.”

Freedom for me but not for thee.