Who is Brad Parscale?
President Donald Trump on Tuesday tapped Brad Parscale to be campaign manager for his re-election bid in 2020. Parscale ran President Trump's digital team during the 2016 election.
"Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won."
In an announcement posted on the president's campaign website, his son, Eric Trump, called Parscale "an amazing talent" who was "pivotal to our success in 2016." Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and top adviser, said that Parscale "was essential in bringing a disciplined technology and data-driven approach to how the 2016 campaign was run."
Last fall, Parscale spoke with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl about his digital strategy in the 2016 election. While the president famously relies on Twitter to get his message out, Parscale spent the majority of the campaign's digital budget on Facebook, creating hundreds of thousands of ads microtargeted for specific voter communities.
"I understood early that Facebook was how Donald Trump was going to win," Parscale told Stahl. "Twitter is how he talked to the people. Facebook was going to be how he won."
Parscale also told Stahl that Republican employees of Facebook were embedded in their campaign office to maximize their effectiveness on the social media platform.
Parscale said he became certain of a Trump victory in the weeks leading up to the election. In the video above, he says that, on the Wednesday before the election, he took that message to his campaign's leadership, to Trump himself, and to television news organizations -- including CBS News.
"They just thought I was a joke," Parscale says of news organizations.
While Parscale began as the 2016 campaign's digital director, by the end of the campaign he also oversaw advertising, data collection, and much of the fund-raising.
While his digital strategy was ultimately successful, Parscale said then-candidate Trump was skeptical.
"He looks at the TV, and he says, 'That is what I believe wins a campaign,'" Parscale recalls in the video above. "So he starts laying into me about TV...and I don't believe in this mumbo-jumbo digital stuff."
In a conversation with 60 Minutes Overtime, Stahl reported that Parscale said it took candidate Trump a while to believe that digital ads were a valid way of reaching voters, but eventually he accepted it.
"Well," Stahl said, "when he won, he came around."
