How Silicon Valley is trying to help Dems capture Congress... 'Staying on the sidelines is no longer an option'
'Staying on the sidelines is no longer an option': How
Silicon Valley is trying to help Democrats capture Congress in 2018
By Tony Romm, The Washington Post Published 8:40 pm CDT,
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Lauren Baer faces a tough task on Election Day: She's a
first-time Democratic candidate for Congress vying against a veteran Republican
in "one of the swingiest swing districts" in southeastern Florida, as
she puts it.
Like many in her party, Baer says she benefits from a
secret weapon - one that is 2,500 miles away from her slice of the Sunshine
State. In Silicon Valley, Baer is among a flood of candidates capitalizing on
new apps, activist groups and other organizations that spawned after President
Donald Trump's 2016 victory with the explicit goal of triggering a Democratic
wave this November.
As voters prepare to head to the polls, the tech
industry's talented, well-heeled engineers and entrepreneurs have been plugging
into Democratic campaigns around the country. They've donated their time and
money toward giving the party a digital edge, aiding the most distant local
candidates and the Democrats' more ambitious quest to snatch control of the
U.S. Congress from Republicans' grasp.
Many of these newly awakened tech workers are motivated
by Trump's controversial policies on issues including immigration, and they're
focused on closing what they perceive to be an innovation gap with the GOP, two
years after Trump effectively tapped Facebook, Twitter and other data-heavy
tools on his road to victory. One outgrowth of the Valley's efforts, an app
called MobilizeAmerica, has helped Baer find potential supporters in Florida's
18th District, a chunk of the state about the size of Rhode Island. The app
helped the campaign knock on more than 2,000 doors during a campaign event held
a month before Election Day, aides said.
"After the 2016 election, I think we saw a number of
individuals in the tech space, in Silicon Valley and also around the country,
frankly saying they wanted to use technology for good," said Baer, who
stands to become Florida's first openly lesbian representative in Congress if
she wins. "And because of that, we've seen a proliferation of new
tools."
But Silicon Valley's heightened attention to politics -
and its commitment to aiding mostly Democrats - could saddle the tech industry
with a new headache in the nation's capital, where Trump and his GOP allies
have alleged that tech giants are biased against the right. On Tuesday, Trump's
2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, accused Facebook and Google of
"ramping up their purge of conservatives" ahead of the midterms.
"While the tech giants, which have deep liberal bias
throughout their personnel and practices, place a thumb on the scale against
conservatives online, we are undaunted," a spokeswoman for the Trump
campaign said this week. "We will continue to build our database of
millions of supporters and are confident that they will turn out and deliver
victory for the GOP on Election Day."
Democrats' new start-ups and other organizations have
attracted high-profile investments from some of the tech industry's deepest
pockets, including Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. They're seeking
more than the next great political app: If Democrats succeed on Nov. 6, the
tools they funded could be a boon that lasts beyond the midterms - giving the
party a technological advantage in its coming rematch against Trump.
"Staying on the sidelines is no longer an option,
and we can't wait until 2020," said Ron Conway, an early investor in
Facebook and Google who has donated millions of dollars this cycle.
Silicon Valley's political apotheosis began hours after
Trump's victory. Many in tech had backed his vanquished Democratic foe, Hillary
Clinton, and they quickly set about protesting the incoming Republican
president's agenda. Some rank-and-file tech employees soon pressured their
bosses - the leaders of companies including Apple, Facebook and Google - to
avoid working with the Republican administration, and many later took to the
streets of San Francisco to protest Trump's policies.
The groundswell of activism in the country's tech
heartland offered an opportunity for digital strategists like Shomik Dutta and
Betsy Hoover to experiment before the midterm elections. Two veterans of
President Barack Obama's political campaigns, the duo and their peers teamed up
to launch a new Democratic-leaning startup incubator, called Higher Ground
Labs, in May 2017. Amassing a roughly $5 million war chest, they set about
trying to seed the next generation of tools that might help Democratic
campaigns deploy Facebook ads and tap text messages to get voters to cast
ballots on Election Day.
"People are realizing if our old technology is horse
and buggy, and a car has just been introduced, we shouldn't be investing in
stronger horses," Dutta said.
Since the 2018 race began, Higher Ground Labs has
invested in 23 startups, including MobilizeAmerica. Think of it akin to the
restaurant-reservation service OpenTable, but for shoe-leather politics: A
candidate can post an event for knocking on doors, and interested supporters
can snag a spot. Campaigns can also link up with allied political organizations,
including the fast-growing progressive outlet Swing Left, which can then direct
volunteers on how to take action.
So far, MobilizeAmerica has been used by more than 400
campaigns and groups, which rounded up more than 254,000 volunteers who will try
to visit, call or text about 19 million voters by Thursday, said Alfred
Johnson, the co-founder of the company.
"A lot of people are very motivated by the
presidency," he said, "and we're going to continue to see a ton of
investment and activity in this space."
Higher Ground Labs also has invested in VoterCircle, one
of many emerging apps that helps organizers tap their address books and text to
friends voting reminders and other political messages. Another, called Change
Research, relies on Facebook ads to reach specific categories of voters with
surveys, rather than querying them through landline phone calls. Its founders -
Mike Greenfield, a Silicon Valley data scientist, and Pat Riley, a political
veteran - say their polling tools now are deployed in dozens of local races in
Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida and Texas.
"I think it is likely just the beginning"
Greenfield said of the Valley's interest in politics, "but I think we've
made real progress."
For years, Republican campaigns have relied on powerful
tools for finding, tracking and advertising to voters, many created by
deep-pocketed donors like the Koch Brothers. For Democrats, some of their most
engaged benefactors have long come from Silicon Valley, where tech leaders like
Eric Schmidt, a former top executive at Google, played signature roles in
helping to assemble digital arsenals for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and for
Clinton four years later.
Now, it's Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, who has
become one of the Democratic Party's top tech benefactors. He has donated to
Higher Ground Labs and some of its portfolio companies, on top of millions of
dollars he's contributed to Democratic campaigns just in the past three months.
Hoffman pinned his heightened involvement on Trump, charging that the president
"attacks the very institutions of democracy." The LinkedIn co-founder
added in a statement it's "why I've been asking my technologist friends
and other leaders to get engaged too."
Chris Sacca, an early investor in companies such as Uber,
hired a former aide to Obama to study dozens of start-up pitches and invest in
some "intended for 2020 and beyond," he said. Conway, meanwhile, said
he and his peers had deployed and "enormous amount of resources,"
adding in an email that Trump has been "an urgent wake up call to many in
the tech sector."
For Mia Ketterling, a project lead at Pinterest, her
epiphany came in September. She opted to join roughly 9,400 of her tech peers
in volunteering with Tech for Campaigns, an organization founded in 2017 that
seeks to pair the best and brightest in the tech industry with candidates,
particularly those at the state and local level, who lack digital savvy and
can't afford to hire experts.
"I think there is a strong opposition to Trump and
also an awareness," Ketterling said of others in the Bay Area. "Like,
'Wow, we've really been sleeping on the job here, and we need to get more
involved.'"
Ketterling is now part of a team assisting Bob Doyel, a
Democrat who's running to represent a north-central Florida district of about
150,000 people (and "fields that may have cattle in them," as he put
it) in the state's legislature. Doyel himself admits his generation doesn't
know "a lot about tech," and he choked up during an interview
acknowledging the unexpected support showered on him by Tech for Campaigns and
Ketterling, whom he's never met in person.
"As more resources have come in," he said,
"we have gotten more digital."
The Democrats' infusion of tech cash and support
originated outside party headquarters. Fearing they had lost ground to
Republicans after Trump prevailed in 2016, Democrats entered the 2018 cycle and
realized they had to allow people to "put their smarts to work," said
Caitlin Mitchell, the chief mobilization officer at the Democratic National
Committee. The DNC also hired Raffi Krikorian, a former leading engineer at
Twitter and Uber, as their chief technology officer last year.
Democrats seek not only to remake the political
compositions of state and federal legislatures but to amass critical data about
the apps and techniques that might work best for the presidential race. Ahead
of 2020, groups like Higher Ground Labs plan to raise an additional $6 million
entering the presidential race, its founders said.
"Technology two years from now will be drastically
different from how it is today," said Hoover, the former Obama campaign
official who founded Higher Ground. "I hope we never again get to the
place where we're like, 'Great, we have this beat, let's move on.'"
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