It was late November 2008, and Dan Wagner’s post-Election Day high was wearing off. Just a few weeks before, the Obama for America team had gotten their guy elected, and people like Wagner, a member of the analytics staff, were getting a whole lot of credit. Headlines hailed Obama’s campaign as the most digital-savvy in history. For Wagner, winning felt good.
But weeks after the Election Day rush, as Wagner was lying in bed in Michigan, a crushing realization hit him: Every tool he had built, every algorithm he had written, all the work he had done was about to spend the next three years rotting at the bottom of a code base in Chicago.
“It was pretty brutal,” Wagner says. “The incredible contribution that dozens of engineers and analysts made was just lost overnight.”
Wagner was not the first staffer to feel that pang of loss. Every four years, some of the brightest minds in public policy and technology put their lives on hold and work with a maniacal focus rarely seen outside Silicon Valley. Then, after the election, they all pack up and go home, leaving behind whatever innovations they had managed to build. “It’s almost like resetting to zero every cycle,” says Zac Moffatt, who worked as Mitt Romney’s digital director in 2012.
Politics, in essence, has a research and development problem. It’s the reason the political world is woefully behind in terms of technology adoption. Abandoning election-cycle innovations wastes valuable assets, staffer time, and donor funds. This wastefulness is so much a part of the political process, you could almost call it an American tradition. But the US has another tradition: startups. If politicians and parties don’t want to start from behind every time, they need to preserve their work each election cycle, and startups are the way to do it.
By 2012, Wagner was back on the campaign trail, this time as chief analytics officer for President Obama’s reelection campaign. The day after the election—another victory for Wagner and his 54-person team of data crunchers—Google chair Eric Schmidt, a campaign adviser and donor, met with Wagner to talk about his work.
To preserve their work, political parties need startups.
Wagner remembers he was suffering from “a bad headache and a bad haircut” that day, as well as an ear infection he’d neglected for a couple of weeks that gave him such terrible vertigo he would intermittently topple over. Future plans were not on Wagner’s radar.
But they were, unsurprisingly, on Schmidt’s. Wagner says Schmidt told him he heard about what happened in 2008 and asked what he could do to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. The answer they came up with was Civis Analytics, the Chicago-based startup Wagner founded just months later. Backed by Schmidt, it still employs one-third of Obama’s data team.
The thinking was that if Wagner and company could keep the team together even though the campaign was over, they could hone their targeting and prediction skills with new clients in new industries, so by the time 2016 rolled around, the technology would be even more sophisticated for the next batch of Democratic candidates. These campaigns, Wagner believes, “should be able to stand on the innovations of others and devote their time to the science of winning, not the science of database infrastructure, which is something that, frankly, we’ve already figured out for them.”
Wagner is not the only one taking this approach, according to Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and author of the forthcoming Prototype Politics, an examination of innovation in politics. He says the 2012 election cycle launched a wave of new startups on both sides of the aisle. And that’s a good thing, because it’s precisely what both parties desperately need. “These firms are really important,” Kreiss says. “They take tools and technologies and can institutionalize them.”
There’s already ample evidence this strategy works. It was his party losing the 2004 election to George W. Bush that inspired former Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean to make technology and grassroots organizing a priority for the party. This era saw the formation of left-leaning companies like Blue State Digital, a strategy firm founded by former Dean staffer Joe Rospars, as well as Voter Action Network, a database software company that grew out of two Iowa Democratic campaigns. By the time the next presidential election rolled around in 2008, they were already up and running. Today, they’re pillars of the party.
During off-cycles, companies like Blue State can keep fine-tuning the same fund-raising and outreach tools they built, but with clients from the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. “They’re evolving them with their feature requests and innovation, so it’s not stop-and-start,” says Rospars, CEO of Blue State Digital and Obama’s chief digital strategist in 2008 and 2012.
Democrats got a head start on this process, Kreiss says, but Republican ventures are also popping up. After Romney lost the 2012 election, for instance, Moffatt bulked up his own digital strategy firm, Targeted Victory, which focuses on advertising and marketing tech. Meanwhile, Alex Lundry, Romney’s director of data science, launched Deep Root Analytics, which is similar to Civis, only more media-focused and on the other side of the aisle.
But not all campaign tools can stand alone within startups. Even the most sophisticated voter data registries aren’t very relevant outside the political world. In order for all this to work, groups like the Democratic and Republican national committees have to invest in R&D alongside these startups. The way the parties conceive of their roles has to evolve, says Michael Slaby, who led Obama’s tech teams in 2008 and 2012. “That means seeing tech infrastructure as an important part of party building.”
To some extent, that’s already happening. Since 2012, the RNC has prioritized technology as a key to growing the party, even establishing its own data startup, Para Bellum Labs. Last year, the DNC launched an initiative called Project Ivy, which helps Democratic candidates benefit from technology developed during presidential cycles.
It can be tough to calculate the exact cost of wasting so much innovation. Sure, you could add up every campaign’s technology budget and time spent through the years. But even that number wouldn’t get at the true cost.
That’s because the tools in danger of getting left behind are about more than finding Amazon users who just ran out of paper towels. They’re about wading through seas of voter data to find people who might be swayed through a banner ad, a nifty donation tool, or a targeted TV spot—to turn out to vote, to get involved in the political process, to help elect the next leader of the free world. Ensuring these tools don’t go to waste isn’t just about making political campaigns more efficient. It’s about making sure democracy works better for everyone.
Staff writer Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is leading WIRED’s 2016 election coverage.
