How the Pandemic Reshaped Election Campaigns—Maybe Forever

Not long after the coronavirus shut down life in most parts of the country, Sarah Crawford’s weekend runs took an unusual turn, as mapped out by her Garmin watch. On April 11, her trail spelled the word HOPE in the middle of downtown Zebulon, North Carolina. The next week, she spelled VOTE in Louisburg, 20 miles away. Her run through the town of Franklinton in May resembled a stick figure waving.

Crawford is also running for North Carolina Senate this fall, and like many candidates around the country, she’s had to get creative during the pandemic. The maps of her routes, which she posted to social media, were a promotion for the “virtual 5K” her campaign held in June. “We are all kind of writing the playbook as we go,” Crawford, a Democrat, says of candidates this election cycle. “There are no retail politics right now. There’s nowhere to go, no doors to knock. And so you have to find ways to do those retail politics through social media and through other creative outlets.”

This week’s Democratic National Convention—which saw Kamala Harris and Joe Biden deliver their acceptance speeches to an empty convention hall, and then turn to giant Zoom screens to receive applause—has served as a high-profile reminder of just how radically the pandemic has reshaped the 2020 campaign. But for candidates across the country, running for local or national office, this has been the reality since March. Politicians have been attempting to raise money, elevate their profiles, and rally supporters all while facing lockdown orders, local outbreaks, and a crippling economic downturn. Many have adjusted by moving their campaigns almost entirely online, accelerating the shift toward digital tools already well underway. But circumstances have also encouraged candidates, especially those like Crawford who are farther down the ballot, to innovate and try new things. Some of these experiments will almost certainly be remembered as Covid-only tools, but many could outlast the virus.

In Normal Times, most campaigns would spend the second quarter of an election year focused on courting large- and small-dollar donors with a gauntlet of in-person events. But in 2020, stay-at-home orders hit just as those were getting underway. Fortunately for candidates, both major parties already had digital infrastructure in place for grassroots fundraising: The Democrats launched ActBlue in 2004, and this cycle expanded the platform to all registered candidates, including presidential, for the first time; Republicans launched their equivalent, WinRed, in 2019.

The Republican National Committee has also more than tripled the size of its email list since 2016, according to a spokesperson. “Thanks to our continued investment in our digital platforms, we have the tools needed to engage with supporters, understand their interests, and expand our audience,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The Democratic National Committee also spent the past few years modernizing its data operation and digital targeting technology, after Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. Having the tools to reach voters already in place has allowed the organization to meet the moment. “I would say that the fundraising part of the program is the thing that we have changed the least since Covid hit,” says Patrick Stevenson, chief mobilization officer at the DNC.

For the Democratic Party, the hurdle at the outset of the pandemic was not technology, but tone. As the country plunged into a recession and millions of people found themselves suddenly out of work, many campaigns and organizations were unsure whether the digital strategies they had lined up were still a good idea. “We were like, ‘Should we even be fundraising? Is that appropriate to be doing right now?’” says Stevenson. The DNC scaled back fundraising emails and took a more serious tone in the messages it did send. And though political donations did dip early in the crisis, as the gravity of the situation became clear—and increasingly politicized—the money started coming in anyway, Stevenson says. Between April and June, both ActBlue and WinRed have reported raising record amounts of money.

Fundraising events have moved to platforms like Zoom and Facebook Live, where often anyone can tune in to watch. By lowering the entry barrier, especially for national campaigns, they have proven an invaluable tool in harnessing the grassroots energy that’s overtaken both sides of the aisle. Joe Biden’s campaign, for example, has hosted virtual events ranging from foreign policy discussions to a cook-along with Senator Jon Tester of Montana and Tom Colicchio of Top Chef. “It’s raising such a serious amount of money right now that I can’t imagine it won’t be a tool in the tool kit moving forward,” Stevenson says.

Smaller campaigns, which don’t necessarily draw as large of a Zoom crowd through emails alone, have had to flex their digital muscles to engage voters online. For Crawford, the state senate candidate, North Carolina’s shelter-in-place orders this spring meant canceling a number of in-person fundraising events. When members of her running group began looking for alternatives to road races that had also been called off, Crawford was inspired. She got to work planning a “virtual 5K” for her campaign. Participants could run or walk the 3.1 miles anywhere, at any time in the month of June, and were encouraged to post a photo to social media with the hashtag #runvotewin. Registration cost $45 and came with a certificate by email and a medal in the mail. In lieu of the usual postrace party, the campaign partnered with the organization Face the Music Collective to stream a concert on Zoom and Facebook Live. Overall, 100 people participated, and more than 700 tuned in to the concert. With sponsorships, the virtual event raised just under $9,000.

Just as money is coming in via digital platforms, it’s being spent more on digital platforms too, as candidates up and down ballots ramp up their outreach to voters and amplify their message. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a research group that tracks money in politics, spending on digital advertising has more than tripled this year, as compared to 2016. Congressional candidates have spent nearly a quarter of their budgets on digital ads so far this cycle, up from just 7 percent in 2016. “People are changing their budgets to reflect just how much time and effort is being spent online,” says Zac Moffatt, a former digital director for Mitt Romney and CEO of Targeted Victory, a Republican strategy firm. “I think campaigns are realizing that this is their new normal, that they have to learn to sustain through and persevere.”

The budgets may be changing, but the platforms will be familiar to anyone who has followed politics this decade. “2008 was the Facebook election, 2012 was the Facebook election, 2016 was the Facebook election, and 2020 will be the Facebook election,” says Moffatt. “It’s because it has audience—it has reach and it has scale.”

Field operations—like door knocking, canvassing, and meet and greets—haven’t had the luxury of building on existing strategies. In a time of social distancing, candidates have had to completely rethink how to connect with voters. Some organizers have embraced the challenge. “The best art comes from having boundaries,” says Amanda Litman, the cofounder of Run For Something, which supports and recruits young candidates. “The best campaign tactics come from navigating a new structure.” Run For Something has been collecting ideas on Airtable, which is available online for any candidate looking for inspiration. Some examples include a “Quaren-stream” interactive gathering and a virtual dog walk held via Facebook Live. “What candidates are trying to do right now is re-create the emotional connection,” Litman says. “And you can do that over the phone, text, Facebook message, Zoom.”

“Most of the innovation usually happens at the presidential level and then four years later kind of trickles down to everyone else,” Moffatt notes. This year, he says, the innovation is coming from the down-ballot campaigns, whose staffs tend to skew younger. “I think the top-tier ones were always innovating, because they had the resources, whereas the lower ones maybe didn’t prioritize it, because there was always something else. But in the age of Covid, when you’re homebound, digital is going to be your force multiplier.”

The nature of this election cycle will favor different kinds of candidates than before, says Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford University. “I would expect a trend toward the types of candidates who are more successful with these online mass-media-type strategies, who tend to be younger and who are better at activating online communities,” he says, pointing to the primary success of candidates like Cori Bush in St. Louis. “If you’re a traditional pressing-flesh fundraiser, your strategies are completely upended.”

Of course, it’s difficult to imagine constituents feeling completely satisfied with virtual-only campaigning when in-person becomes viable again. Bonica predicts that the campaign trail will closely mirror the trajectory of many corporate offices in the US: everyone who can is working remotely out of necessity, but eventually some of those people will begin going back. But it’s unlikely everything will return to a pre-Covid standard.

Election fundraising and advertising have been moving online for years, and many candidates found success streaming policy discussions from their living rooms long before a pandemic forced them to stay home. But the temporary restrictions have forced candidates to adopt digital tools they otherwise might not have, and get creative to engage donors and voters online. That experience will likely have a lasting impact.

“In four years, all these people who wouldn’t have adopted these techniques for another four years now know them today,” Moffatt says, “so they’re going to be that much better as they go forward.” As for this cycle, he adds, the Covid election will reveal “who’s really taking their future into their own hands and moving forward versus who will be dragged kicking and screaming.”

How the Pandemic Reshaped Election Campaigns—Maybe Forever

Author: sgadmin

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