“So, like, what do we say?” Asher Norberg, a willowy 15-year-old with impossibly blonde hair, asks his friend Zachary Ziegenhorn on a sunny morning this past Saturday. They’re standing smack in the middle of the street in a wealthy suburb of Des Moines, where heavy gates enclose immense mansions set on sprawling, snow-covered lawns.
“We say, ‘Hi, my name is Zachary. I just want to make sure you’re coming out to the Caucus. It’s at 6:30,’” Ziegenhorn, a bespectacled 17-year-old in a black pea coat, replies. Ziegenhorn has the distinct honor of turning 18 by election day. Even though he can't vote in the Iowa Caucus, he says, "I still want to campaign for the candidate who will be best for my future." And so, as the two teens walk from door-to-door, Ziegenhorn has assumed the role of team leader, urging each Iowan we encounter to turn out to vote for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders tonight.
Ziegenhorn, Norberg, and another pal, Dominic Lorino, had driven up the night before from Kansas, subsisting on Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and doughnuts, and arrived at the Sanders Des Moines headquarters for a brief, but inspiring training session on the art of canvassing. “This is their right,” the organizer leading the training had told them. “Hammer that in.”
But before they could inform anyone of their rights, they had to figure out where they were going first. They’d been sent off on their own with a paper map, a stack of Sanders door hangers, and several pieces of paper, printed line by line with names, addresses, and party affiliations of every likely Sanders voter in the neighborhood. For teenagers born into the digital age, this analog process felt clumsy at best.
“I feel like we’re not doing this in the most organized way,” Ziegenhorn lamented, as he scanned each address on his list, checked each house on the block, and back again.
For all the ways technology has transformed modern day political campaigning, the old-fashioned door-knock remains—for the most part at least—unchanged. There are plenty of tech tools out there that purport to streamline the process. And yet, for campaign field organizers tasked with training hundreds if not thousands of volunteers of all ages everyday, sometimes the simplest thing to do is send people out with paper and pencil.
“Certain things will never be replaced because the door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor contact has been shown time and time again to be the single most important thing,” says Pinky Weitzman, Sanders’ Iowa digital director, whose hair color matches her name. While the campaign does use apps like MiniVAN, built by the Democratic voter data file company NGP VAN, as well as a volunteer-built app called Field the Bern, Weitzman says sometimes circumventing these tools altogether is the path of least resistance for organizers.
Instead, she says the most important role of digital technology in any campaign is “filling in all the gaps to get to the people’s doors we won’t reach.”
That said, a lot of data goes into compiling those voter lists, which, for Democrats at least, are generated from NGP VAN’s central voter file. Because it’s used by nearly every Democratic campaign up and down the ballot, it includes an extensive catalog of Democratic voter preferences, enabling the campaigns to ensure volunteers are knocking on the right doors. The list Ziegenhorn and Norberg received, for instance, included not only voters who have indicated in the past that they support Sanders, but also voters that the data predicts will be most likely to caucus for him.
While this approach may have seemed old school to my teen companions this weekend, for people like Scott Thompson, a 54-year-old Hillary Clinton supporter who was also out canvassing on Saturday, the very existence of these apps represents a revolution in campaigning. “Now I can walk down the sidewalk and have access to information that 15 years ago, I would have had to sit down at a desk and I still wouldn’t have had access to,” he said, referring to the MiniVAN app. “Now, it’s just unbelievable.”
Some campaigns, particularly the Ted Cruz campaign, are pushing the potential of this technology even farther. Volunteers across the country can download Cruz’s app, developed by the Koch Brothers-backed startup i360. It allows voters to target not just the household, but each individual living in that household. Depending on who answers the door, the app will generate a different script for the canvasser to use, emphasizing whichever issue the data says that person cares most about.
Meanwhile, the Cruz campaign has also been working with a company called Cambridge Analytica, which is developing technology that helps target people not just based on the issues, but based on their psychological profiles. It uses surveys to compile data on how open, extroverted, conscientious, agreeable, and neurotic individuals are, and then helps design messaging that will appeal to that personality type.
“With a full-spectrum conservative like Ted Cruz, there’s a lot to choose from, so I want to make sure to tailor my message to Mr. Smith, but if Mrs. Smith comes to the door, she’s very likely got different issues that motivate her to vote,” says Bryan M. English, Cruz’s Iowa State Director. “[The app] has allowed us to target our phone calling and our door knocking. It’s also allowed us to push data out to people remotely.”
Still, for Cruz supporters like Keith Trullinger of Waukee, Iowa, sometimes this technology just gets in the way of the task at hand. “I don’t like to read the script,” he says. “You could do that, it’s very user friendly, but I tend to just talk.”
