41
“This not Biden vs. Trump,” she says. “This is my
entire community, my family, against Trump.”
Now, as the deputy digital director for the Flor-
ida Democratic Party, Castro helps lead a team of
six women, all in their 20s, who spend their days
organizing Florida voters on social media. They live
in five different cities—one in New York—and none
have ever met one another, but they’ve become a
close-knit team through daily Google Hangouts and
FaceTime calls. Not even Castro and her boss, Chel-
sea Daley, 26, have met in real life.
As Daley sees it, the Internet can be carved into
turf, just like a state. Facebook, Instagram, Pinter-
est, TikTok and Snapchat each require a different
outreach strategy, messaging and tone, and reach
different types of voters. Which means each of the
digital organizers specializes not in traditional sub-
sets, like geographic regions or age groups, but in
mastering different social- media platforms.
In the weeks leading up to the Florida Democrats’
virtual Leadership Blue convention in July, the Twit-
ter organizer sent hundreds of tweets announcing
new attendees and speakers, while the young woman
in charge of TikTok posted a “What I’d Wear As”
meme video of herself dressing up as various Flor-
ida political types. The Instagram organizer put up
a photo of a dog attending the convention on a lap-
top, while on Pinterest, the team posted a recipe for
“Leadership Blueberry Pancakes.” “Every platform is
so different,” Daley says. “The audience is different,
the way you organize and mobilize is so different.”
Castro spends her days in front of two laptops,
an iPad and a ring light for making Instagram vid-
eos. She’s mostly focused on organizing the Latino community in Florida,
which she does from her mom’s living room in Kissimmee. That means
posting new ads in groups like Venezolanos con Biden, recruiting Latino
influencers for Instagram Live events or soliciting personal stories from
Florida voters to share to the Democrats’ various platforms. “For the His-
panic community, social media has always been a way of communication,
because we often can’t travel back to our home countries,” she says. “You
build different communities through these digital platforms.” Castro uses
WhatsApp groups rather than text chains, because she knows that’s the pre-
ferred messaging app for many Latino families. “If I text my mom through
regular message, she won’t text me back,” Castro says.
The pivot to digital organizing involves rethinking some of the founda-
tional concepts of political mobilization, which are often rooted in physical
spaces. Organizer no longer means a student with a bullhorn or a clipboard.
Actions are no longer neighborhood canvasses on Saturday mornings. And
communities can be groups bound by ethnic identity (Cubanos con Biden),
shared experiences (Veterans for Biden) or personal passions. (On Face-
book, nearly 1,500 people follow a page called Joe Biden Loves Dogs.) But at
its root, organizing is about persuading people to disrupt their day-to-day
lives to achieve a desired political result. Online, that relationship build-
ing unfolds in private Facebook groups, DM chats and text messages, and
is often invisible to the public eye.
On Facebook, Daley’s organizers keep tabs on grassroots non campaign
groups with names like Florida for Joe Biden 2020. When they noticeBiden 3 to 1 on Facebook in the past 30 days. More
than Florida or New York, the Internet is Trump’s
home state. “Trump’s campaign was literally built
around Facebook,” says Tara McGowan, founder and
CEO of the nonprofit ACRONYM, which builds digi-
tal infrastructure for Democrats. “Biden’s campaign
is still trying to make digital a centerpiece, but that’s
not how their team has thought in the past.”
Yet followers, Facebook interactions and ads
don’t win elections; votes do. Biden is already ahead
in the polls. What he needs now, his supporters say,
is organizers to help him turn those poll numbers
into votes, especially in an election where many
Americans will be casting ballots by mail for the
first time. That means grandmothers sending texts,
teachers making graphics and homebound activists
typing personalized Facebook messages, all work-
ing together to take on Trump’s digital colossus and
spread the gospel of voting by mail. To win in No-
vember, as Biden digital- organizing director Jose
Nunez puts it, “The Joe Biden campaign and the
Democratic Party [have] to build the largest grass-
roots digital volunteer movement in history.”
Mariana Castro has been waiting for this mo-
ment. A 26-year-old from Peru who was protected
from deportation by the Deferred Action for Child-
hood Arrivals (DACA) program, Castro has spent
most of her adult life advocating for immigrants’
rights. When Trump won Florida in 2016, she knew
she would spend the next four years fighting him.
^
Biden at a
socially distant
campaign event
in Wilmington,
Del., on July 14