43
New York, they’ll become part of a “distributed or-
ganizing vertical,” based off the volunteer struc-
tures built by the Sanders and Warren campaigns.
Battleground- state volunteers focus on registering
local voters and persuading people in their area. Non-
battleground volunteers focus on recruiting volun-
teers and driving turnout in battleground states.
Grassroots groups are helping too. Soul Squad, a
team of roughly 30 amateur graphic designers, spend
their free time packaging Biden’s speeches and plans
into digestible images to be shared on social media.
The group is led by Christopher Schmidt, a 26-year-
old middle-school science teacher in Pennsylvania
who spends roughly five hours a day designing the
graphics and managing the team. Schmidt says he
was never very involved in traditional canvassing or
field organizing; he doesn’t like to confront strangers,
especially about politics, especially at somebody’s
front door. But engaging online, he says, feels more
natural. “It’s super easy to just have someone share
a graphic,” he says. “It’s kind of like baby steps for
people that aren’t always involved in politics.” By Oc-
tober, he hopes, the people who are now posting his
images will be making phone calls for Biden instead.If Biden’s digital content often has the feel of a friendly grandpa telling
a story that goes on slightly too long, Trump’s is all about outrage. His team
blankets Facebook with ads that leverage fury to sell swag—Trump T-shirts!
Trump hats! Trump wineglasses!—and harvest the data. This strategy has
made the President a digital Goliath. Using data from CrowdTangle, a public-
insights tool owned and operated by Facebook, TIME compared Trump’s
Facebook interactions to a combined list of more than 25 high- profile Dem-
ocrats, including Biden and his campaign pages, former President Barack
Obama, every major primary candidate, high-profile Democrats in the House
and Senate, and Democratic Party pages. In the past three months, Trump
alone got between double and triple the Facebook interactions of all these
Democrats combined. “If they were having any success, they would be spend-
ing more on Facebook,” says Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh
of Biden’s team. “Why are they spending so little? It’s because they’re not
having success. It’s not because they don’t have the money.”
The Trump juggernaut extends to digital organizing as well. It aimed to re-
cruit 2 million volunteers; as of this month, 1.8 million had volunteered since
January 2019, Murtaugh said. Since March, he says, those volunteers made
more than 64 million voter contacts (phone calls and door knocks) through a
web-based system called TrumpTalk. Four million of those happened in the
past week. By contrast, Biden’s organizing operation and the accompanying
app only launched in late July: in the first few weeks, they’ve sent 500,000
texts and made 100,000 phone calls, a fraction of Trump’s reach.But team Biden insists there’s reason to be hopeful. There are signs that
Trump’s famous digital campaign—known as the “Death Star”—may not
be firing on all cylinders anymore. Trump demoted Parscale in July. And
feeding red meat to his base doesn’t do much to persuade independents or
swing-state voters, who favor Biden in most recent polls. Harvesting hate-
clicks worked against Hillary Clinton, the subject of years of conspiracy
theories and corrosive misogyny, but Biden tends not to elicit the same
passion. Besides, as Biden’s team insists: engagement is not the same as
persuasion. “You’d rather have a hundred views if they’re the right views
than a thousand retweets in the echo chamber,” says Teddy Goff, who ran
Obama’s digital operation in 2012. “An ad targeted toward Trump people
that says, ‘Donald Trump is the best, Democrats are crooks’ will always be
more engaging than an ad from Biden targeting persuadable seniors that
says, ‘Here’s my plan for the middle class coming out of the recession.’”
Amanda Litman, a longtime digital organizer who is now the executive
director of Run for Something, which recruits young Democrats to seek
state and local office, makes a similar point. “Good digital programs are
really boring,” she says. “It is very authentically Joe Biden. It is stable. It
is solid. It is a little boring. But it gets the job done.”
The disparate text messages from the Trump and Biden campaigns crys-
tallize the difference in their approaches. Trump’s texts often take on the
tone of an angry ex-boyfriend (“URGENT: President Trump texted you
multiple times with no response?”). Biden’s have a cheerier tone (“Do you
want to spend some time with Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren? They are
hosting a grassroots fundraiser on Friday, and you’re invited!”). Trump’s
messages sometimes suggest he will hold a grudge against delinquent do-
nors (“President Trump asked why the last patriot didn’t join. It’s YOU!”),
while Biden’s subject lines are deferential: “A respectful ask of you.”
There’s no doubt the Democrats are fighting an uphill digital battle,
outspent and outgunned. But they’re betting their adversary may self-
destruct. “We love that Brad [Parscale] called it the Death Star,” says Mc-
Gowan. “Because we know what happened to the Death Star in the end.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOE BIDEN/FACEBOOK; @FLADEMS/TIKTOK; —With reporting by AbigAil AbrAms and leslie Dickstein/new York
@MIRANDA_BARRIE/TWITTER; @FLADEMS/INSTAGRAM
^
Clockwise from top:
Biden’s Facebook exhorts
voters to wear masks;
a TikTok post from
Florida Democrats;
organizers gather on
Zoom; an Instagram story
urges Florida Democrats
to vote by mail