Democrats hope their experience using data, social media and digital advertising will pay off. The battle for digital supremacy

Control of the Senate isn’t the only big prize for the November midterms. Bragging rights are also up for grabs in the deeply partisan arms race over who has the edge with political technologies.

Democrats hope the experience they’ve gained using data, social media and digital advertising in President Barack Obama’s two winning White House campaigns will pay off in 2014 and maybe even help save the day in some of their closest races. But with the playing field and technology budgets much smaller this cycle, Republicans insist they’re finally entering the home stretch at something close to parity.


After all, both parties are blasting out carefully-crafted emails to potential donors. Both maintain they’re running pitch-perfect online ads that targets the undecideds not watching live TV. And both say they will be monitoring and responding to real-time data on early voting totals in the most critical battleground states.

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“There are no tools absent in the toolbox on our side,” said Matthew Dybwad, a partner at CRAFT Media/Digital, a GOP firm working for Dan Sullivan’s Alaska Senate campaign and for the outside group backing Tom Cotton in Arkansas. “At this point, it’s really about smart use and it’s not about clamoring for the shiny object that we don’t have.”

Despite the millions both parties are investing in political technologies, it’s still a challenge to determine who really has the advantage. Federal disclosure requirements allow the campaigns and consultants to obscure most of their spending and they typically release only the most positive-sounding figures when asked how much money they raise with online technologies. That makes the results on Election Day 2014 count even more in shaping the data and digital narrative, especially headed into a wide open presidential primary where Democrats and Republicans will again compete for techno supremacy.

For Democrats, a big test is finding a way to deploy all of the digital know-how gleaned from Obama’s two campaigns with budgets that are exponentially smaller than his past White House runs. Facing a mix of 2012 presidential battlegrounds like Colorado and Iowa and states that never get general election love, like Alaska and Louisiana, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this year has committed to spending $60 million building a 4,000-person field team focused on voter registration and turnout.

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At their Washington headquarters, the DSCC has expanded the size of its tech team since 2012, devoting significant digital resources to fundraising, IT, data, persuasion and turnout. The party also has a new level of understanding when it comes to forecasting the battleground electorate, from studying last names to decipher how ethnicity influences voter behavior to how an in-state high school graduate votes different than someone who went to an out-of-state high school.

“These are richer models,” said Matt Canter, the DSCC deputy executive director. “We’ve been able to enrich the [Obama] technology and that’s helped us be a lot more efficient, which we have to be because we have a lot less dollars to work with.”

Democratic consultants predict their incumbent senators also have an advantage over their GOP rivals because of their experiences using technologies while in office and in past Senate campaigns. “We’ve laid a big foundation,” said Anne Lewis, who helped establish the tech programs for the House and Senate Democratic campaign arms in 2006. “Many have been in this online business for years, thinking about it, figuring it out with the DSCC holding their hands.”

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Several Democratic candidates themselves said in interviews earlier this month that campaign technologies help them keep a better pulse on their voters.

“I think it’s a whole new day with technology,” said Alaska Sen. Mark Begich, citing his experiences with social media, texts and telephone town halls, which he said voters enjoy “because they feel more personal.”

”I actually consider this back to the old days of campaigning because you have to really make a one to one contact with a voter versus in the old days you run a bunch of TV and it all works suddenly, magically,” Begich said.

Sen. Mary Landrieu said technology “absolutely” gives her an edge as she tries to secure a simple majority in Louisiana, otherwise she’ll be forced into a runoff with the next highest vote winner.

“We are using all of the latest opportunities to do exactly that and trying to help to identify our voters and our likely voters and I think it’s just going to get more and more and more useful,” she said. “Just like new apps help people to find what they’re looking for, when you’re looking for voters, it really helps you to have that technology.”

Asked if the Democrats’ historic technology edge could give him a one to two-point bump in his voter turnout — figures which the GOP say they are factoring into election models — Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor replied, “I think it definitely could be. There’s no doubt about that. At the end of the day, everybody up here, the news media up here, talks about ads and money. At the end of the day, politics is about people. If it helps you reach people and communicate with people it probably does give you an advantage.”

Republicans counter that no amount of technology will help red staters like Begich, Landrieu and Pryor as they try to shake off midterm voter apathy and an unpopular Obama presidency.

In addition, Republicans say they have been working since the 2012 presidential election — where Mitt Romney’s campaign dealt with several Election Day technology breakdowns — trying to build their own set of tech tools that can help raise money, excite the base and sway large blocs of undecided voters.

The Republican National Committee is spending $100 million on the midterms, including $8 million for its data-driven get-out-the-vote operation in several critical Senate races. That includes more field staff, phone banks and early vote monitoring. The GOP’s two leading data management firms — the Koch Brothers-affiliated i360 and RNC-affiliated Data Trust — also announced an information-sharing agreement in August.

“I think the knowledge is there,” said Walter Whetsell, a South Carolina-based Republican campaign consultant. “I don’t think the Democrats know something we don’t know. I think in the past they’ve had more money to exploit or develop it. But the technology is getting less expensive and I don’t think the big gap exists in the knowledge of some of these tactics.”

On the ground, several GOP campaigns have been trying to showcase their tech savvy.

Sullivan’s outreach coordinator in Alaska, Terranova Tasker, blasted out an email earlier this monthwith a targeted fundraising plea for $49. “Not only are there 49 days left, but control of the Senate could come down to the 49th state,” she wrote. “It’s critical that we beat Begich, retire [Harry] Reid, and turn around the direction of our country.”

In Virginia, Ed Gillespie’s digital director said the Republican has been making inroads with voters through quick turnaround in email responses to potential supporters and by answering their questions on Twitter. “We have a culture of responsiveness,” said Eric Wilson, who noted the campaign’s emphasis on tech issues by making him its third hire after a campaign manager and communications director.

Republicans also note that their use of technology played a key role in helping all of their incumbent senators win in this year’s GOP primaries, including Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Thad Cochran (Miss.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.).

“The optics of Lindsey Graham being in a runoff would not have been something positive,” said Whetsell, who worked for a super PAC backing Graham which mined consumer data on South Carolina voters to find persuadable Republican primary voters. Graham’s supporters used the information to contact people through their Facebook friends and connections at the barbershop, golf course and church.

“Literally harassing them to go vote,” Whetsell said.

But come November, Republicans caution that their work trying to match the Democratic technology juggernaut will mean little if they can’t demonstrate tangible results.

“If we come out the other side and it’s conclusively shown that the Republicans didn’t use technology to their favor,” Dybwad warned, “we’ll have that much more of a black eye because there’s really no excuse anymore.”