Daniel Kreiss, a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, wrote me that in the arena of digital politics, Trump is the beneficiary of a major advantage:

The fact that Trump is an incumbent, without a significant primary challenger, means that his team and the Republican National Committee have had three years to build tools, collect data, test models and messaging, and mobilize supporters.

How does this advantage actually work?

Michael Podhorzer, the political director of the AFL-CIO, is deeply worried that Democrats have fallen behind. In an email, he described some of the technological advances that have allowed Trump and the Republican Party to leave Democrats in the dust: “The key is MAIDs — Mobile Advertising IDs. All of our phones have a unique MAID.”

FoxBusiness.com explains the utility of such IDs:

Political campaigns are getting in on the action by working with third-party companies to track the “unique identifier” of voters’ phones, matching that ID with the “trove of data usually connected to that same ID.”

From there, Fox reports,

the campaign will recognize the phone, knowing where it has been and the interest of its user, creating a portrait of the user. With this broad body of information, campaigns can effectively target potential voters with advertising, calls and send campaign representatives right to your house.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties maintain and regularly update massive voter and non-voter lists that include details of credit card usage — magazine subscriptions, church and club dues, hunting and fishing licenses — that are all useful in predicting which candidates voters are more likely to choose.

Now, Podhorzer says, “imagine a file with that, and every piece of information taken from your smartphone.” This, he argues, “is the world we’re moving to.” In this new terrain, “the G.O.P. is running pretty far ahead of the Democrats innovating online, mostly because of their financial advantage.”

The Trump campaign’s interest in gaining access to smartphones was unmistakably signaled in an arcane July 1, 2019 reference to “beacon” and “proximity systems” in the “Privacy Policy” on the Donald J. Trump for President website:

“If you agree to allow access to your location, you agree that we and our service providers may collect such location-based information from your Device,” it said, and

We may also collect other information based on your location and your Device’s proximity to “beacons” and other similar proximity systems, including, for example, the strength of the signal between the beacon and your Device and the duration that your Device is near the beacon.

Matt Binder, a tech and politics reporter, wrote on Mashable about the significance of the new language:

Using beacons, campaigns can micro-target voters. For example, they can encourage voters to go to the polls based on their location. Campaigns can also use this technology to collect additional data by messaging users with questionnaires, email sign-up forms, and surveys.

What this means is that the Trump campaign can collect mobile advertising IDs for smartphones in relatively small geographic areas — “information based on your location and your Device’s proximity to “beacons” — at a Trump rally, for example, or a National Rifle Association convention or a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.