“There’s a broad recognition among campaign professionals that the way that campaigns are working is dying,” the app’s creator, David Shor, told the Tribune just after he launched VoteWithMe in 2016. (Civis says it hasn’t been involved with VoteWithMe since 2017.) “People don’t trust campaigns anymore, and they trust strangers less. While knocking on doors, for the most part, people were pretty unhappy to see me. Research suggests that people are more receptive to the people they know, and that’s especially true in canvassing, so we’re trying to make this process more personable.”