This is part one of a two-part series on the past and future of digital campaigning in the U.S.
Remember digital campaigning in 2010? Considering how fast the field has grown in the past ten years, you probably don't.
While I've never seen firm numbers, a majority of people working in the field today obviously joined the digital campaigning ranks within the past decade. The influx of all those unworn faces mirrors the vast increase in the scale of digital politics over that time.
Nowadays, every campaign or advocacy organization bigger than a shoestring now has dedicated digital staff if it can possibly afford them. Meanwhile, tools like targeted digital advertising and political data have gone from exotic to expected.
Quantity has a quality all its own, Stalin once said. But scale isn't the only factor changing the work of digital politics professionals. Below, we'll look at several of the Big Trends that defined the political internet in the past decade, when it truly came of age as a tool to change the world and elect candidates. Next week, we'll examine the trends likely to matter in the decade to come.
1. The ubiquity of social media.
Between 2010 and today, social media took over our politics — but not in the way most of us might have expected 10 years ago. So far at least, Facebook hasn't replaced email, blogs haven't replaced cable news, YouTube hasn't replaced the rest of television and Twitter hasn't replaced a canvasser's knock on the door. What these platforms have done is to fill the sea of information and opinion in which all of our campaigns swim.
Truth, rumor or disinformation, the stories that spread online shape our political environment, often more than anything a campaign does itself. A click-bait headline someone sees in passing? It likely lingers longer in the mind than someone's carefully considered policy position. An “insider-only” conspiracy theory? Far juicier and more interesting than boring old facts. In that sense, the social web is often something that happens to campaigns, rather than a tool we use to our own ends.
2. Digital tribalism.
Social media have only enhanced the internet's tendency to connect people based on our shared interests, good or bad. Thanks to the combination of algorithms and our own decisions to read or watch things we already agree with, we can go days without encountering an idea that challenges our beliefs or assumptions. Who needs shared truth when you can have one of your own?
Campaigns have naturally responded to rising political tribalism by focusing less on persuading people in the middle and more on motivating and turning out people already inclined to support them. Political data plays a role since it helps us direct specific messages to voters most likely to respond, but our political splintering started long before the present decade. Cable news and niche political newsletters predate social media and political data-targeting by years, and our new digital communications channels merely took that developing trend and super-charged it. In the digital world, information bubbles are real and tough to break into.
3. Triumph of digital fundraising.
By 2010, Barack Obama had already demonstrated that you could raise enough money online to fund a presidential campaign. Since then, digital fundraising has exploded down the ballot and across the issue spectrum, powering movements from the Tea Party to the Trump Resistance. The Trump campaign was the first to perfect the process of recruiting grassroots donors via Facebook, and by the 2020 election cycle, the Democratic Party built small-dollar donor thresholds into the qualification process for presidential debates.
But candidates for lesser offices across the country have benefited from the ease of donating online, particularly if they've found a national hook or a national network to tie into. Digital dollars = grassroots power.
4. The democratizing of data.
Likewise, political data went from mysterious to commonplace in just a few years. Voter-file-targeted voter contact, either digitally or on the doorstep, helps campaigns get the most value out of each media dollar or each canvassing shift. Self-serve ad platforms and voter-data systems like the VAN put tools in the hands of local candidates that presidential campaigns would have envied only ten years ago. The challenge, of course, is to put all that data to meaningful use. Good data + bad strategy = wasted time.
5. Advertising on the cusp.
Campaigns may have learned to raise money online, but most don't seem yet to have figured out how to invest it there. Trump 2016 excepted, most campaigns and other political spenders still lag far behind commercial brand marketers when it comes to digital vs. television budgets.
The new wave of ad political restrictions from Google, Twitter, Spotify, and more platforms hasn't helped, but campaigns didn't exactly need encouragement to put their money into our TV sets rather than our phones and laptops. Too many have ignored the internet's ability to target voters cost-effectively for too long to think 2020 was going to be the year digital advertising finally flashed over. The average campaign may spend more on digital this year than in 2018 or 2016, but I doubt by much as a percentage. So far, digital advertising still awaits its moment in the political sun.
6. Mobile finally made it.
By contrast, mobile phones finally began to deliver on their political promise in the past few years. Activists live-stream rallies (or police brutality), canvassers rely on their phones to get them to the right doors, peer-to-peer texts barrage priority voters and social media apps let our supporters get in the messaging game in the moment. More prosaically, donors now open most of our fundraising messages on a mobile device, sparking a return to email simplicity and the proliferation of one-click donation tools. If your campaign website isn't mobile-friendly, it might as well not exist these days.
7. The old is new again.
Speaking of email and websites, plenty of older digital technologies have stuck around in the age of virtual reality and Tik Tok. Campaigns still raise the bulk of their digital dollars via emails to supporters, despite constant predictions of the medium's demise, and websites aren't disappearing anytime soon, either.
With perhaps half of all web searches now conducted via voice rather than text, search engine optimization has become a significant question again, this time focused on how well a campaign site pleases Siri or Alexa. Smart campaigns still get the basics right and focus on channels they can control. Email, text messages and field teams are immune from Facebook's latest algorithm change!
Well, so much for the 2010s, the decade in which digital politics came of age. Next time, we'll look at several trends likely to govern the next 10 years of online campaigning. Buckle up.
Colin Delany is founder and editor of the award-winning website Epolitics.com, author of the 2019 edition of “How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections,” a twenty-four-year veteran of online politics and a perpetual skeptic. See something interesting? Send him a pitch at cpd@epolitics.com.