Democratic campaigns are significantly underfunding their digital GOTV efforts this cycle — investing just 20 percent of what they did at this point in the 2020 cycle despite the media spend for both years projected to be neck-and-neck.
Part of the drop could be attributed to recent changes to the fundraising environment, and the fact that there’s no presidential campaign directing turnout strategy. It could also be that Democratic campaigns are focusing more resources on persuasion and the money could come later.
Still, it has Mike Schneider, a partner at Democratic digital firm Bully Pulpit Interactive (BPI), concerned.
“Taking voters for granted and underfunding mobilization really keeps me up at night,” he told C&E. “I think people breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the NRSC cancel some of their buys a week or two ago. [But] we really can’t let our foot off the gas pedal here.”
A Medium post by Schneider noted that in 2020, “Democrats invested over $84M on Facebook alone to educate and turn out voters — and we’re on pace to spend just ⅕ of that.”
Last week, BPI launched a platform called Momentum to help campaigns turnout their target universes. It’s built off of tools that were deployed during the 2020 cycle to help the Biden effort and some Senate campaigns.
Now, because of early-vote windows in some states opening soon, “mobilization really starts now … not in late October,” said Schneider, who noted that this tool is aimed at late spenders this cycle.
In fact, Schneider said the platform isn’t just another way to cull targeting lists with early vote returns. “We can actually optimize campaigns, make them smarter, pick winning creatives, pick … channels and frequency levels based on whether people are actually voting,” he said. “That’s a really groundbreaking capability and something that could really change the way that GOTV and mobilization campaigns are run.”
One of the things that Schneider hopes to learn from the program this cycle is, “How early can you change behavior?”
He continued: “When can you get the strongest signal on the type of ads or types of tactics that are working? That’s something that I really hope we can start to explore in greater scale than a presidential and a Senate race this time.
“That was pretty good to scale start with, and then can be something that is really battle tested and really ready to deploy for 2024.”
