The Social Platform That Wants to Build a Down-Ballot Talent Pipeline
Bart Myers and Jaime Peters say they want to build a pipeline of down-ballot talent on the left. They’re betting that a social media site is the key.
Myers and Peters are two of the minds behind CrowdBlue, a social organizing platform that launched last year as a rebrand of the political crowdfunding platform CrowdPac. The idea, they say, is to give down-ballot and emerging candidates a space to test the waters, learn the ropes of campaigning and raise money, both before and after they jump into their races.
“We’re focused on making it so easy for candidates to be able to effectively go from nothing to having their own site that they can promote to their friends and colleagues,” Myers, CrowdBlue’s CEO, told Campaigns & Elections.
On its surface, CrowdBlue looks like any other social media feed. It features a seemingly endless scroll of posts from veteran politicians, like Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), and upstart candidates for school boards, county commissions and state legislatures. Users can find candidates and causes to support with filters that surface pages by state, election year, political affiliation, gender or issues of interest.
“At its core, it’s really a social platform,” Myers said. “It’s modeled sort of on Instagram and TikTok and a lot of these more visual social feed models.”
What’s different is CrowdBlue’s fundraising capabilities. The site is integrated with the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, allowing users to give to individual candidates, organizers or parties directly through CrowdBlue. It’s one of a few apps in Apple’s App Store that allows users to make political contributions.
Users also have the option to fundraise through pledges, Myers said, which allows prospective candidates who aren’t yet committed to launching a campaign the ability to gather financial backing before announcing an official run. Donors aren’t charged until the candidate makes that decision.
Myers also said that CrowdBlue is, in part, built out of necessity. As more mainstream social platforms have moved to limit political content, Myers said he wants CrowdBlue to be a space for politically minded people to organize and communicate.
“I think there was maybe an assumption that social media would remain a reasonably unbiased force for engagement. And I think given the TikTok news and what we’ve seen in terms of algorithms dialing back political engagement, it hurts campaigns that rely on reaching their audiences through social media.”
Peters, CrowdBlue’s head of campaigns, is heading up the platform’s efforts to recruit candidates and organizations to CrowdBlue. She said that her goal is to help guide would-be candidates through the process of launching their own campaigns – a slog of filing deadlines, networking and fundraising that can seem daunting to political newcomers.
“You’re seeing school board races, you’re seeing state reps, county commissions, city councils, even the small town mayoral races,” Peters said. “That’s what gets overlooked. It’s not even the person who’s already decided to run for school board. It’s ‘how do I even know if I can run for school board? Is there an open seat? What do I have to do if I decide to run?’ ”
At a moment when Democrats and progressives are showing a renewed interest in state and local races, Peters said she wants to ensure that new talent has a way to break into politics.
“These candidates are able to really punch above their weight,” she said.
