Democrats have developed a number of campaign tech tools in recent years aided by a robust incubator infrastructure and startup funding community. Despite those business successes, the party in 2024 wasn’t “meeting people where they are,” according to Betsy Hoover, founder and managing partner of incubator Higher Ground Labs.
“A lot of that is tech enabled because people are online and they’re in different parts of the internet and they’re receiving their information in so many different ways,” Hoover told C&E.
“We’ve been saying that for a long time and we’ve been putting new tools out into the world that reflect that. But at the end of the day, for most campaigns, our tech and digital strategy still is an add-on to an old paid media strategy and a traditional field program — and that’s got to switch.”
To that end, Hoover is hoping that one of the changes in campaign strategy that emerges from this cycle is greater focus on digital outreach.
“The piece of the challenge that we want to help tackle is how do we make sure our campaign programs and strategy evolved with technology?” she said. “Because I think one of the things that was amiss for Democrats this cycle was really back to our organizing basics where we’re not meeting people where they are.”
Republicans had perhaps the highest profile tech ally ever rally to their side with Elon Musk supporting the Trump-Vance campaign in person and online. But Hoover isn’t concerned that her side is losing out on tech talent to the right.
“There are huge tech names and voices that have been super active on the left forever, and continue to play a really important role,” she said, pointing to the likes of Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt and others.
“I actually think the bigger point here is technology itself is not partisan and technology itself is not political. It’s cultural,” she said. “It’s the way that people use technology — it’s not about a candidate. It’s about their lives. And if candidates want to reach people, they have to use technology to do it. Period. Full stop. That’s it.
“And so that’s more the lesson for me to take away here than Musk’s move towards Trump.”
Hoover said it’s too early to assess where investors will want to put their money to help develop new tools in the coming months.
“What I want to spend time on and what I think all Democrats need to spend time on in the next several months here is really experimenting with some things,” she said. “I’m not ready to throw a bunch of money behind one strategy at this point, and I don’t think any of us should be — it’s too soon.”
She added: “I think what we do know is that the Trump team did a really great job of turning out hard-to-reach and hard-to-mobilize voters … And we did less of a good job of that. And that explains the pretty massive shift nationwide to the right.”