Democrats Just Got the Digital Machine They Need to Keep Winning
EveryAction, a Salesforce-like platform for liberal campaigns and causes, has acquired the organizing company Mobilize, creating a political tech juggernaut.
Many Democrats have spent the weeks since the election bickering about who’s to blame for a result that ousted President Trump but also saw the party fall short in its efforts to gain strength in Congress and statehouses. The debate has obscured one area of unquestionable Democratic success: In the four years since Trump’s election, progressives have built an organizing and fundraising behemoth, which just delivered a record 80 million votes for President-elect Joe Biden. Democrats’ fortunes in the Biden era and beyond will hinge on whether they can maintain and grow this juggernaut.
In 2017, I wrote about MobilizeAmerica, a digital organizing startup founded in the wake of Trump’s victory whose technology was just then being tested in Virginia’s off-year elections. The company’s founders, Alfred Johnson and Allen Kramer, thought that the explosion of grassroots energy evident in the Women’s March and similar events could be harnessed and deployed locally to advance progressive goals—if Democrats developed the right tools to draw new activists into campaigns.