Is campaign cold outreach slowly dying?
Phone calls from strangers, spam text messages, and door knocks have defined campaigns for years. Now, that’s changing.
FWIW, this week’s newsletter is sponsored by Civic Shout
Cold outreach (the phone banking and door-knocking tactics that are a staple of political campaigns) can be tall ask for volunteers, and it's often exhausting. Getting a casual supporter of your candidate, who probably doesn’t have a ton of experience in the political world, to volunteer to sit in a room with a long list of voters’ names and call each of them to read them a script isn’t easy. If they end up doing it, there’s a strong chance they’ll get yelled at or immediately hung up on by a majority of voters on the other line. Many first-time volunteers won’t come back.
While proven to be somewhat effective in the past, those cold calls, door knocks, and spammy texts are only as good as the lists of voter data behind them. Every cycle there are reports of Democrats mobilizing voters in the final stretch who are surprised to find themselves engaging with hardcore MAGA supporters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton famously blamed her loss on data that was “poor, nonexistent, and wrong.”
Last week, Makena Kelly at WIRED wrote about Relentless, a startup founded by a group of Democratic organizing veterans who think the party should begin prioritizing relational outreach over cold outreach. Relational organizing is a fancy term for getting supporters to reach out to their own friends and family with election messaging, instead of having them log hours talking to strangers. Several experiments have shown it to be far more effective than cold outreach.
WIRED reported that Relentless is investing heavily in a major relational organizing effort in swing states and paying participants to talk to their personal networks about the election. They’re partnering with the Progressive Turnout Project on the program.
“[Relentless] is launching a $10.8 million program that will, in part, help pay participants in the program a $200 stipend to get out the vote. The organizers of the program say they plan to build out a network of more than 2 million voters across seven battleground states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.”
The company, which has received some funding from Higher Ground Labs, also built a web-based tool called Rally to create and track those voter contacts. This is in contrast to the Democratic Party’s traditional, top-down way of logging voter contacts based on rigid lists in a decades-old software platform called Votebuilder.
“Where we're headed is that everything is going to be relational-first,” said Greta Carnes, co-founder of Relentless. “There will always be voters we’re not going to be able to reach through friends or family members, so cold contact will be critical when the choice is between cold contact or no contact. But, I think campaigns are going to begin prioritizing what we call “the warmest possible touch,” which may come from a friend, or maybe somebody you went to high school with, or even a neighbor - anyone you have a relationship with.”
And it’s not just outside efforts deploying relational tactics this cycle. The Biden campaign itself launched several relational organizing pilot programs in Wisconsin and Arizona last fall. Those efforts targeted volunteers in several specific constituencies and attempted to get them to log their own networks of Biden supporters. The result: they were to reach a large percentage of potential voters who weren’t contacted in 2022.
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Digital ad spending, by the numbers:
FWIW, political advertisers spent just over $12 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
The Biden campaign spent a huge amount of money on Facebook and Instagram ads last week, accounting for 16.5% of all political ad spend on Meta platforms during that seven-day period. They’ve been the top-spending political advertiser on the platform every week since early February. One of their newest waves of Facebook ads attacks Trump on healthcare.
We also saw the Koch Brothers’ conservative Latino outreach arm, The Libre Initiative, launch a new campaign last week targeting voters in key swing states. The group’s ads attack “Bidenomics” and ask “What happened to the America we dreamed of?”
Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $6.7 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
Duty and Honor Fund, which is tied to Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC, is running new video ads that praise Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown for “cracking down on illegal drugs at the border.”
On Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent $1.9 million on ads year to date. Here are the top spenders:
…and on X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers have spent over $4 million on the platform in 2024. Here are the top spending accounts:
Your 2024 digital dispatch
FWIW, here’s how weekly digital ad spending (Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube) compares between the Trump and Biden campaigns year-to-date:
As you can see, both presidential campaigns spent more on digital ads last week than any other seven-day period this year. The news of Trump’s conviction played a huge role in that spending spike, with both the Biden and Trump teams running digital ads mentioning the news.
The Trump Show, now on TikTok
Last Saturday night, convicted felon Donald Trump finally did what some political watchers would have considered highly unlikely a few years ago: he joined TikTok. The @realdonaldtrump account launched with one video, a montage of Trump attending UFC 302 with Dana White. The video has received 120 million views, and the former President is now one of the most-followed U.S. politicians on the platform. (We’ve had a hard time finding any other political candidate with a similarly sized following)
Given that political content on TikTok may be much more pro-MAGA than some of us previously thought, Trump will likely be able to use his account to drive massive engagement - and spark lots of viral conversations - in these final five months before Election Day.
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More from around the internet:
Trump’s campaign entities reportedly raised $141 million in May, bolstered by his guilty verdict last week. If accurate (they lie a lot), it’s a significant sum that will help close the gap between his team and the Biden campaign.
Democratic software behemoth NGP VAN launched a payments platform this week, allowing them to process donations on the back end from gifts that come through their forms. They’re charging a slightly lower per transaction fee (3.25 percent) than ActBlue (3.95 percent), according to Campaigns & Elections.
Facebook is attempting to win back young users after many departed to other social media platforms. They’re doubling down on those efforts now by making three big changes that they hope will win over Gen Z.
We write a lot about online campaigns trying to influence members of Congress, but this is a new one for us… Since October, the Israeli government has been running a covert online influence campaign targeting members of Congress, including creating three fake news websites and hundreds of social accounts.
Instagram is allegedly testing no-skip ads on their app… and people are saying that they really, really hate it.
The vibes on TikTok last week:
FWIW, here’s a look at 10 of the most-liked videos mentioning Trump on TikTok in the past week:
The vibes were pretty negative for Trump’s first official week on TikTok. Most videos featured reporting about or reactions to his conviction on 34 counts in NYC. Two of the top-performing videos poked fun at him: a mashup from @fallontonight of Trump “singing” I Fought The Law and a brief clip from @hamiltonhound of a dog trained to snarl at his name. There were, however, a few positive videos from Trump’s UFC visit, including one from @bestufcvids where he appears to be saying he’ll end the war in Palestine.
Meanwhile, here were some of the most-liked videos mentioning Biden in the past week:
In terms of posts that mentioned Biden, the most-liked video by far was a repost from @ifukingloveboburnham of comedian Bo Burnham complaining about needing to vote for Biden again (Burham actually released the song back in 2021). We’d link the video, but Burnham deleted all the videos from his account sometime last night. Notably, two videos from young women who are conservative TikTok commentators garnered a lot of attention as well: one from @bryannacalifornia on Biden family conspiracy theories and one from @brettcooper_ on Trump “beating” Biden on TikTok.
That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 21,480 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on Twitter or Threads? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.
Thanks Kyle. Help me understand how relational organizing expands the pool of potential supporters, especially from independent voters, or less active voters? Relational outreach misses discouraged, disappointed, or disallusioned voters and non-voters. Those groups are as important to reach as the voters reached through relational efforts. I write as a successful state legislative candidate, who has worked on local, state and federal election. And as someone who has knocked on all doors in swing areas.
thanks Greta for your thoughtful and thorough response. I admire how you handled my questioning the issue of relational organizing—to your credit. In my state of Iowa, I am aware of the interest in relational organizing by some political leaders and the state political party. I will open my mind more to its potential; I still maintain that ‘cold outreach’, especially in leafleting (not doorknocking) has a benefit to reach many people, demonstrates a different view of what the controlling party in Iowa is setting as policy, and is easy for volunteers. I do like what happened in Mississippi.