Here's What Beto Could Unleash on Trump

[RandySF]

The imperative was always to optimize the campaign for scale rather than precision. By the start of summer, the field team engineered a major shift, freeing organizers from a geographical base and having them share recruitment duties for block walks and phone banks held across the state, in the spirit of the distributed-organizing tactics pioneered by Sanders. Their tool was the Beto Dialer, a phone system developed by the firm Relay that queued up respondents to minimize the seconds that a caller spent waiting for a live voice to answer. It could make more efficient use of staff time, but at the cost of making accountability diffuse: No longer could responsibility for a poorly attended event be squarely placed on the nearest organizer. And for some organizers, it was a jarring adjustment to be calling a stranger in Lubbock one moment and another in San Marcos the next, all while a volunteer in Texarkana recruits people to attend a block walk near your office.

As it grew, the Beto for Senate field program regularly turned to methods that most campaign tacticians would find aimless. There was no mechanism for routing volunteers to unvisited areas, so volunteers were likely walking the same blocks over and over again. The field team rejected, too, advances in data analytics that modern campaigns typically embrace to narrow the range of voters with whom they interact, and perhaps tailor their communications to different groups. When the campaign did finally hire a firm to work on data projects, it selected TargetSmart, which serves primarily as a wholesale provider of voter data rather than a consultancy working on bespoke projects for clients. Casey, the campaign manager, was so sensitive to the idea that she might be paying for something that would violate O’Rourke’s vow not to hire a pollster that TargetSmart began referring to the survey calls necessary for any micro-targeting project as “model training data collection.”

Up until August, the campaign’s objective was to contact all but the most reliably Republican voters in the state, see if they supported Beto, and then cultivate them as prospective volunteers. Hard-core Republicans were excluded only to save existing supporters from potentially unpleasant interactions. “Literally, it could be such a bad experience,” said Malitz. Only then did the campaign narrow its range of potential targets to Texans identified as likely to support O’Rourke.

At the outset, Wysong planned around a modest statewide budget—“It felt like if we could get to $20 million, we could probably hang,” he said—that would require the field operation to be both very fast and very cheap. But O’Rourke’s dynamic digital presence turned out to be ideal for bringing in money. National party committees were still writing him off as too much of a long shot to fund, but small-dollar donors took to O’Rourke’s candidacy, especially as he associated himself with positions—Trump’s impeachment, abolishing ICE, likening the criminal-justice system to Jim Crow—that few other Democratic Senate contenders were willing to touch.



https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/22/beto-orourke-campaign-strategy-2020-225193

[Cha]

1. KR!

[TexasTowelie]

2. Bookmarking.

Thanks for posting.

[RandySF]

3. Any word in TX that he's going to do it?

This article impressed me.

[TexasTowelie]

4. There haven't been any announcements.

I checked the El Paso Times and there is no word.