In 2017, a couple of disgruntled Silicon Valley founders launched a startup to use their internet skills to elect Democrats. They built a network of digitally savvy volunteers that eventually ended up advising hundreds of state legislative candidates on how to modernize their digital footprints.
Now, a group called Tech for Campaigns is expanding those efforts, using digital advertising tools to register Democrats to vote. The social media ad blitz, honed with performance-testing tactics common to corporate advertisers, is reaching voters in battleground states across the country, including Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, to encourage them to vote early or by mail.
Tech for Campaigns was born out of its founders’ concern that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential victory was partly down to a social media strategy. But the group, whose past donors include Open AI’s Sam Altman, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters and former Meta executives, argues that targeting unlikely voters is key to protecting Democratic majorities in state legislatures.
“Close races are going to be decided by voter turnout,” Jessica Alter, co-founder of Tech for Campaigns, said in an interview. “We’re in favor of sending out mailers and canvassing, but we know that to get different results, we need a different approach.”
The new effort comes at a politically perilous time for Democrats, with President Biden trailing in the polls, while Republicans are stepping up efforts to persuade people to vote by mail despite President Trump’s doubts about the voting process.
“In a state like Wisconsin, it’s the occasional voter who makes all the difference,” said Josh Henderson, senior director of paid media for the A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, which partners with Tech for Campaigns.
Registering a new voter is “usually cheaper” than influencing someone’s vote, he added.
Mr. Alter, Peter Kazanji and Ian Ferguson are all technology founders who started the group after the 2016 presidential election. Outraged by Mr. Trump’s victory, the entrepreneurs sent a Google memo to friends asking if they could lend their expertise, but not money, to help Democrats win the election. Hundreds said yes.
“We brought a tech founder mentality to the table,” Alter says, “instead of just sitting around and complaining and yelling on social media to people who already support us, we actually tried to find solutions.”
The group worked with more than a dozen campaigns in Virginia in 2017. In the 2024 election cycle, it is supporting campaigns in eight states hoping to overturn or maintain Democratic majorities at the congressional level, as well as five Republican-leaning states it is looking to overturn over the next decade.
Supporters claim the organization’s main value is helping campaigns leverage data-validated digital marketing strategies at a time when the political world lags behind corporate America in marketing strategies. In 2022, campaigns allocated about 28% of their ad budgets to digital advertising, while commercial advertisers allocated 72% of their spending to digital, according to a Tech for Campaigns report.
Rob Goldman, a former Facebook advertising executive and Tech for Campaigns donor, said when he spoke to candidates and political activists in 2019, they described outdated messaging strategies that focused on messaging rather than tangible results.
Political experts say, “If you tell voters this position, they’ll change their mind about candidate Y,” Goldman said. “That may or may not be true. You don’t know if your ad is going to change their mind… Is it as simple as, did someone request a ballot, yes, no?”
Tech for Campaigns has tested more than 500 different messages across the country since 2020. The ads often encourage users to visit a website that walks them through the voter registration process in their state. The ad campaigns have encouraged more than 500,000 people to vote by mail, and of those who registered, twice as many were under 35, nonwhite and female. A quarter of them did not have a mobile phone in their official voter file, the group said.
The group also recruits micro-influencers to post videos and pay them to promote the campaign on social media to reach Democratic voters who might not vote. In 2023, the group found that influencer ads in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election had 3.4 times higher engagement rates than regular ads and increased registrations among people of color by 25%. This year, the group plans to spend up to $15 million on voter turnout programs.
This year, the group plans to test whether revealing that artificial intelligence helped design an ad affects its effectiveness, and how artificial intelligence can be used to answer voter questions.
The results of these experiments could come in handy this summer, when Tech for Campaigns faces its next big test: getting people to the polls.
“One of the biggest reasons why people don’t vote, no, the biggest reason is because it’s too hard,” Alter said. “Let’s make sure they vote.”
