The digital divide between Republicans and Democrats |
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In case you missed it, my colleagues Jim Rutenberg and Matthew Rosenberg took a deep look at the scramble among Democrats to catch up to the Republicans’ advantages on the internet. So I talked to Jim today and asked him a few questions about his reporting.
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So, Jim, to get us started: Just how bad is it for the Democrats?
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All you have to do is look at the numbers on Twitter: President Trump has more than 75 million followers; Joe Biden has fewer than five million. The Democrats just have nothing compared to what the Republicans have online. That’s going to be a bigger deal as the campaign moves increasingly online because of social distancing measures.
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What’s interesting to me is that the Democratic Party seems much closer to Silicon Valley, and many big-name Democratic donors are from the tech world. How did they let this slip?
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The best we could tell in our reporting was that the tech world, which was generally very close with the Obama administration, got complacent. In Hillary Clinton’s campaign, things were falling apart behind the scenes — the vote-tracking system she inherited from Obama was regularly crashing — but it never led to a sense of alarm because of the misguided belief that she wasn’t in a real fight.
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They sprung into action in 2017, led by the LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman — who ruffled a lot of feathers among the old guard, which generally doesn’t embrace concepts like “disruption” — and much more quietly by Laurene Powell Jobs, who inherited the Apple fortune of her late husband, Steve Jobs.
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Got it. So, how does the likely Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, stack up on the tech front?
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After a considerable bit of clashing, the Silicon Valley types and the older guard have managed to get it together enough to help Biden even the gap. The most important of those efforts, backed in part by Ms. Powell Jobs, is a Big Data project called the Democratic Data Exchange, which would allow all of the campaigns and the big outside groups like Planned Parenthood and the League of Conservation Voters to share all their data about voters, exponentially boosting their intelligence capabilities. Biden’s own campaign is starting to put together a more aggressive digital operation with people who are well respected on the Democratic side.
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So, can the Democrats catch Trump in time?
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No one we spoke with, and we spoke with a lot of people, thinks the Democrats will be able to match what Trump has online in time for November. The bigger question is: Will they be able to do what they need to do to win? Their assessment is cautiously optimistic that they will. Biden’s team knows that having a strong tech infrastructure, and an effective online message machine, can make the difference between winning and losing in a close contest. His aides told us they need to be able to communicate with their own supporters and those whom they see as future supporters (swing voters), and they think they can — while acknowledging it’s a work in proecss.
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