Reflecting on DNC Tech in 2022

It’s that time of year in the political cycle — campaigns are shuttering, staff is resting, and pundits are busy making sense of results, ascribing blame, and anointing geniuses. In reality, the outcomes of elections are infinitely more complex than we can easily analyze, and the will of voters (not the inner workings of political machines) is infinitely more important. Indeed, one of the most challenging aspects of any retrospective in the political space is that the nuanced work of driving a positive impact for users is reduced down to black and white outcomes — elections won or lost.

Election outcomes are binary, but the work to impact them is always incremental, and about marginal gains — more votes earned, volunteers recruited, money spent more efficiently. And the work the DNC Tech Team did this cycle — delivering high quality data and secure infrastructure — had an incrementally positive impact on the day-to-day lives of our wide base of users within the DNC and at state parties, sister committees, and campaigns up and down the ballot. We are grateful to have played our part in the most successful midterms for a president’s party in 20 years.

In March of this year, I shared an overview of how the DNC Tech team was focused on preparing to support thousands of midterm campaigns in 2022. While our work is not quite done — there is still a critical Senate runoff in Georgia next week! — I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what the DNC Tech team accomplished. This reflection takes a special meaning for me personally this year, as it is my last one in this position at the DNC — after nearly four years, I’m transitioning out of the CTO role.

I am going to spend time in this post talking about what we got done at the DNC this cycle, but first, I want to talk about why any of it matters — and what I’ve taken away from my fourth November at the DNC, as it relates to the role of technology in politics.

• Technology exists only to serve an outcome. In the case of the DNC Tech team, our mission is to build political power by winning more votes for Democratic candidates. There is sometimes an urge to valorize a piece of technology — a new social media site, an app, an algorithm, etc. — as “changing the game.” This is almost always a red herring. What matters is what people do with that technology, how it serves the needs of users, and how it advances the goals of the program. At the DNC, we have stayed laser focused on building the tools that do just that.
• Technology works best at scale. The work of electing Democrats is fragmented — there are thousands of elections across this country, and the vast majority are small in scale and deeply local. This fragmentation easily leads to redundancy and inefficiency. And this is where technology can change the game, by offering a strong, centralized, and reliable foundation for others to build and innovate on. Almost all technology or data we invest in gets shared with our users at Democratic state parties, committees and campaigns, at scale, and at no cost.
• Technology can be durable and enduring. In addition to being fragmented, the political ecosystem is highly cyclical, with boom and bust moments of investment and attention. For technology, this often means that spurts of innovation are left stagnant, critical data about voters is left unarchived, and that learnings are left behind after a cycle ends. One of the unique value propositions of the DNC is the fact that we are an enduring organization, which means we can offer that stability cycle-to-cycle, in a way that many other political organizations (especially campaigns) cannot. And our most valuable asset as a party — two decades of data about voting behavior and voter interactions with campaigns — is valuable because of its longevity. This is one of the reasons I am so passionate about the work done by the DNC around technology and data, because it is a role only we can play in being custodians of some of the party’s most precious resources, while continuously investing in that centralized foundation.

I came to the DNC because I knew it was rare to find a place in politics to build something lasting, available at scale, to so many Democratic organizations. And I leave as confident in that opportunity as the day I joined. I am so proud of what we’ve accomplished and I am so very excited about the path ahead for this phenomenal team.

Let’s take a minute to recap some of what we accomplished in 2022.

We helped campaigns reach the right voters with the right message.

Thanks to the DNC’s investment in the data that powers voter contact, campaigns were more likely to reach the right voters, whether at their doors, through mail, text messages, phone calls, or online advertising, and could more efficiently identify and target the right set of voters to engage.

In total, over 500,000 Democratic volunteers and staffers from 12,000 campaigns utilized this data to talk to voters in 2022.

We continued to raise the bar on the quality, completeness, and usability of our national voter file to ensure that users could spend more time on their program outputs and less time on data inputs.

• We increased the frequency of our voter file ingestions (30% increase from 2021 to 438 files processed to date). This doesn’t just mean fresher individual-level data — it also gives campaigns and us a clearer view of current voter registration and voter roll purge trends across the country.
• We added more than 1.7 million unregistered targets to our potential voters dataset across the U.S.
• We built a centralized set of address data for geographic targeting, analysis, and reporting independent from voter records — 99% of addresses that the USPS tracks as deliverable are now contained in our cloud-based data warehouse, Phoenix. This includes 25 million net new addresses never seen in our national voter file before, yielding 8 million newly canvassable registered voters, and an 11% increase in rural canvassable voters.
• We released more than 57 million cell phones in 2022, across the U.S., and brought our national voter file coverage to over 80% — up from 70% in 2020 and from 30% in 2016, meaning more voters can be reached on the phone, via texts, and online.
• We provided our users with 75+ unique predictive scores to help optimize their voter outreach efforts. Our top scores — modeling likely Democratic support and midterm turnout — were directly accessed 400,000 times across hundreds of campaigns this cycle alone. This included releasing a choice support model, predicting the likelihood a voter supports legal abortions, within 72 hours of the official Dobbs decision. This remains one of our most highly utilized products this cycle.

We made sure early vote data was accessible to campaigns and committees.

Over the past decade, in response to changing election laws and the pandemic, Americans have increasingly chosen to vote either early in person or by mail. We call this type of voting AV/EV (absentee vote/early vote). In most states, secretaries of state and/or boards of elections report AV/EV data publicly on a daily basis once early voting begins in a state, and this data is incredibly powerful for campaigns. It helps them understand everything from who needs to be reminded to return a mail ballot, to who has already voted and no longer needs to be targeted for GOTV efforts, to who has a rejected ballot that may need to be cured, to the evolving state of turnout trends.

Unfortunately, the raw data provided publicly can be messy, disparate (e.g., provided on the county level), and take precious campaign time to parse. To address this problem, the DNC Tech team made AV/EV data processing a priority in 2022. More than 40 states used our AV/EV (early and absentee vote) data uploader, which gives users a faster and clearer picture of who has already voted.

In total, we processed over 7,000 absentee vote and early vote files this year, and made the data available to state parties, committees, and campaigns across the country.

We offered centralized tools for voter education and voter protection.

We are so proud that the Democrats’ destination for voter education — IWillVote — was fully utilized across all states for early and Election Day voting in 2022. In addition to being live in 50 states for the general election, 49 states also leveraged IWillVote during primaries and/or special elections. This is a great example of how the DNC is transforming the innovations typically only seen during presidential years into infrastructure available to races across the country every election year.

We also made numerous, critical improvements to tools used by our voter protection teams at the DNC, and across states, to support the work of volunteers working at polls and working voter support hotlines, and ensure we were capturing and triaging incidents of voter suppression.

We improved the organizational sustainability and security of the DNC.

We worked tirelessly to ensure that the entire DNC could operate seamlessly and securely, with the right tools (but at lower costs to the organization), and we made our infrastructure more secure and sustainable for this cycle and for cycles to come.

Here are a few examples of things that we did “behind the scenes” to ensure that our tools and tech worked more seamlessly and securely:

• We launched a content management system for IWillVote. This dramatically decreased the number of app deploys required to keep critical voter education information accurate and updated, empowering stakeholders and freeing up engineers to focus on other issues during our most critical election window.
• We upgraded 100% of our production data pipelines to a modern new platform, increasing stability, performance, and usability while improving our pace of deploying new features. Between our efforts to deprecate legacy platforms and thoughtfully introduce new ones, we’ve been able to drive practical improvements including an average speed-up of 60 minutes in processing individual voter files!
• We expanded automation of how we monitor, audit, and offboard users from our data infrastructure! This had multiple impacts: better controls for state parties managing their data, saving our team a ton of time, and of course, helping our data and systems stay secure.

Finally, a critical portion of organizational sustainability is about fundraising. The DNC Tech Team contributed to the phenomenal work of our grassroots fundraising team to raise more funds to support all of our vital work to support Democrats across the country! In 2022, the DNC broke midterm fundraising records and transferred over $27M to the DSCC and DCCC — a record for the party. Just one example of our contribution to fundraising: improvements to the model used to predict likely donors resulted in 2.3x more donations raised via mail, while saving money for the DNC.

We invested in ourselves — building this great team!

As I’ve written about in the past, the most important investment this team has made is not in any single product or technology, but in an organizational culture focused on building a technology foundation for the long-term. That means breaking the boom and bust cycle of political hiring in tech roles, investing in iterative and agile forms of product development, building trust with our users through ongoing and bidirectional conversations, and staying laser focused on our unique value within the ecosystem.

I’m so incredibly proud of the team of humans who have brought this vision to life. In 2022, we were nearly 70 strong, and we hired and onboarded 27 new team members this year alone, including a new Head of Product and Community and a new Chief Security Officer.

We have built a durable, effective organization, rooted in shared values but open to change and iteration over time. And part of continuing to evolve and strengthen as an organization is making space for new leaders and new voices. As I transition out of the CTO role, I’m thrilled to share that our current Head of Engineering, Arthur Thompson, will be stepping into the role — providing a new perspective combined with a deep understanding of, and continuity with, the work we’ve done over the past years to build this great team.

I am so proud of what this team has accomplished both in 2022 and over the last four years. But I am even more thrilled to see the next generation of DNC Tech leadership continue to push us forward. Onward!