What can digital campaigners learn from the midterms?

By Steve Anderson, Co-Founder & Chief Strategist at New/Mode

Photo by Mirah Curzer

As a community of campaigners, many of us have contributed to historic wins recently. The U.S. midterms saw historic engagement levels culminating in a decisive victory with the Democrats taking over the House.

We need to recognize the progress that has been made, but this moment also calls on us to step-up and go bigger. As I’m sure you’ve seen, the regressive fight-back is already underway.

We know we can’t just maintain support between elections, we need to grow our communities even further, deepen relationships, and move the dial on key issues like immigration and protection for Dreamers, federal minimum wage, healthcare, clean-energy, and curbing voter suppression.

Now is a great moment to pause, learn and get ready to scale up.

At New/Mode we’re on a mission to make effective campaign strategies, tactics and technologies broadly accessible to the progressive movement.

That’s why I’m in Washington DC this week, debriefing with leading technologists, strategists, campaigners and organizers. I look forward to sharing these insights with you:

• On Monday, I’ll join our cohort colleagues at Higher Ground Labs for an intensive recap of our pre-election efforts and post-election results.
• On Tuesday, AFL-CIO is covering everything from ground game to digital, data, mobilization, local races, #resistance and more.
• On Thursday, I will be presenting with an awesome group of panelists at the Campaign Digital Debrief 2018, a virtual summit. If you haven’t RSVP’d already, save your spot today!
• On Friday, I’ll be speaking at the New Media Mentors 2018 Midterms Debrief with Digital Innovators (hosted by Netroots Nation), summarizing what I’ve learned throughout the week and presenting a case study on successful issue-based organizing. This is also a free session, so be sure to RSVP soon!

If you were involved in a campaign leading-up to or during the election, I’d love to know what you learned so I can feed it into the debriefs I’m attending. I also welcome questions to put forward to others in these meetings. Send us a note on Twitter or get in touch from our website.

I’ll report back in this space and in the New Media Mentors 2018 Midterms webinar later this week.

Onwards!

Steve Anderson, Co-Founder & Chief Strategist & New/Mode