The Independent View: Hillary Clinton's New Tech Team

Hillary Clinton is assembling a technology team that signals a significant departure from her 2008 presidential run, led by Obama veterans and geared toward recasting her analog-era image.

With the hiring of Obama campaign alumni Teddy Goff as chief digital strategist, Elan Kriegel as analytics director and Andrew Bleeker as a top outside adviser, the campaign is indicating a greater emphasis on the kinds of cutting-edge techniques that both parties now routinely use to tap into every possible fundraising dollar and seek out every available voter. Just as important, the new hires point to a candidate who’s learned from a 2008 campaign marked by its inability to harness technology to its advantage.

She is building a New York-based campaign that senior party operatives say could ultimately be staffed with more than 1,000 data geeks, techies and digital gurus. Interviews for more tech-focused slots are happening “on the half hour for what will be dozens of early hires,” one longtime Clinton aide explained of the operation, which could see its technology fleet grow roughly three times larger than Obama’s 2012 reelection effort.

The 30-plus digital-specific staffers who did work on Clinton’s last effort “were an appendage to the campaign in 2008,” said Andrew Rasiej, a New York-based technology strategist who had urged Clinton at the start of the last open Democratic presidential primary process to give more emphasis to online marketing, social media and other ways to engage via technology with voters. “They were not central to the operation.”

Clinton’s growing operation also will include longtime aide Katie Dowd as the campaign’s digital director, EMILY’s List’s Jenna Lowenstein as a digital deputy and Matt Ortega in a central role connecting the communications and digital teams.

For 2016, Clinton is drawing on lessons learned from her previous stumbles by filling her innermost circle with tech-savvy advisers. Campaign co-chair and former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta gets frequent praise from Democrats for being open to taking chances on innovative new tech approaches. Clinton’s likely campaign manager, Robby Mook, got an up close and personal look at the relevance of data and digital techniques while running Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s razor-thin 2013 campaign. In that race, Mook hired both Kriegel and Jenna Lowenstein.

The Clinton team constitutes a who’s who of the Democratic digital world. Bleeker, who handled online advertising for her 2008 primary campaign before moving into Obama’s orbit for the general election, founded the Democratic tech firm Bully Pulpit Interactive. He returned to work for Obama in the 2012 campaign and also partnered with Mook on the McAuliffe 2013 race. Dowd has some of the closest direct ties to Clinton after serving most recently as her senior tech adviser at the Clinton Foundation, as new media director at the State Department and as digital fundraising chief during the 2008 campaign, when she helped raise more than $100 million. Dowd’s close relationship with Clinton “will empower the rest of the squad,” said one Democratic tech operative.

Kriegel, a former NCAA Division III football player who co-founded the Democratic tech firm BlueLabs, served as Obama’s battleground state analytics director in 2012. His hire, together with the other new tech staffers, demonstrate Clinton is more than aware of the 2008 perception that rival power centers hampered a critical aspect of her campaign, said Democratic technology expert Ken Strasma.

“Targeting and analytics suffered from the perception that they belonged with one power center, which kept them from being integrated with the rest of the campaign,” said Strasma, who directed microtargeting efforts for Obama in 2008 and John Kerry in 2004.

“The 2016 campaign,” he added, “seems committed to having a high-quality, professional analytics operation that will be integrated with all aspects of the campaign. This mindset is as important as all of the technical advances that have happened over the last eight years.”

By its nature, many of the tech tools the Clinton team will develop will be invisible to the outside world, including tests on which ads, emails and phone call scripts produce the best fundraising figures or volunteer commitments. While she currently is expected to face only minimal opposition in the Democratic primaries, Republicans aren’t ignoring the role technology will play in the race. Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Chris Christie all have started beefing up their digital efforts; on Wednesday, Christie’s Leadership Matters for America PAC announced it had hired Austin-based digital firm Upstream Communications to build out its website, online fundraising and email marketing.

The Koch brothers and conservative big money players have also promised to help elect Republicans in 2016 by dedicating a portion of an $889 million cash infusion to data and analytic work.

While Clinton has started building an “A-team” of Democratic tech experts, Rasiej, the founder of civic tech non-profit Personal Democracy Media, warned that she still faces a much bigger challenge showing that she’s “engaged, present, listening, involved and understanding the two-way dynamic of the medium.”

“If they build a fortress around her and they’re tweeting and videotaping from a fortress,” he said, “the public will notice.”