The Independent View: Political Alchemist Who’s Been Data-Mining for Hillary

For someone with over 50 years in technology and 10 years in elected politics, I am interested in the merger of technology and politics, with an independent view.

When Mitch Stewart first became a field organizer, in 2002, it looked like the most out-of-place job a young man could seek out in a 21st-century campaign: managing and training volunteers for the work of phone banks and door knocks. At that point, the glamor job in politics was making ads. But now, with Big Data at the center of modern campaigns, the game is different. Thanks to the availability of information about individuals at a remarkably granular level, along with statistical tools for finding patterns in it, what used to be a matter largely of shoe leather now cranks along with guidance from the most sophisticated analytics anywhere. The 39-year-old Stewart has risen to the highest rank of Democratic operatives by thinking holistically about how those pieces of a modern campaign fit together, and how strategies and budgets need to change accordingly.

One of its highest-profile clients has been Ready for Hillary, a super PAC founded in early 2013 as a vessel to nudge Clinton into another presidential race. The group was initially viewed suspiciously by Clinton allies, uncertain what purpose a grassroots freelance effort could serve three-and-a-half years before election day in 2016. But the hiring later that year of Stewart’s 270 Strategies as the super PAC’s chief consultant was a purposeful signal to donors that the group’s aims and methods were serious, and that it was worth an investment. It ultimately raised $15 million, according to a spokesman. Stewart’s job assignment was simple: Help build a list of supporters that Clinton’s staff could inherit for their use whenever she became a candidate.

When her campaign began to take shape earlier this year, Ready for Hillary started to wind down its operation and prepared to hand off, through a legally delicate exchange between two institutions forbidden from coordinating their efforts, the fruits of its labor. Last weekend, Ready for Hillary quantified them: 2.4 million people who signed a pledge to help Clinton’s candidacy, along with four million voters, or prospective ones, identified as supporters the Clinton campaign should attempt to mobilize.

As that process of unwinding the group was getting underway, Mitch Stewart met Bloomberg Politics’s Sasha Issenberg for an exit interview to reflect on this experiment in non-campaign organizing, what Ready for Hillary did, what it accomplished, and what it leaves behind now that Hillary is officially in.

Here are some interesting questions and answers:

Sasha: What was Ready for Hillary?

Steward: It was basically a gigantic net. You saw all this enthusiasm across the country shortly after the 2012 re-elect, where people were excited about a Hillary Clinton presidential run. From my perspective, not taking advantage of that enthusiasm when you had it would have been a huge wasted opportunity. One of the things that we learned in 2012 and in 2008 is that the larger the foundation you have, the bigger your impacts will be.

Sasha: How is the data you get today from an individual supporter who signs up at Ready for Hillary different from what you would have had from someone requesting a ticket to a rally in 2007?

Steward: Actually, the barriers for getting that information have completely flipped. Now if all we get is an e-mail address that still provides value. Matching an e-mail address is brutal. We try get them to self-select: “Get a free bumper sticker, but to do that you have to give us your address so that you we can mail it to you.” You can figure out different ways to move that single e-mail address into something that’s more identifying, so that we can try to match you back to the voter file. One of the things that we did in Iowa is we had a “Caucus Look-Up Tool,” which is a way we were able capture a ton of personal information, because you had to put in your address. But in 2007, I was interested in their personal information, their voting address, and their telephone number. The e-mail address was seen as sort of a nice thing if you can get it, but not necessary. Now the e-mail address is absolutely crucial for building your list.

Sasha: How valuable is an e-mail address if you can’t link it to an identity in the real world?

Steward: That’s going to be a voter. You can still see if they’re opening your e-mail. You can still see if they’re taking action. You know there’s a person behind it. And in a perfect world you’d be able to match that back to the voter file to know exactly how to treat them. Are they a voter-registration target? Are they a persuasion target? Are they a get out the vote (GOTV) target? You can’t quantify the impact, necessarily, that you’re having with an individual, but you know that you’re having an impact.

Sasha: What did you learn in 2011 and the first part of 2012 about trying to recruit and motivate volunteers in the absence of a real opponent?

Stewart: It’s not easy. If you remember the story lines going into 2011, it was that the enthusiasm’s way down and there’s no way we will be able to replicate the same sort of machine that we had in 2008. There were a lot of reasons to be pessimistic. So we start reaching out to volunteers, the first program we ran was I’m In, basically trying to engage. We go to everybody who was active in 2008 and get them to take the pledge: I’m in. We know that matters. And so we spend basically the first six months running that program, and it wasn’t very easy. As soon as the Republicans started to have debates, it became crystal clear what the contrast was, even if it wasn’t Romney at that point, it became easier to recruit volunteers.

Sasha: So Ready for Hillary is collecting e-mail addresses. What happens then?

Stewart: People are signing up saying I’m ready for Hillary, I’m in. People start by giving low-dollar donations, then we start walking them up that ladder of engagement, from an online perspective, because we don’t have an offline perspective. Now we’ve done that, let’s start taking you down different paths digitally to see how you want to be involved.

Sasha: Can you give me a rough sense of the fractions we’re talking about? What share of the e-mail addresses that you collected have already given or volunteered?

Stewart: This is not particular to Ready for Hillary, just a test case for another organization that we’re dealing with. What you want for an issue advocacy or non-profit entity, the average is about a 13 percent open rate. What you hope for is then about a 3 percent click rate for the entire list, and then there’s a smaller subset that will take action. So it’s almost like you know there’s divisions of 10 there. I’m not saying that applies for Ready for Hillary, but that gives you a sense of the scope.

Sasha: What are your assumptions about the people who aren’t responding? You’ve contacted them over and over again, we’re getting closer to the 2016 campaign, we’re starting to see who an opponent might be. If they haven’t taken an action now, can you conclude anything about their value as a potential volunteer or donor to a presidential campaign in 2016?

Stewart: Well, I think the short answer is no. But I would not give up on these folks now. In fact I’d probably run a really aggressive campaign, as soon as the campaign launches, to try to get them to do something. Once there’s news, that’s an organizing opportunity. As far as dissecting or segmenting the list, how I would do it is: first you have your foundation, which is basically your list of supporters, primarily e-mail. Then from there you’re building up. So you know you probably have your list of donors from that and then you have your list of people who volunteer, and people who do both—and so the bigger this foundation is, the bigger everything else will be on top of it.

Sasha: How do you anticipate what the campaign’s needs will be in each areas?

Stewart: I guess I’d take it back to 2008, 2012. So in 2008 we had 1.2 million volunteers. By all accounts, that broke every record in the book. It would have been impossible for us to try to duplicate. Except in 2012, there were 2.2 million volunteers! From my perspective, that’s additive, and so I suspect that when 2016 rolls around, because the foundation is bigger now than it was in 2008, or even in 2012, that more people will be ready to take action. The volunteer army will be bigger in 2016 than it was in even in 2012.

Sasha: How will the next Democratic nominee use volunteers differently than Obama did in 2012?

Stewart: Now the Analyst Institute is saying it’s not about the quantity, it’s the quality of those conversations. What I always say is if you can’t get your message through in 90 seconds with a voter, move on. Now they’re saying no, have a 10 to 15 minute conversation with that voter, it will be more impactful. Am I going to reject that out of hand based on of my experience? Or am I open to saying: Hey, you know what? Instead of, like, having a really short conversation that’s not very deep or meaningful, sit down and really try to engage them, spend 15 minutes, because we know at the end of the day that one conversation is worth five two-minute conversations. That’s the math that you have to do. So I don’t know.

Sasha: If you could play God, how would you divvy up the resources and responsibilities between all the different entities trying to elect a Democratic president in 2016?

Stewart: The national committee, the DNC, has to remain the center point for all data collection and manipulation of that data. So the voter file needs to continue to live at the DNC, it needs to be the hub of all the different spokes that run Democratic campaigns and then feed back into the DNC. Some of the technology that enhances that data, and allows this stuff to flow freer, whether it’s between a volunteer data set, a donor data set, a voter data set, I think that needs to live in the DNC. That’s a huge, critical piece. With the actual candidate campaign committee, that has to be both distinguishing your brand and your opponent’s brand. And I think the field component has to live within that candidate campaign.

Sasha: Why is that?

Stewart: I hope that with two successful presidential efforts we’ve broken this, but the idea that volunteers are going to show up because the party asked them to is an outdated model. Volunteers are going to show up because a candidate asked them to, because a candidate builds a specific relationship with those volunteers—motivates them, keeps them engaged. Volunteers showing up in 2015 and 2016 need to know that they’re volunteering for Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton needs to know that those volunteers are her people, and that that line is very, very straight between two dots, that you’re not having to go through two or three other subsidiary legal entities to show up for your preferred presidential candidate.

To me, the relationship that President Obama and the volunteers had, it can be replicated, it can be done for people other than Barack Obama, but doing the John Kerry model in 2004, with ACT being the “super PAC” field organization, is just a waste of money. I would never support something like that.

Sasha: So where do super PACs fit into this ecosystem?

Stewart: What Priorities did very well in 2012 was really labeled the opponent in ways that didn’t make sense for the campaign to, went a step further than the campaign felt comfortable branding Mitt Romney as someone who outsourced jobs. So the negative campaigning is where super PACs will continue to spend most of their resources.

But you could see a world where a super PAC is built solely on providing a presidential campaign with technology. You could make a pretty strong case it makes sense to have a continual environment where smart developers can build apps that help campaigns make smarter decisions about how they spend their resources, that can make door-to-door apps, all of those things, but it doesn’t live with the committee, it lives with the super PAC that a campaign or committee would have access to. You can see a world where that exists.