As COVID-19 confines people to their homes and prohibits gatherings, US political races are moving online, causing anxiety for some campaigns
Issie Lapowsky / Protocol : Tweets: @issielapowsky and @timgrieve Tweets: Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : “We're canceling our paid canvassing plans. We're not going door to door. We need alternatives. What can we do? What can we do? What can we do?” Inside the political tech startups rushing to take the 2020 election digital https://www.protocol.com/... Tim Grieve / @timgrieve : “It's not out of the realm of possibilities that the person you were planning on calling today has literally gone to zero in their income in the last few weeks.” https://www.protocol.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The story lands mid-arc: weeks after a surge in online community building raised hopes that virtual organizing could offset lost in-person contact, campaigns are confronting what that actually costs. Paid canvassing programs are being scrapped outright, and political tech startups are racing to fill the gap with digital tools for the 2020 cycle.
The stakes differ sharply by campaign tier. Joe Biden's operation is ramping up its digital operation to close a technological gap with Republicans, while down-ballot hopefuls without that infrastructure are improvising — later coverage shows them starting to look a lot like influencers as campaigning moves entirely online.
First-order effects
- Campaigns canceling paid canvassing immediately cut off income for the door-knocking workforce — Tim Grieve notes some of the people you were planning to call today have seen their income go to zero in recent weeks.
- Political tech startups selling digital organizing tools see sudden demand as campaigns scramble for alternatives to door-to-door contact.
Second-order effects
- Volunteer-recruitment and event platforms like Mobilize become near-ubiquitous among Democratic campaigns, concentrating organizing infrastructure in a few tools rather than each campaign's own field operation.
- Fundraising shifts toward channels campaigns control directly — email lists and influencer-style outreach — a dependency that becomes acute when Facebook and Google later ban political ads and force marketing dollars elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, campaign field operations restructure permanently around rented digital platforms instead of owned staff-and-canvasser networks, widening the gap between well-funded operations like Biden's and resource-poor down-ballot races.
- Heavy reliance on a handful of platforms makes elections structurally vulnerable to those platforms' policy decisions — the ad bans show how a single company's rules can hamstring an entire cycle's fundraising.
The trend: US campaigning is migrating from physical presence to platform-dependent digital infrastructure, with tool vendors and platform policies — not field offices — setting the terms of voter contact.