Parties in the Pandemic

Evan Halper and Janet Hook at LA Times:

A perceived advantage the Trump campaign has in this new territory could prove fragile.

Trump’s operatives have built an intimidating and costly digital machine around unprecedented social media micro-targeting. It is fueled by a conservative media ecosystem that reliably draws in masses of voters who help amplify Trump’s message.

That ecosystem is showing signs of strain, however, as voters seek out reliable information about the virus, which some of the leading outlets on the right failed to provide when they initially dismissed its danger.

Republicans are now bulking up their digital infrastructure.

Republican National Committee volunteers made 1.4 million voter contacts during last Saturday’s “National Day of Action,” using a phone script that starts by asking voters about their their health and offers information about medical-care resources before they begin detailing Trump’s efforts in the pandemic.

The GOP’s chief volunteer-training program, the Trump Victory Leadership Initiative, has gone virtual and hasn’t slowed in the process. ere were 312 events that trained 1,390 volunteers during its first week online.

For Democrats, the public health crisis tests in real time how far they have come in closing the digital politics gap.

The Democratic National Committee has seen a sixfold increase in requests for its digital-organizing training program.

In Florida, Democrats are sending texts to more than a million voters to urge them to register to vote by mail. Elizabeth Warren’s former presidential campaign staff unleashed a motherlode of new technology when it open-sourced some of the campaign apps and organizing tools it had developed.

In Wisconsin, a key swing state that holds a primary on Tuesday, Democrats say they have found that the loss of door-knockers’ powerful face-to-face conversations is mitigated by an unprecedented eagerness of voters to chat with volunteers cold-calling or pinging them online.

“There are more people home to pick up the phone and look at Facebook messages,” said Ben Wikler, the state party chairman. Some pollsters have also reported rising response rates as voters stuck at home appear more willing to answer their phones.