Get Ready to Cau

With the time for glad-handing over, candidates rely on technology to get voters to the polls “We want to make the experience for volunteers the best thing possible”

Across Iowa, thousands of campaign volunteers are knocking on doors with a simple goal: getting people to the Feb. 1 caucuses, the first vote of the 2016 presidential primary season. Traditionally, canvassers would go out armed with clipboards holding address lists and scripts for wooing potential caucusgoers. Today, the volunteers leave campaign offices with “walk apps” on their phones. These display the names and addresses of people each campaign believes can be motivated to caucus. They also offer live maps to help canvassers find their way in unfamiliar neighborhoods, entry forms where they can upload the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of new supporters back to headquarters, and remote access to fresh lists.

Although their apps look similar, the two parties have taken different approaches to developing get-outthe-vote technology. The Democratic side is dominated by a single private company, NGP VAN, which is backed by the national party and used by all three Democratic candidates: Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders. The Republican app market is as fragmented as the GOP’s 12-person presidential field. “The competition on our side has yielded a number of good applications,” says Mark Stephenson, who was Scott Walker’s chief data officer until the Wisconsin governor dropped out of the presidential race.

Walker’s campaign signed up with a technology company called Bridgetree, whose Advantage Mobile app is also used by Chris Christie’s campaign. Stephenson spent years working for FLS Connect. In 2010 helped develop its pioneering Geo Connect app, now used by Marco Rubio’s campaign. (Rubio’s deputy campaign manager, Rich Beeson, previously worked at FLS.) The Republican National Committee recommends both Geo Connect and Advantage, which can be integrated with the party’s GOP Data Center platform, formerly known as the Voter Vault, to gain lists of potential supporters.

Yet Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich have chosen to rely on i360 Walk, an app offered by i360, a