How the Sanders Campaign Is Reinventing the Use of Tech in Politics

A Q&A with two senior advisers to the Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) campaign, Zack Exley and Becky Bond. Exley was MoveOn’s first organizing director, an adviser to the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, John Kerry’s director of online fundraising and communications, and worked on field organizing technology with Obama’s 2008 general election campaign. Bond has been the political director of CREDO Mobile since 2004, where she most notably built the group’s 2012 campaign that successfully defeated several Tea Party members of Congress with intensive field operations. In the following exclusive interview, they explain how the Sanders campaign is evolving a new model of tech-powered organizing.

Both the Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns are organizing in a context that has never existed before in American politics: Close to 70 percent of Americans now own a smartphone, and two-thirds of all adults and a whopping 90 percent of young adults use social networking sites like Facebook. Both are experiencing massive amounts of online engagement outside traditional campaign structures. For example, Sanders has about 165 Facebook pages with 7.3 million likes, and nearly 200 Facebook groups with more than 358,000 members; Clinton’s numbers are roughly half that.