The secret behind the Sanders campaign

Using social media and technology allows the Sanders campaign and his supporters to remain people-focused but to a much larger audience. Hence its unprecedented success.

"Using a strategy named 'distributed organising,' a small team of full-time staff was supplemented by thousands of technical volunteers, contributing to open source code repositories and creating tools that tied together commercial technologies such as Google Sheets with specialist political software. Downstream, many many more volunteers worked on the ground. The Sanders campaign did not junk data entirely, but supplemented it with face-to-face interaction. The 'big data'’ of the Obama era had given way to big organising. Niche targeting of specific demographics gave way to a social democratic, universalist message regarding issues such as healthcare.

"The techniques that evolved out of these campaigns have increasingly emphasised 'relational organising': placing relations, conversations and existing human networks at the centre of efforts, rather than data-based targeting. In 2020, the Sanders campaign’s Bern app is encouraging people to 'have open, honest, and thorough conversations with our friends, family, and neighbours' and record their information, persuading them over the course of the campaign. This simple technique is a hallmark of traditional campaigning, but the communication power of digital technology helps it take place on a massive scale."