There are 7,383 state legislative seats in the United States. State Houses and State Senates govern the policy that affects our daily lives — on healthcare, guns, education, voting rights, women’s right to choose and much more. In most states, the legislatures draw the lines for theU.S. House districts, setting…

Co-written with Jim Sorenson, TFC volunteer data scientist, and the rest of the Build the List team In the 2018 elections, 380 state legislative seats flipped from red to blue as Democratic turnout surged and educated districts abandoned the GOP. While many eyes were on federal and statewide races, for…

The techniques were not sophisticated, but the messages were on target. — By Anela Chan and Greg Dale, Tech for Campaigns Mixing the likes of Laurel and Yanny with malicious intent, Russian trolls in 2015–17 produced thousands of pieces of divisive clickbait — and Americans consumed it voraciously. On May 10, 2018, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released 3,500 Facebook and…

We need to protect our privacy. But that alone won’t return sanity to our politics. — The 2016 presidential election was an explosive reinforcement of the dark potential of online influence. Cambridge Analytica, with its purloined Facebook data and skill at mythical self-promotion, has arisen as a perfect boogeyman for these gloomy times. To be clear, the scandal exposed real privacy issues that need to be…

Bringing startup scale to progressive and centrist politics — Last week, we published Tech for Campaigns’ 2018 Priorities list for State Legislatures, detailing the fourteen states we are focused on for state legislative races. This week, we wanted to zoom out — and in — on how TFC established and is executing on its 2018 strategy. …

Focusing digital volunteer efforts for maximum impact — Although a political news junkie for as long as I can remember, I had been satisfied as a bystander. I hosted a community event or two for Obama 2008 and donated some to Hillary 2016, obsessively refreshed Nate Silver and Politico like many, but doing more seemed like someone else’s…

Computers are dumb. They’ve gotten faster throughout the decades, though, and programmers have increasingly stacked up larger amounts of simple instructions to make computers do ‘smart’ things. Computers, for their part, are happy to execute these instructions over and over again. Since the 1980s, when white collar workers began to…