News: The Post-'24 Democratic Tech Reckoning Has Begun

MoveOn is leaving private equity giant Bonterra for non-profit tech platform Action Network. Plus, what the "too woke" vs "too corporate" debate is missing about the Democratic party.

For the last three years, much of the core technology platforms and tools used by Democratic and progressive organizations to connect with voters—NGP VAN, Every Action, ActionKit and Mobilize--have been owned by a giant overseas private equity fund, Apax Partners, operating under the corporate name Bonterra. Last year, in two rounds of restructuring, Bonterra laid off about one-third of its overall workforce, setting off alarm bells across the political tech ecosystem. As I wrote in an in-depth report back in April, “VANxiety” about these core tools failing to function well in 2024 was overstated. But it was clear back then that we’d face a reckoning after the election was over.

Today I can report that the reckoning has begun. The leaders of the giant online mobilization group MoveOn have told me that after a careful review, they’ve decided to end their longstanding reliance on ActionKit and embark on a new partnership with the non-profit movement tech platform Action Network (AN). As part of this shift, MoveOn—which boasts more than 10 million members on email and text--will be joining AN’s Product Development Committee (PDC), which currently includes the AFL-CIO, Canada’s Central Labor Committee, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and DailyKos.

“This decision was not made lightly,” Amy White, MoveOn’s chief technology and data officer, said. “ActionKit has been central to our operations for over 25 years. MoveOn funded its precursor for our own infrastructure beginning in 1998 and later transitioned to the publicly marketed version in 2015. The team of engineers and product directors at ActionKit has consistently provided a top-tier tool with exceptional levels of service, and we deeply appreciate their efforts and dedication,” she added.

She went on, “However, due to the consolidation of core progressive technology platforms under the private equity owned firm Bonterra, coupled with repeated company layoffs and restructuring over recent years, we believe it’s in the best interest of our organization’s long-term sustainability and risk management to move in a new direction.” The break will formally happen next May 31, when MoveOn’s contract with ActionKit expires.

Last year, after Bonterra laid off half of ActionKit’s staff, MoveOn led a public pressure campaign that resulted in the rehiring of two senior engineers. But the experience clearly taught MoveOn leadership that their reliance on Bonterra was untenable. Erica Mauter, MoveOn’s chief of digital membership experience, told me that the switch was not triggered by any performance problems they experienced with ActionKit this past year. But, she said, “given our history with them, we wouldn’t be surprised if they attempted to make cuts again.” She also said they had considered a new platform being developed by Demtech.ai in India, led by Jhatka founder Avijit Michael, but they felt it was too risky to stake their whole technology stack on a completely new platform.

MoveOn’s announcement is just the beginning of the process of the group shifting from ActionKit to ActionNetwork. “Part of the challenge of the migration,” Mauter said, “is we have so many integrations and customizations built on top of ActionKit” which will need to be rebuilt. She added, “By joining the PDC, we are joining a small group of Action Network users that are collaborating on the roadmap for the product. What that means is we get to gather up all our product requests and prioritize them for ourselves, but also in the context of the needs of the other PDC members. The mutual benefit between Moveon and Action Network and other Action Network customers is given the scale and complexity that we have, if it works for us, it works for everyone else, too.”

MoveOn’s decision to leave Bonterra’s orbit is likely to influence the thinking of many other progressive organizations, few of which have nearly the same level of experience or talent on staff managing their own tech operations. “It’s a signal to others,” Brian Young, the longtime executive director of Action Network, told me. He added, “As people are looking for lifeboats off of S.S. NGP VAN, we want to be part of the solution, not the only one."

That’s a reference to the de facto monopoly that NGP VAN has long enjoyed, courtesy of decisions made fifteen years ago by the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties. But all of that is in flux now, as I detailed last spring. There are several rising alternatives to VAN’s platform for voter engagement, notably Universe, Open Field, Civitech and Votivate. Campaign Deputy and Argenta are both nipping at NGP’s heels, with other start-ups rumored to be waiting in the wings. A new generation of interoperable software is also changing core assumptions about the “right” way to build political tech products and manage voter data.

The field of Democratic political technology still faces some core challenges. As a sector, it’s too small and cyclical to sustain many tech vendors, which inexorably pushes them towards corporate clients. The venture capital model of start-up financing dominates the sources of funding, also warping the field’s values and choices. A generation of campaign staff has been trained on Bonterra’s tools, making it harder for many to contemplate changing. And except for a few standout nonprofits like Action Network with its deep ties to the labor movement, the sector has mostly been developed by private entrepreneurs who have seen little contradiction between wanting to help Democrats and progressives win campaigns and wanting to make lots of money. After all, that’s what many of their peers in both political consulting and tech engineering do.

Building and sustaining movement technology infrastructure requires a different mindset as well as a commitment to hard decisions about governance. MoveOn’s decision to abandon ActionKit for Action Network aligns with other decisions it has made in the past to support movement-owned and open-source tech, like its development of Spoke, an open-source texting tool. Across the ecosystem, especially wherever there are unions at progressive organizations, MoveOn’s choice can only prompt good questions about the tech tools they use. With a second Trump Administration looming, the time couldn’t be riper for everyone in this sector to think hard about how they can reduce their reliance on corporate platforms and instead lift up movement-owned and movement-governed tech.

Whither the Party?

In case you haven’t noticed, the election has triggered a big debate among Democrats and progressives about what lessons need to be learned, which is essentially an extension of the pre-election debate over whether Democrats are too “woke” or not progressive enough. One pole of that argument might best be encapsulated by pundits like Ruy Teixiera and pols like former Obama chief of staff and DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel. “The Progressive Moment is Over,” Teixiera argued in a piece he wrote two weeks before the election, so sure he was of where things were headed. Democrats have become too liberal on immigration and policing, too ruled by identity politics, too committed to fighting climate change, he claimed. To recover from the loss to Trump, Emanuel told Ezra Klein (gift link) a few days ago that Democrats must demonstrate that they listen more to what gets said at the “street corner” than at the “faculty lounge.” And recognizing the populist fervor, he argued that they should demonstrate their anti-establishment bona fides by attacking fellow Democrats, again, for being too liberal, too “woke.”

The other pole might best be encapsulated by Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist firebrand, and Waleed Shahid, one of the founders of Justice Democrats. After the election, Sanders said it’s no wonder the working-class has abandoned Democrats, since Democrats have abandoned them—and his former campaign manager Faiz Shakir elaborated in depth (again in conversation with Ezra Klein, gift link) as to how the party has avoided economic populism. Shahid just posted a long “Populist Manifesto for Democrats” that argues that Democrats have become too corporatized themselves, “gutting the party’s ability to meaningfully challenge the conservative order.”

What remains, he writes, “is a politics of performative gestures and timid incrementalism—actions designed to placate elite donors and upper middle class voters while sidelining the working class and marginalized communities in the name of respectability.” He lays out a blueprint for rebuilding and realigning the party that envisions the electoral left becoming a bigger and better-funded faction inside it. “Right now, too many elected officials and progressive organizations operate like small businesses, focused on preserving their own brand rather than collaborating to advance a collective mission,” Shahid writes. “What’s needed is a permanent support system—one that anchors progressive governance, counters conservative dominance, and redefines what the Democratic Party can achieve.” (How to pay for all of that is left unanswered.)

Maybe the Party is Fine?

There’s a third position in this debate that is worth mentioning simply to shove it aside. And that is the one apparently being taken by the senior leadership of the Harris campaign—people like campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon; deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks; communications director Stephanie Cutter; and senior advisor David Plouffe—who laid out their argument two weeks ago on Pod Save America in an interview with host (and former Plouffe colleague) Dan Pfeiffer. The tl/dr version: We did really well in closing the gap with Trump after Biden dropped out, but there was nothing we could have done better in order to win.

This is just self-serving bullshit. Look at how O’Malley Dillon responds to Pfeiffer’s probing why Trump’s turnout rose while Harris’s collapsed:

Dan Pfeiffer: Jen, this is the third campaign in a row where Trump has not invested, what appears to be not invested, significant money into a traditional field organization, and yet still gotten incredibly high turnout. You guys invested a ton of money and time in the field, particularly in this election. Is there, and that obviously bore fruit, so I’m not suggesting it didn’t, but is there anything you take from this that makes you question how we have traditionally done field in the Democratic Party in terms of efficiency or efficacy?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Well—

Dan Pfeiffer: I know that I know this is a loaded question for you.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Yeah. So first of all, I don’t, I think against national headwinds, we would not have come as close as we did without organizing. I think that part of what we have to do as Democrats on our side is, you know, do the work of having the conversations and reaching people. I just think that is a part of our party and a part of the people lower propensity that we are trying to reach, that we can reach effectively through programs.….

But what is true and what I do think we need the answer to is how do we reach people in ways that isn’t just about traditional field. And we worked very hard at this, but I’m not sure we sort of solved all of it. You know, there’s the door knocking, there’s the phone calls, there’s the texting, there’s the ways to reach people.

We do that effectively, we know how to do it. We have volunteers, like we had extraordinary people that came from all over that were part of the battleground states that did the work, did the trainings. We did contrast at the doors and on the calls. You don’t typically do that. Our folks were able to handle all of that and it was a testament to the overall organization and the organization could scale as we had just growing support, which is exactly what you want to see.

We spent a lot of time, even earlier in the year when President Biden was at the top of the ticket working on, and I hate fucking terms for field, so I can’t, like, relational organizing.

Dan Pfeiffer: You invented most of them.

Jen O’Malley Dillon: I just, it’s like all organizing, or field, I still say field, but anyway, whatever, relational.

The bottom line is, we know, especially in this environment that we’re talking about where people are tuned out to politics, they want to stay away from the chaos of Trump, they don’t trust institutions, they don’t trust parties, how do you reach them? You reach them by people they trust in their own lives.

So, so much of what we were trying to do was to get to the young people, not just to talk to them, but to give them the tools and empower them to speak to other people in their lives. And I think that we made some progress here. I think, you know, there’s lots of technical things that help us do that.

But at the end of the day, there is no doubt that Donald Trump figured out how to do that and did that to young people, young men in a way that he, you know, created some of this coolness to folks and most of the people that wouldn’t be harmed are the ones that felt like that he was cool and they would respond in the podcast and so on.

Dan Pfeiffer: This is young men?

Jen O’Malley Dillon: Young men in particular. Yeah, young white men in particular, too. But this isn’t to say this is all just about young white men. From a— how you reach people, I actually think you know, we worked a lot on sharing content. We worked on trying to talk not just to our own people, right, which is one of the problems and the limitations of platforms that you’re just speaking to the chorus.

O’Malley Dillon’s answer reveals more than she probably intended. First, that she has extraordinary faith in the “traveling salesman” model of field organizing, where strangers are sent to knock on the doors of strangers, and where managers emphasize quantity over quality of engagements. Second, that she thinks the campaign had a strong “relational” program, though she can’t quite remember what to call it. And third, that that program’s emphasis on giving people supposedly persuasive content to share, instead of emphasizing building big relational networks and empowering them to talk to their personal contacts in their own voices, did as well as it could.

In fact, the Harris campaign could have insured that the 50,000 volunteers who had signed up for the DNC’s relational organizing program get trained to build out their personal networks and focus outreach efforts on the seven key swing states, but it did not. Emails from the DCCC’s relational team begging for attention on this front were ignored. Only the Wisconsin Democratic party made full use of the potential for relational outreach, using personal contacts to go after 160,000 voters in the state. The Georgia campaign let its person in charge of using Reach, the relational organizing tool, go a month before the election.

Sri Kulkarni, who ran the DCCC’s Take Back the House campaign, told me today, “We mapped out over 130,000 voters through 2,000 volunteers. We offered to do the same for the DNC and they ignored the offer. We also asked for the DNC to share the data with the DCCC and that too was ignored. We told the DNC that we had mapped out 160,000 voters in Georgia in 2020, and they just had to ask for the data. They declined that help as well. We even asked them to at least give info on the 110,000 voters whom their own volunteers had mapped out themselves to the DNC's own coordinated field teams on the ground in swing states, to help them reach voters who were ‘unreachable’ by cold calls. They ignored that as well.”

He adds, “’Relational organizing’ is fundamentally about having a relationship with the people you are organizing/mobilizing. For the party to understand "Latinos" or "Gen Z" or the "white working class" there has to be a way for us to reach them and for them to reach us. If the voter who gets phonebanked or has their door knocked on today has no way to ever reach that person again and have a conversation, that is not organizing, it's telemarketing. If we are ever going to survive the next 4 years, rebuild trust in civil society, and ever win elections again, we have to put in place infrastructure to actually listen to the people. Relational Networks are that infrastructure. This is our defense against disinformation. We have the tech. Now, the party just needs to trust the experts who know how to use it and bring them in, rather than shutting them out.”

What if the Democrats were a party?

I’m digressing into these weeds for a reason. O’Malley Dillon’s lack of understanding of new forms of personal organizing is indicative of what I think is the fourth pole in this “what lessons to learn” debate. That is, the problem for Democrats and progressives is less one of how they should position themselves to regain support from voters and more the fact that they lack organic connections to voters in the first place. Or as Henry Farrell of Johns Hopkins just put it:

What if the Democratic party’s problem is not that it is too left-leaning, or for that matter, too moderate, but instead is too disconnected from the lives of the people whom it wants to appeal to? … There is a body of work and thinking that suggests that instead of pulling policy towards left or right, we want to build more organic connections between leaders and voters, which will allow voters to pull leaders in their direction, and, for that matter, vice versa. According to this diagnosis, the answer to the Democrats’ problems is to do something they haven’t consistently done in decades - work with ordinary members and voters to actually build up a party that makes connections between politicians and the people between elections.

High on list of scholars Farrell is channeling: Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, who first wrote about the weakness of existing party organizations back in October 2016, and then turned that paper into their new book, The Hollow Parties. One of the things that is interesting to me is how much this school of thought highlights the potential of the gigantic local capacity-building effort of Obama for America in 2008—which organized more than two million volunteers and empowered them, not just entasked them. The thing is, as I reported back in 2017, and others have documented as well, Obama and his circle didn’t just let that massive muscle wither away—they actively smothered it because it was seen as a threat to party insiders. It’s bitter irony to see people from that crew, like Emanuel and Plouffe, continuing to ride high, while Obama spends most of his time making money on book and Netflix deals and sucking scarce philanthropic dollars into his billion-dollar presidential library (the most expensive in history) instead of funding the party-building he neglected for so long.

Still, hope springs eternal. Farrell ends his trenchant piece by quoting writers like Ned Resnikoff, who urges that Democrats start the work of building an organic connection to voters by funding the creation of community centers in priority voting districts, and Pete Davis, who wants the party to emphasize membership, local precinct captains, meeting halls and mutual aid. In some ways, these are the foundation stones needed to stand up the kind of intellectual and messaging superstructure that Waleed Shahid hungers for to be able to advance a populist agenda. (Needless to say, I like these ideas.)

Left unanswered by everyone: how will this be paid for?

—Bonus link: Steve Schale, who ran Obama’s 2008 campaign in Florida, writes in the Bulwark about the collapse of the Democrats. My favorite quote: “Thanks to ‘smart’ election technology—in this case, campaign analytics and modeling—we increasingly don’t talk to voters in large swaths of states. I am not anti-data. All data are useful. The problem with using analytics to ‘efficiently’ target voters is that efficiency leads to mass exclusion. For example, in 2008, in many southern states, the Obama campaign sent mail on gun policy to men in rural and exurban counties. We laid out his positions: that he believed in background checks, and closing the gun show loophole. We didn’t expect to win those voters on guns but we knew we needed to take our position directly to them in order to get them to listen to us on other issues. There is zero doubt in my mind that current modeling would tell us to never do this, that it would be crazy inefficient. We’re over-reliant on analytics and not on the emotional or narrative elements of politics.”

A few lacunae

It’s hard to cite all this punditry without making note of some other glaring blind spots. For example, Waleed Shahid makes no mention of the Covid crisis or how Dems became defenders of institutions exactly when they broke the worst, and then failed to create a different narrative of civic renewal as soon as vaccines arrived. While Ezra Klein nudges Rahm Emanuel ever so gently about being himself a party insider who has profited personally from his years mingling with the mighty, he never asks Emanuel directly about his own mysterious success becoming a multimillionaire in just months in finance after leaving the Clinton Administration or his more recent financial machinations. Nor does his prod him about his role in covering up the 2014 Chicago police murder of LaQuan McDonald because release of the cops’ body-cam footage would have hurt his mayoral re-election bid. If Emanuel is going to return to a leadership role in the Democratic Party (some are pushing him for DNC chair) and if he wants to make “corruption” a central issue, one really has to question how he can possibly be a good messenger given the heavy stink coming from all his baggage. Finally, Dan Pfeiffer never asked the Harris campaign leadership team a single question about her handling of Gaza. I don’t know if that’s because not touching Palestine was a condition for the interview, or because they forgot, but either way we have yet to hear an explanation from Harris-land for why they mishandled this issue so badly.

About United Healthcare

Read Luke O’Neil’s take, which contains this chart:

Also, see this.