Welcome to Campaigner, a weekly newsletter exploring the tactics that drive winning political campaigns and highlighting the players pushing the buttons. Produced by Arena & FWIW Media.
Depending on who you ask, a campaign’s “digital” staffers are responsible for fundraising, organizing, persuasion, social content, and just about everything else. One person who has played those many roles for campaigns up and down the ballot is Emmy Bengtson, cofounder and partner at Wavelength Strategy. She has led content and mobilization efforts for campaigns and organizations including Gillibrand 2020, Gavin Newsom for Governor, Hillary for America, Planned Parenthood, and Obama for America, and has lots of thoughts on the state of “digital” ahead of the midterms.
Q&A with Emmy Bengtson, Wavelength Strategy
Campaigner: You’ve worked doing “digital” for a bunch of advocacy groups, presidential campaigns, statewide races, and now with your own firm. How do you think the role of a “digital” staffer differs between campaigns?
Emmy Bengtson: Every digital director job is totally different. No two digital directors are the same; it entirely depends on the cycle, the candidate, the circumstances of the race, how much money you have, and what the strategic imperatives of the campaign itself are. That's where the digital team is going to flex and fill in the gap typically, sometimes with just one or two people—which I don't think is how it necessarily should be, but that's how it has been.
Depending on the campaign, your entire job could be fundraising or organizing or your entire job could be social media. On Gavin Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign, for example, it was really organizing-oriented. He had a prolific Twitter account, so it wasn't like there needed to be a hard-hitting social program per se. But it was a California statewide election and running a traditional field program was totally impractical. So we had a huge online persuasion and mobilization texting and digital organizing program. That was kind of an outlier in terms of the work I'd been doing, but I think that's just a testament to how digital works differently on different campaigns, and can be lots of different things.
Campaigner: After 2018, you ended up on Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign. The 2020 presidential primary was pretty insane in terms of the number of high-level campaigns with full digital teams experimenting with different tactics. Can you talk a little bit about your experience there, and how that cycle kind of changed the way campaigns are run?
Emmy: Early on, I was talking a lot with the Gillibrand team about how they should structure digital on the campaign - everything from senior staff to early strategy. We decided that the campaign should have a digital communications vertical, and that should be a unique senior role that would work closely with the comms director. We wanted digital to be part of everything we did with press, everything we did with messaging. So we went that route and I think it was a really successful experiment. It paid off a lot in terms of attention and eyeballs that we were able to drive as a fairly scrappy campaign.
Campaigner: It seemed like that entire early part of the primary was about getting attention and eyeballs online, right?
Emmy: Right! Some of our tactics and strategy were kind of shaped for us - it was the DNC debate qualification rules, it was the $1 donation quota, and it all just kind of pointed to needing to get as much attention as you possibly could. So we did things like, really try to own the space of women's rights among the field. We asked ourselves “How can our candidate put out the most badass, comprehensive reproductive rights agenda? How can she be the first to put out a comprehensive LGBT rights agenda? How can we use social and video and Medium posts and clever influencer plays,” all with a very scrappy, small, in-house team.
I think it was really cool to see what can happen if you really pay attention to digital comms. For example, I worked with the comms team on Kirsten's launch speech. And we made sure that there were lines in there that were super tweetable. I think all of that was infused into the campaign and I think was a really modern way to think about incorporating digital, not just letting your digital person be the end of the line of like, “Here's what's being put out today, figure out a tweet for it,” but instead reversing it and making it more two-way where we would always ask ourselves, “How is this gonna play online?”
Campaigner: One thing I remember from the Gillibrand campaign were these mini-viral moments and .gifs… you all had one where she was playing beer pong, right? That was so iconic.
Emmy: First of all, I can't take any credit for that. That was totally our digital fundraising team. They were so smart, because we built so much of our stuff in-house, that they could really run an in-the-moment strategy. Kirsten is exactly what you think she is, she's spontaneous. She's really fun. She was having so much fun on the campaign trail, hanging out with people, so if somebody asks her to play beer pong with them, she's gonna play. And she's super athletic, so of course she made the shot. (laughs) There's an old saying that a lot of people working in digital have said, which is, “prepare to be nimble.” It’s such an eye-roll statement, but it's true!
I think the smartest campaigns have made the right structural decisions and have gotten all their ducks in a row in terms of being able to approve stuff quickly, having a digital person in the room, knowing what the tone/voice is like. And, if you have all that in place, then you can react quickly and capitalize on key moments. That’s something I think the Gillibrand campaign did really well.
Campaigner: What’s something that you were most proud of from that campaign?
Emmy: I’m really proud of how we decided to throw out the model and build it a little bit differently. A lot of campaigns say they’re going to be digital first, but don't make the staffing decisions to bear that out. I think another thing that happens a lot is that campaigns maybe will make that staffing decision or senior hire, but the digital director won't be in the small group that's actually making decisions.
I think that if you do change that equation and you really do structurally set that up, you can get a lot more juice for the squeeze when you have a rapid response moment. I was just really proud that we brought everything in-house. It was a really small team, but I think the footprint that we left on the internet was really large.
A good example of that was the work we did on abortion rights. We released a huge reproductive rights agenda. Kirsten went down to Georgia after one of their bans was passed. It was in the spirit of, let's not only try to really live Kirsten's values and reflect that in the race and understand how much power we can have to move the field on this, but also be aggressive and seize opportunities. As part of this rollout the digital team wrote a Medium post to explain what all these different abortion rights policy pieces do. We also explained what the values of that initiative were, and what the stakes were. What does it really do when we ban abortion? It makes women less free in this country. We spelled that out and were very honest about it, and we got a ton of engagement on that Medium post and it was linked in a bunch of coverage. That was a very cool way to prove the theory of the case that if you have a very digital-infused comms strategy you actually can get a lot of bang for your buck. You can reach a lot more audiences and get a lot of different kinds of coverage by having that in-house and having people thinking about it all the time.
Campaigner: Looking forward to this year’s midterms, what do you think Dems need to do to more effectively reach audiences that we need to win?
Emmy: I think Democrats need to understand the power of a national brand. For a really long time, our theory of the case has revolved a lot around recruiting the right candidate for that state. Have them be a Democrat, have them support the right policies, but you know, find someone like a Jon Tester, who really aligns with their state and we can win. I’m afraid that doesn’t work as well, alone, as it used to. That’s because media is so nationalized and politics plays out all over social media. Everybody has a pretty unified sense of what the Democratic party stands for, and the Republicans have been working to define that for a really long time.
We haven't really fought fire with fire to that point, I don't think, and I think that we have got to be a little bit more brand-savvy about what we stand for and take credit for our accomplishments. We should explain what it is that we're trying to do in Congress with the Biden agenda, these huge pieces of legislation, and also not be afraid to say what the Republicans stand for or what it means when they unanimously oppose those policies. I think this idea that we can continue to fight these fights as person to person, candidate vs. candidate, just doesn't really work anymore. A lot of Democratic organizations and campaigns have been putting in the work to improve the brand of the Democratic party and show through actions, not just words, what it is that we're trying to do - particularly with a very economic lens.
I think that’s also one way we can help inoculate candidates against unhinged attacks in September and October about being, you know, socialists who are going to sell your kids off to drug traffickers or whatever (laughs). We have to establish a much stronger level of credibility and reputation when it comes to who we're looking out for when we get into Congress. And you can't do that, by the way, without actually demonstrating it when you have power. So I have a lot of thoughts about, why aren't we passing voting rights legislation, why aren't we codifying Roe, why aren't we getting this stuff done and then defending it? The Republican ads are coming one way or the other. Either we can get something done and show voters who we are and make our case to them about how we’re helping them and making a difference in their lives - or we can just lose. 🇺🇸
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