Archive: Year: 2015

Ownership Taking a page from the Obama '08 and '12 campaign handbooks, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is launching a broad organizing effort aimed at signing up volunteers in all fifty states. It's being led by Marlon Marshall, the deputy national field director of Obama '12 and a founding partner in the 270 Strategies consulting firm. As in the Obama campaigns, the Clinton team is promising that volunteers will "own a piece of this campaign" by getting involved. If their role is anything like that of volunteers for Obama, the piece they own will be sort of like the tail-light of the car, nothing near the steering wheel or dashboard. (For more on Marshall, see this profile by Juliet Eilperin in the...

Bush League It looks like the bulk of John Ellis (Jeb) Bush's still unannounced presidential campaign, currently raising unlimited amounts of money under the banner of his Super PAC Right to Rise, is going to stay there, at least through the primaries, reports Thomas Beaumont for the AP. Once he officially declares, he can no longer coordinate with the PAC, but that will hardly matter since a close confidant of Bush's, Mike Murphy, will run it. According to Beaumont's report, Right to Rise would handle everything from TV ads and direct mail to data gathering, online targeting, phone banking, GOTV and efforts to maximize early voting and absentee balloting. All without disclosing who is paying for it. But remember, as Bush...

Glass Half Full A new survey report from the Pew Research Center, conducted in association with the Knight Foundation and released this morning, finds that a slight majority of the public believes more transparency and open government data can help journalists cover government better and make government more accountable. Skepticism about the government's overall ability to do the right thing appears to drive public attitudes, with only 45% saying that open government data can result in better decisions by government and 53% disagreeing. Partisan identities also strongly color opinion about this issue, with Democrats far more optimistic about government transparency efforts and Republicans far more skeptical. Very few Americans think federal, state, or local governments are sharing data effectively (they are right!),...

Zucked Up Tackling the rising tide of criticism in India of its "zero rating" policy offering free access to Facebook and a few other sites through select Internet service providers and telcos, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg responded with an oped in the Hindustan Times that he alsoposted on his wall in defense of his Internet.org project. In it, he argues that "universal connectivity and net neutrality can and must coexist," adding "if someone can't afford to pay for connectivity, it is always better to have some access than none at all." Responding to a handful of comments to his Facebook post, Zuckerberg notes "It's too expensive to make the whole internet free." So far, Indian travel website Cleartrip, the Times of India...

Mugs Sasha Issenberg, the leading reporter covering data-driven campaigns, rolls out a big story for Bloomberg Politics on Mitch Stewart of 270 Strategies, who has been leading Ready for Hillary's list-building efforts on behalf of the now official Clinton campaign. Its harvest, he reports, was 2.4 million pledges to help her candidacy plus 4 million prospective voters to target. Stewart confirms something online organizers have been dealing with for years--email list open rates have dropped (see the 2014 M&R Benchmark study). It used to be that an open rate of 16-18 percent was considered healthy. Now he says to Issenberg, "What you want for an issue advocacy or non-profit entity, the average is about a 13 percent open rate." He adds, "What...

Edges Today at 2:35 ET, President Obama will have a town-hall meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina with the women's news sites BlogHer and SheKnows, streaming live there as well as WhiteHouse.gov, focusing on checkbook issues as we all get our tax returns done. The moderator, BlogHer's Lisa Stone, explains more here. Friday, the White House is also hosting a Tech Meetup which will be streamed live at 9am ET. While we're on the subject of White House tech, you can send feedback on its news redesigned website here. Related: Speaking at the Omidyar Network's "Business of Civic Tech" conference at Civic Hall yesterday, White House CTO Megan Smith said that the United Kingdom's government was about two years ahead of the US, and...

Anomalies No Labels, which co-founder Mark McKinnon once styled as a "MoveOn for the middle," is trying to organize a push in New Hampshire to rally uncommitted voters around its centrist agenda, reports Eleanor Clift for the Daily Beast. In terms of website security, so far Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio score highest according to a survey by Paul Schreiber, a senior web developer at FiveThirtyEight, reports Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai for Motherboard. Their sites are encrypted by default, though as 18F technologist Eric Mill notes, that hasn't stopped them from using third party trackers. After misusing a chart from rival FiveThirtyEight, Vox founder Ezra Klein graciously apologizes and explains his site's approach to aggregation and attribution. Claire Cain Miller reports on a new project led...

In It To Win It Until yesterday, Hillary Clinton identified on her Twitter handle as a "Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD…" Now there are a few changes: "Wife, mom, grandma, women+kids advocate, FLOTUS, Senator, SecState, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, 2016 presidential candidate. Tweets from Hillary signed –H." Somehow, the Clinton announcement wasn't streamed live on either Periscope or Meerkat, and so far neither live-streaming service has surfaced any video of her on her road-trip to Iowa. Still, it's the #MeerkatElection, right? Clinton's announcement tweet has been retweeted more than 95,000 times and favorited almost 92,000 times as of this morning. By comparison, of the two...

Ladies Who Launch Hillary Clinton is going to launch her presidential campaign while on the way to Iowa on Sunday, Lauren Gambino reports for The Guardian. Here's some more background on Stephanie Hannon, the Google vet who has been hired to be the Clinton campaign's CTO, courtesy of Alex Howard. He notes her prior focus on open data standards as offering some possibly mixed encouragement for open government advocates; I'm a little worried about her hold on grammar (see the first slide in her open data presentation). It's "its," not "it's." Today in sousveillance: In Mexico, a top government official was forced to resign after a local aircraft enthusiast posted some photos of the official and his family boarding a state-owned helicopter...

Organizers Longtime Googler Stephanie Hannon will be the CTO of Hillary Clinton's emerging presidential campaign, the first woman in that position on a major campaign, Philip Rucker reports for The Washington Post. Hannon is currently Google's director of product management for civic innovation and social impact. Robby Mook, the soon-to-be official campaign manager of the soon-to-be Clinton campaign, is the first openly gay manager of a presidential campaign, Andy Kroll and Patrick Caldwell report for Mother Jones. Also, they write, "He's a political nerd who lives and dies by data and nuts-and-bolts organizing." He's also another veteran of the 2003-4 Howard Dean presidential campaign, the breeding ground for many of today's top Democratic campaign talent. As Kroll and Caldwell note: Jeremy Bird, a...