Part 2, Texas: Campaign Brain Borne From Cycle-After-Cycle of Challenges
Campaign Brain Founder and CEO Nate Levin has spent the last few cycles working for Democratic campaigns in all corners of the country, including Maine, Texas, and Arizona. In this series of blog posts, Nate shares how these experiences are informing the solutions we are building at Campaign Brain.
There are two primary realities that dictate the challenges of supporting the progressive movement in Texas:
The last statewide Democratic victory happened 29 years ago
Texas is massive both in terms of size and population
Accordingly, these make Texas among the most important places to grow our movement. As Brian Stevenson of the Equal Justice Institute profoundly shares, it is necessary to get proximate to injustices to make change.
While Democrats have made massive strides over the years and have now narrowed statewide races to consistently single-digits and often times closer — 5.6% in 2020 presidential election, 9.0% in 2016, 15.8% in 2012, and 22.9% in 2004 — work remains to be done. Outstanding groups like the Texas Democratic Party and allies are working hard to continue to narrow this gap.
To complicate solving both of these core challenges to flipping Texas, resources to elect Democrats are scarce in Texas. Exacerbating this challenge is the massive expense it takes to run statewide in Texas, covering large geographic areas and reaching millions of voters.
To offset these realities, my work focused on making local investments in human capital and training. In addition to traveling the state, engaging with volunteers, staff, and candidates in all corners of Texas Democratic circles, through the Texas Democratic Party, we launched Staff the Movement.
Staff the Movement, which took place from March 2019 through April 2020, was a campaign academy to deepen the bench of political operatives across the state. We trained 115 staffers across two cohorts and provided the skills to work with candidates in their home communities to run modern, effective campaigns. The core theory: if we trim the margins in every community, collectively we will get over the hump.
Following the 2020 election cycle, I led the Texas Democratic Party’s Project LIFT program, which effectively endorses and provides support to municipal candidates. While we received many, many applications, we were only able to support a fraction due to resource limitation with staff and scalability.
Consequently, it was clear to me — building on top of what had been discovered in Maine in 2018 — that scale in supporting under-resourced communities across the country was a key limiting factor for the progressive movement and electing Democrats up and down the ballot.
As we moved forward with introducing concrete plans to build Campaign Brain, our product was built on the premise that to support the progressive movement, it would need to be scalable.
That’s why we are implementing artificial intelligence to execute many of the time-consuming tasks that humans have typically done on campaigns. These include voter targeting, preparing turfs and lists for field work and voter contact, drafting social media and email content, preparing analytics, building daily and weekly schedules, and making them easy to use.
We’re extremely excited to make Campaign Brain available to campaigns in Texas and beyond to remove financial and knowledge barriers that have historically hindered campaigns.
At Campaign Brain, we’re working on democratizing AI to support the progressive movement. To learn more, visit us at campaignbrain.ai.
In the next blog, CEO Nate Levin will share how his time working for Mark Kelly’s 2022 re-election campaign is informing how we are building Campaign Brain.