Democrats’ Butter-Cow Selfies Don’t Count Unless They’re Online

(Bloomberg) -- Posing next to the Iowa State Fair’s famous butter cow while holding a pork chop on a stick has long been a way for presidential hopefuls to gain credibility with the state’s voters. But this year’s Democratic contenders are also shadowed by staff who’ll leverage those images to win support from younger voters nationwide.

The fun times will quickly be uploaded to their own social media accounts and available to reach the critical younger demographic where they are: on their mobile phones. It’s a tactic that’s become a matter of course in the crowded race for the Democratic nomination, even at heavily covered events like the annual Fair, as candidates attempt to win the White House by winning the Internet first.

Candidates roamed the fair, one of the biggest in the country, on Friday: talking to voters, taking selfies, sampling some of the dozens of “food on a stick” offerings -- and recording it all for social media.

The Democrats are defying conventional campaigning and allocating more resources than ever to producing original, behind-the-scenes content. Campaigns have built in-house digital teams to meet the expectations for real-time online interactions with a voting bloc of social media users that’s going to play an important role in choosing next year’s Democratic nominee.

“Digital strategists are the new field organizers,” said Danielle Butterfield, paid media director of Priorities USA, a Democratic super political action committee. “The campaigns that are going to use that opportunity in an offline setting to extend it into an online setting are going to be the ones that have success.”

With the visibility gained during his 2016 run Senator Bernie Sanders is winning the online race with almost 18 million followers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter combined. Senator Elizabeth Warren has almost 8 million followers and Senator Kamala Harris and former vice-president Joe Biden around 6 million.

Sanders, the oldest candidate at 78, travels with two videographers who feed content to his digital team back in Washington. Harris is on the trail with a videographer and content creator, while Warren, with a team of eight people, has given voters unprecedented access online to her life inside and outside of the campaign.

Warren’s signature selfie lines are becoming legendary; she spends hours giving people the chance to snap a photo with her. “Who wants anything signed?” Warren’s staff will ask as they follow a line that more often than not wraps around the room.

Worth Waiting For

For some voters, that makes all the difference. “If she’s willing to stick around and do this for all the people here, that’s the candidate you want,” said Chris Anderson, a 44-year-old web designer from Omaha, Nebraska, who attended Warren’s town hall in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and waited in line for about an hour and a half.

Warren, 70, goes one step further by sharing many personal, everyday moments on her social media accounts: birthday dinners with her husband Bruce, giving her golden retriever Bailey a bath, and videos of her surprise calls to supporters. These digital experiences provide an authentic look behind the lives of what would otherwise be inaccessible candidates.

“It just makes her feel like a real person,” said Maggie Bashore, 18. “I don’t just see her on TV or on the news, I get to see her in her kitchen.”

Bashore is one of the millions of potential first-time voters in 2020 who are relying less on traditional media and more on social media channels. Millennial voters and their successors from Generation Z are expected to play a large role in 2020.

Key Election

In an Aug. 8 poll by College Pulse and Chegg, 59% of college students say the 2020 election will be the most important of their lifetime.

Youth voter turnout has almost doubled in the past five years, to 42% in 2018 from 22% in 2014, a midterm election, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Many Democratic candidates are speaking with urgency about issues crucial for that voting bloc, including student debt, climate change and gun control, said Tom Bonier, chief executive officer of TargetSmart, a Democratic data and strategy firm.

“More than any other generation, younger voters are recognizing that the world is on fire at this point, and they are moving to action,” Bonier said. “A huge part of this is a reaction to the Trump presidency and a call to action to do something about it.”

Sanders seems to understand the power of the youth vote. In the 2016 primaries, his progressive policies won more support from voters under 30 than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton won in each of their primaries combined, according to exit poll data from by research firm CIRCLE, based at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

In short documentaries posted on Instagram TV, Sanders campaign staffers appear on videos with trendy music and modern fonts on screen discussing the campaign’s signature policies, like canceling student debt and Medicare for All.

Relevant Content

“They want to make sure that there’s content out there frequently that’s relevant to what people are talking about online,” said Keegan Goudiss, managing partner at Revolution Messaging, who served as director of digital advertising on Sanders’s 2016 campaign.

In some instances candidates attempt to appeal to younger voters on platforms that are not native to the candidates themselves. Ahead of the Detroit debates in late July Biden’s campaign announced that the former vice president, 76, had joined Snapchat, the millennial multimedia messaging app, with a cameo from his granddaughter Finnegan.

“We are meeting the American people where they are, and that includes Snapchat,” said Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders. “We just want to reach voters that aren’t watching CNN and MSNBC but are on social media.”

Perhaps the power of social media is most evident for lower-tier candidates like Marianne Williamson and Andrew Yang. Both began to level the playing field as they competed with better-known contenders by using social media to gain momentum, get on the debate stage, and stay in the race for longer than many pundits expected.

In past election cycles “viability was really only measured by who you knew, what they thought of you and how much money you could raise,” said Tara McGowan, CEO of Acronym, a Democratic digital strategy firm. “Now it has a lot more to do with how much influence you cultivate, and a lot of that is only measurable online.”

(A previous version corrected the spelling of Keegan Goudiss.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou in Washington at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Wendy Benjaminson, Ros Krasny

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