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Buttigieg Bets on Friends-and-Family Tactic to Win Iowa Caucuses

Buttigieg Bets on Friends-and-Family Tactic to Win Iowa Caucuses

(Bloomberg) -- Jean Scigliano first reached out to her colleagues about Pete Buttigieg at the veterinarian’s office where she works.

Julie Klocke held a children’s party at a bowling alley with an eye toward winning over the parents. And after Ashley Kuckelman exhausted her inner circle of friends, she even got coffee with her ex-husband to talk about the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

When these women signed up to volunteer for the Buttigieg campaign in Iowa, they didn’t receive a list of phone numbers to call or doors to knock. Instead, they were asked to create their own.


It’s a campaign tactic called “relational organizing,” and those lists, they were told, should include family, friends, work colleagues, and yes, even, ex-husbands. It’s not a new idea but Buttigieg is relying on it to an extent never seen before.

Buttigieg Bets on Friends-and-Family Tactic to Win Iowa Caucuses

In a historically large field of candidates and a saturated organizing environment, the Buttigieg campaign is betting that tapping into its supporters’ personal networks will be more successful in locking in support from reliable Democratic voters and will help them better reach independents and disaffected Republicans.

“The potential for someone to come into a campaign office and upload their contacts and even bring 20 new people into the mix could really be the ball game,” said Brad Anderson, Barack Obama’s Iowa state director in 2012 who is unaffiliated this cycle.

“If you have a giant number of volunteers across the state and they all add 20 people into the fold and in a caucus where 250,000 people turn out, you’re talking about a percentage that could be impacted by the model.”

Every four years, hundreds of mostly 20-somethings move to Iowa to join presidential campaigns as field organizers. Working out of coffee shops, homes or small field offices, the organizers are responsible for evangelizing a candidate’s message, identifying supporters and recruiting volunteers. This continues right up to the caucuses, an increasingly rare kind of presidential selection process and one that kicks off the 2020 presidential primary.

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On Feb. 3, Iowans will gather in houses, school gyms and community centers to hash out who will be each precinct’s pick for a nominee. In some locations they can spend hours persuading each other to support one candidate over another. That gets more intense after the first round, when supporters of candidates who didn’t make the 15% threshold are wooed by the top campaigns.

In a battle of persuasion, the strength of a campaign’s organizing can impact the final results. And in a race where polls show a nearly four-way tie at the top and many voters undecided, campaigns are looking for any edge over their competitors.

“If you were planning a birthday party, you would never get a burner phone and call all of your friends over and over until they pick up, which they would never do because people don’t answer unknown numbers anymore,” said Greta Carnes, Buttigieg’s national organizing director. “If you were planning a birthday party, you would start with an email invite and then text a few of your friends who you thought might flake.”

So Carnes designed a program that she thought would avoid the pitfalls of traditional organizing strategies, while also accounting for the fact that few people knew who Buttigieg was.

Avoiding Robocalls

“We knew we had this unknown candidate who didn’t have a lot of name ID and didn’t have a big well of support,” she said.

Rather than have a stranger knock on a door to talk about a candidate they’d never heard of, the campaign prioritized individuals’ networks ahead of the traditional voter file as it built its organizing program. The rise of robocalls has also greatly diminished the success of reaching voters from unknown numbers.

“Our organizers are more like local organizing directors and our volunteers are organizing for us,” she said.

That led people like Scigliano, Klocke, and Kuckelman to dig through their contacts and share Buttigieg’s message. Scigliano, 68, said four of her seven co-workers are now Buttigieg supporters. Klocke, 35, converted a former supporter of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who recently ended his presidential run, into a Buttigieg precinct captain, and Kuckelman, 55, was successful in getting her ex-husband to support the former mayor.

Intense Competition

The model, Carnes said, also helped the Buttigieg campaign overcome the intense competition for voters’ attention. With more than two dozen Democrats at the starting gate last year, many Iowans have stopped answering calls from unknown numbers.

“Figuring out how to break through the noise and truly decide on the candidate that’s best for you, there’s very few sources of truth in that,” said Betsy Hoover, the co-founder of Higher Ground Labs, which invests in progressive political startups. “But you trust your friends. And if your friend or your neighbor reaches out to you and says, ‘I’m going to an event for Pete,’ or, ‘I’m going to rally for Warren,’ you’re much more likely to do so.”

Campaigns have also sought to leverage technology to maximize supporters’ ability to contact and track their communication with friends and family. The Buttigieg campaign built a website that allows volunteers to input people’s information and send them updates about Buttigieg. The website prompts supporters with suggested information to share, based on details about the indiviudal’s interests and other candidates they support.

Tens of Thousands

The campaign declined to provide a specific number of how many Iowans have used their website, but it said thousands in the state have used the tool to engage tens of thousands of others who are part of their personal networks.

The campaigns for Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren all have phone applications that seek to tap into supporters’ personal networks as well.

Jesse Harris, a senior adviser to Biden in Iowa, said the campaign’s organizing strategy mirrors that of campaigns he worked on 16 years ago: recruiting precinct captains. Those individuals oversee a campaign’s supporters, and campaigns aim to have one in each of the nearly 1,700 precincts across the state.

While the strategy remains the same, Harris said the Biden campaign used a variety of methods to reach voters, including relying on supporters’ personal networks and using technology such as their Team Joe phone application.

“A lot of those traditional methods are still things that we employ,” Harris said about sending organizers out to knock doors and hold phone banks. “We still want to able to incorporate any sort of new technology that allows us to communicate the Vice President’s message to voters.”

The Sanders and Warren campaigns didn’t respond to a request for comment about their organizing programs. But Democrats familiar with campaigns’ different organizing strategies say the Buttigieg campaign’s reliance on personal networks is unique.

“Either books will be written about this model, or it will be gone by Super Tuesday,” Anderson said.

(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Tyler Pager in Ankeny, Iowa at tpager1@bloomberg.net

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

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