16 Young Americans Shaping the 2016 Election
Reaching voters personally costs campaigns a lot of time and money. Traditionally, they’ve had to send volunteers to knock on doors or make phone calls, and mail out flyers to people’s homes. Eli Kaplan started to see how the Internet would change all that when he worked his first senatorial campaign in 2006, even while he was still trying to convince his boss that it would be a good idea to set up a Facebook page. In 2010 he founded Rising Tide Interactive, a digital advertising firm that uses big data to help Democratic candidates and groups pushing liberal ballot initiatives get personalized messages to specific groups of people online. It’s a similar idea to the custom ads for shoes or plane tickets or dog food that pop up in your Facebook feed. Mining troves of personal information does raise critical privacy questions, but it’s incredibly useful for campaigns, which can use their money talking to people who will listen.
“There haven’t been really enormous disruptions in the way that political campaigns have been waged all that often. We’re in one of those moments,” says Kaplan, whose clients include Senate and gubernatorial candidates, as well as super PACs like Ready for Hillary. “The media environment is getting more and more fragmented. People still consume an enormous amount of television and they still read their mail, but they’re also looking at their phones and spending a lot of time on their laptops.”
Ben Wessel, 27
Deputy Political Director, NextGen Climate Action
In early January, the Bernie Sanders campaign sent out a press release asking, “Where is Secretary Clinton’s climate plan?” Clinton’s campaign manager fired back with a snarky post on Medium titled “The Sanders campaign asked where our climate plan was. I Googled it for them.” It’s not an accident that the Democratic primary candidates are fighting to paint themselves as the most aggressive climate hawk: It’s because young climate activists, including 350.org alum Ben Wessel, have pushed them there.
“Young people, when fully engaged in the political process, can make or break the political future of either a climate denier or of a pro-clean energy candidate,” says Wessel, who oversaw teams of students organizers who were on the ground in Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio during the caucuses, where they got tens of thousands of people to commit to vote on climate in November. By early February, all of the Democratic candidates had endorsed NextGen’s benchmark of relying on clean energy for at least 50 percent of the country’s power supply by 2030. NextGen, which is backed by billionaire Tom Steyer, will be in seven states in the coming months, organizing the youth vote to elect climate-minded Senate candidates.
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