Republican Campaign Tech Sprawls as Democrats’ Is Too Big to Fail

When Marco Rubio’s staffers dispatched volunteers on Sunday afternoon from his Iowa headquarters, a storefront office between a tailor shop and a nail salon in a suburban strip mall north of Des Moines, everything they needed to knock on doors was loaded into their phones. Rubio’s canvassers rely on Geo Connect, an app developed by the Minnesota-based company specializing in phone services, FLS, that had that Friday night been loaded with a fresh list of voters whom the campaign’s statistical models had identified as likely to caucus and still open to persuasion on Rubio’s behalf. Republican politics in the early-voting states are overrun with so-called “walk apps”—the perfect intersection of the tech world’s app fetishism and GOP campaigners’ rediscovery of the ground game. Each promises a digital upgrade to the clipboards that used to direct canvassers to pre-selected doors and guide them through interactions with voters.

But as befits a party riven on axes of identity and loyalties, Republicans are unable to agree on which app to use. Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz rely on an interface from i360, the data hub controlled by the political network associated with David and Charles Koch. The company that provides many of Cruz’s campaign’s data services, Cambridge Analytica, markets its own competing app called Ripon. Chris Christie uses Advantage Mobile, from the firm Bridgetree, while Rick Santorum depends on the nonpartisan NationBuilder.