The Social Network

The pandemic made traditional campaigning a thing of the past. And that may be for the best.

- By Pema Levy

November 2017, Emily Isaac packed her belongings and flew to Texas. More specifically, to the 21st Congressional District, gerrymandered to include half of San Antonio, a scoop of Austin, and a large rectangle of Texas hill country, where a Bernie Sanders acolyte named Derrick Crowe was running for Congress. “We did all of the right things,” says Isaac, who had spent six months as a field organizer on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Crowe’s team built a massive door-knocking operation “dwarfing what our opponents were doing in terms of volunteers.” Isaac expected Crowe to win, but he came in third. “I left feeling like, ‘Wow, did any of that move the needle?’” she says. “That’s when I realized voters at the door will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you off the doorstep.”

A few months later, Isaac drove 150 miles east to work for another Democratic congressional candidate: Sri Kulkarni of Sugar Land, outside of Houston. The district has been a Republican stronghold since the 1980s, but there was promise for Democrats in its growing diversity, including immigrant communities from South and East Asia. Unfortunately, the voter file provided by the Democratic National Committee lumped them all together as “Asian,” an overly broad category for people with different cultures and languages. So Isaac’s team tasked volunteers from those communities to sort the 85,000-row spreadsheet by surname, dividing entries into more than 20 community categories, from Arab Christian to Zoroastrian. The campaign would ultimately run phone banks in 15 languages.