As technology becomes a bigger part of our everyday lives, it has also become increasingly involved in political campaigns, from using social media to galvanize support for a candidate to creating campaign ads that go viral.
These days, candidates need to make sure their digital game is just as strong as their in-person canvassing. A group of Republican engineers is launching a new platform to help GOP candidates do just that.
Republic VX is a new platform from Republic Computer Science that is designed to help GOP campaign managers more easily keep track of volunteers, staffers and voters, according to TechCrunch. The team was started by Azarias Reda, the CTO of the Republican National Committee who joined the organization in 2013 to head its data team.
In recent presidential elections, the Republican party has had some difficulty keeping up with the Democrats in the digital department. Moving forward, the idea for Republic VX is to not only identify volunteers but to also organize them to get votes, according to TechCrunch.
The new platform attempts to do that in a few ways. A chart helps managers keep track of staff organization in each of the local campaign offices spread throughout the country. There are automated field reports to keep track of volunteer numbers as well as functions to manage volunteer signup, recruitment, shifts, communication and organization. Republic VX can also be integrated with Facebook Groups.
The new platform also attempts to make the RNC's databases more accessible. As TechCrunch describes, the platform can use RNC's data APIs to see a potential volunteer's full voter history to help get in touch with potential volunteers more quickly.
To ensure that voter and volunteer information remains within that particular campaign, Republic VX will make it so that field offices can only view information to which they have been granted access and that this data also remains isolated between campaigns. Reda described the platform to TechCrunch as "a multi-tenant Web server with a single-tenant database."
As Bloomberg Politics points out, another challenge for Republic VX as the 2016 presidential election continues to heat up is competing with the data management company i360, which is financed by the political network backed by Charles and David Koch and recently signed a temporary deal to share data with RNC affiliate Data Trust, the Washington Post first reported last week. Let the best campaign data tool win.
