Mar 25, 2024 - 14:21
By npr.org

It's easy to tune out politics. Biden's campaign is using an app to get around that

Last weekend, Kimberlee Foster, 63, staked out the parking lot near a pop-up soul food restaurant in Milwaukee, phone in hand, looking for young voters.

It was chilly, with snow flurries, so she was strategic and approached just before people got out of their warm cars.

The retired police officer was talking to people about voting in Wisconsin's primary election next month, and then plugging their information into an app on her phone — an app that feeds information into a national database that the Democratic party will use later this year to turn out supporters for the presidential election.

Reaching voters is harder than ever in this age when people are constantly on their phones, deep in social media information silos, and actively avoiding political ads and news. The Biden campaign is hoping the app will help them connect with hard-to-reach voters.

While she doesn't fit the profile of someone on the cutting edge of campaign technology, Foster said she was willing to venture out of her comfort zone to avoid a replay of the 2016 election, when former President Donald Trump narrowly won Wisconsin and the presidency.

"I'm not on the computer every day doing computer work," said Foster. "And I really don't care about the phone being super-techy."

Foster was part of a pilot project for the Biden campaign and the Wisconsin Democratic Party testing a smartphone app called Reach. The project looked at whether the app could help reach Black voters in North Milwaukee, where there traditionally haven't been many campaign volunteers.