One year as DNC CTO
By: Nellwyn Thomas
Tags: Engineering, Politics, Data, Data Science, Democratic Party

One year as DNC CTO

And less than 150 days until the general election

In May 2019, motivated by the opportunity to tackle some of the most meaningful challenges in political tech, I joined the DNC as the Chief Technology Officer.

The events over the past year — and the past months in particular — have only reinforced how critical it is to fight for progressive leaders. Reform is necessary to eliminate the systemic racism that plagues our institutions.

I am honored to lead the Democratic Party’s efforts to leverage data, technology, and security to help progressive campaigns at every level of the ballot win elections.

As someone who worked on the 2016 presidential cycle, I saw firsthand how the cyclical nature of campaigns is antithetical to ongoing, deep technical development and iteration. Having led analytics teams Facebook and Etsy, I knew there was an opportunity to create lasting change in the democratic ecosystem by establishing strong data infrastructure powered by strong technologists.

This is the promise of DNC Tech: by building reliable and secure data infrastructure, innovative data products, and first-rate security & counter-disinformation practices, the DNC Tech Team can advance every Democratic campaign in this election cycle, but also in those to come.

In the last year, our phenomenal team has built transformative infrastructure and data products that will help Democrats win. Our team has grown by more than 30% and is now more than 55 people strong. We’ve attracted top-tier talent from the tech industry, including Amazon, Uber, Twitter, and Facebook; politics, including members of the Beto, Booker, Buttigieg, Warren, and Sanders teams; and academia, including PhDs and advanced degrees from Duke, Penn, Michigan, London School of Economics, and many others. I’m particularly proud that our tech staff is 43% female and 28% people of color.

Our team members are united by the desire to build lasting solutions to ensure the success of the Democratic Party. Leading this group of talented, thoughtful, and dedicated technologists has been the highlight of my year. I am humbled every day by them, and honored to represent their work.

DNC Tech Team featuring Mambo — our unofficial mascot

I am also immensely grateful for the partnership of the democratic state parties and sister committees. The incredible voter file managers and data directors at democratic state parties are the engine behind data-driven campaigns at every level of the ballot. Their feedback and partnership has helped us develop and deliver more effective data products and tools.

Our work

So, what exactly does the DNC Tech team do?

In short, we focus on the shared resources used by campaigns at every level of the ballot — data infrastructure, the national voter file, tools for voters themselves, countering disinformation online, and security resources. Our users include the presidential nominee, but also state parties and sister committees, and by extension, all down ballot races.

Our work is guided by two core principles:

The infrastructure needed for effective, secure and efficient voter outreach should be built once and leveraged by every Democratic campaign. Every dollar a campaign spends building tech or cleaning data is a dollar that could go to talking to voters about the issues they care about. Our goal is to save campaigns time and money so they can focus on what matters most: the voters. The DNC is uniquely positioned to aggregate, enhance, and maintain the decades of data campaigns and the Democratic Party has collected about voters.

Highlights of the last year

Upgrading the party’s data infrastructure

In the last year, we have significantly improved our data infrastructure, addressing technical debt accumulated over previous election cycles, from a variety of systems.

As someone who personally worked through the fabled woes of the 2016 Democratic data infrastructure, it has been thrilling to equip our users with new data infrastructure. We built a new data warehouse that supports Democrats up-and-down the ballot for the 2020 cycle (and future election cycles). It is far more scalable, secure and usable. You can read more about Phoenix, our data warehouse, here.

Supporting 20+ presidential campaigns

During the primaries, the DNC Tech team provided data, training, and support to all presidential campaigns. As you can imagine, this kept us quite busy. We provided neutral, but deep support to every presidential campaign and loved learning from the innovative work happening at each one. Now that there is a presumptive nominee, we work exclusively to support the Biden for President team.

Acquiring insightful data for campaigns to reach voters

In order to help campaigns become more accurate and more efficient, we have worked tirelessly over the last year to acquire and provide data to ensure that Democrats are reaching the right voters. This includes acquiring over 45+ million cell phones for all Democratic campaigns to use for voter outreach, partnering with innovative new companies like Deck, and investing in faster and more frequent ingestion of the latest voter files from our partners in state parties.

Developing innovative data and data science products

In the last year, we’ve released a number of analytics and data science products, designed to improve the utility of the national voter file.

A new record linkage algorithm de-duplicates 30+ million voter records, leading to a 9% increase in efficiency across the voter file.

A new foundational dataset, Blueprint, helps campaigns quickly run analyses, create reports, and build custom models.

We have also released several new models that leverage the DNC’s unique store of data, including hundreds of thousands of polling survey responses and millions of field IDs collected in races up and down the ballot since 2004.

Example inputs for DNC data science models

Building a counter-disinformation program & security culture

The scale of malicious activity and disinformation operations is increasing. I’m grateful that Bob Lord has led ongoing and relentless efforts to improve the security stance of both the DNC and the broader Democratic ecosystem. (Speaking of which… have you completed your security checklist?)

Over the course of the last year, we also established a Counter Disinformation Team dedicated to identifying and responding to bad actors targeting Democratic campaigns online. Having seen the intricacies of Facebook first-hand, I feel passionately that we all must hold a light to the platform and its effects on national discourse. Learn more about our disinformation program here.

Road to the general

With fewer than 150 days before the general election, the DNC Tech Team and I are acutely aware of the shifting state of the world. Our country is fighting dual epidemics — COVID-19 and systemic, institutionalized racism. Both of which disproportionately impact Black men and women.

Our team is outraged by the recent murders of George Floyd in Minnesota, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and Breonna Taylor in Kentucky. Words cannot express the deep sadness we feel for their families and communities.

Our work today, to elect Democrats at every level of government, is more important than ever as we fight for justice, fair democratic processes, and the safety of Americans.

We are thrilled to be partnering closely with the Biden for President team, state parties, and sister committees to develop and deliver data, products, and tools to effectively reach voters through new and varied channels to guarantee the success of Democrats at all levels throughout the United States.

We hope that you will join us in our efforts, either by joining our team or by making a donation that will allow us to continue to make a difference in this election cycle and many more to come.