More than a dozen staffers will be huddled over laptops at Sen. Cory Booker’s Newark headquarters Wednesday night with the TV volume on high, while 10 aides to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand will pile into a war room in Troy, N.Y., fingers hovering above computers with software open to pull video footage for Twitter.
They’ll be standing at the ready when, or if, their candidate has that elusive, impossible-to-script “moment” that can change a campaign.
The rise of social media and digital fundraising has put a new premium on catching fire online in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary as the contenders scrap for national attention in a 24-candidate field. Such episodes are elusive: Only South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg has enjoyed a truly explosive viral moment in 2019, when his early CNN town hall rocketed him into the top tier of the primary. But that’s what all 20 candidates in the Democratic National Committee debates this week are seeking, and as they practice their lines in hotel conference rooms and campaign headquarters, their staffs are preparing to amplify it when it lands on national TV.
“It’s not debate prep — it’s moment prep,” said Dan Sena, a Democratic consultant advising Sen. Michael Bennet, who gained notice in January with a hand-waving Senate-floor rant about the federal government shutdown. “Each candidate gets, maybe, 76 words in three to four minutes. So, all you can prep for are the X-factors that might help you take off.”
A handful of candidates have cracked the formula before, including former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign answer on kneeling during the national anthem at professional football games, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s muzzled criticism of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the Senate floor in 2017, and Sens. Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar’s lines of questioning during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings last year.
But they won’t be previewing their one-liners early: “If I had zingers, I wouldn’t tell you,” Klobuchar joked at a campaign stop in Cresco, Iowa, last month.
Aides from nearly a dozen campaigns agreed that much of the hard work is up to the candidates themselves, because you “can’t manufacture” an authentic moment that resonates with voters,” said Emmy Bengtson, Gillibrand’s deputy communications director and head of digital. But, she added, “you can make the most of it once it happens. And when [Gillibrand] has a powerful moment, we’ll be ready for it.”
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“You want a ‘memeable’ moment,” said Tara McGowan, founder of ACRONYM, a progressive digital group. “The real value for the candidates when they’re on stage is going to be able to land a breakout moment they can use to fundraise and expand their base.”
Gillibrand got a taste of the viral zinger during her Fox News town hall debate, when the host, Chris Wallace, told her it was “not very polite” to criticize the network’s coverage on its own airwaves. The New York Democrat’s digital team blasted the clip across its social media channels, added it to the senator’s Twitter bio and, within hours, designed a tote bag with the tagline that she sold on her website.
“We will have all of the stakeholders in the same room, so we can move really fast, get aligned on messaging and tactics, executing it quickly,” said Bengtson, explaining that the campaign’s debate-night war room will mimic its setup during earlier TV town halls. “We want to be the first out of the gate with content to amplify Gillibrand’s positions.”
Campaigns are doing their best to keep supporters engaged throughout the entire process. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign told POLITICO that it will host a pre- and post-debate livestream show from its campaign headquarters, where campaign staff will react to the debate and answer questions on “Bernie TV.” Featured prominently on the livestream page: a donate button.
On Thursday, synced with the debate, Sanders’ digital team — which packs digital firepower including hires from NowThis, the viral video platform — will also launch a channel on Twitch, the site for video gamers.
If former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro makes a splash on Wednesday, his campaign has tapped a dozen well-connected supporters to amplify it. They are on call to tweet and retweet the moment to create “critical momentum,” said Jennifer Fiore, a senior adviser to Castro’s campaign.
For all the planning campaigns do, the best viral content sometimes comes from the outside. The prime 2020 example so far is Warren’s campaign motto, which has its roots in a Twitter exchange in early April, when a Warren supporter tweeted that she’d buy a T-shirt that said: “Elizabeth Warren: She’s Got A Plan for That.” Previously, former Vice President Joe Biden’s aviator sunglasses inspired a flood of memes during the Obama administration.
“The bigger the audience, the less likely anything viral will actually come from the campaigns themselves because there are so many smart and funny people watching it,” said one presidential campaign aide, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “People are going to react in real time, and there’s no way for the campaign to get ahead of it. That’s new and unusual for this cycle.”
Still, even candidates who have already benefited from a viral bump aren’t sure how they’ll go about repeating it on the debate stage. “It’s hard. I don’t know,” Bennet said in an interview with POLITICO.
“I’m never going to be the person who comes up with the best turn of phrase,” Bennet said. “What I’ve found,” he continued, is “that people appreciate when I show up and tell them the truth.”
While no one needs to rocket up the polls now, there is an imperative for some candidates to turn a big moment into a fundraising bump soon. The next major campaign finance deadline is Sunday, and with slower summer months ahead, a big moment in the June debates might be the best chance some candidates have to amass the 130,000 unique donors they need to qualify for future DNC debates in the fall.
“When Andrew introduces themselves to the folks across America, when they go online and look up ‘who is this guy, who is this Andrew Yang?’ … We need to be ready,” said Randy Jones, Yang’s press secretary. “We’re gonna smash [the 130,000-donor threshold]. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were there by Thursday.”
The 2020 campaigns are not only organizing around the debates online, but in person, too. Data compiled by ACRONYM from MobilizeAmerica, an app many campaigns use to organize volunteers, tracks over 2,150 debate watch parties arranged by the campaigns themselves or supporters.
There will be more than 850 Sanders-themed meetups for his debate on Night Two, and his campaign said they expect there will ultimately be over 1,000 watch parties set up across all 50 states. Warren has over 560, Buttigeig has nearly 275 and Biden has at least 170.
“In the age of social media, they’re taking pictures, they’re tweeting, people do spread information by word of mouth. You become part of a community [at a watch party],” said Michael Hopkins, former Rep. John Delaney’s press secretary. “When you see supporters start to go, it becomes affirmation … it becomes easier for other people to say ‘Who’s that John Delaney? I need to check him out.’”
But a messy two-night, 20-candidate event could ultimately cut off any of the presidential candidates from catching much-needed fire: “Maybe no one has a moment because everyone’s trying to have a moment,” said another presidential campaign aide.
Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.