Startup Caucus has invested in several conservative campaign technology startups to match the left’s investments in relational organizing, which encourages organizers to use their mobile contacts in voter mobilization campaigns.
NurPhoto via Getty Images
When Will Long was a sophomore at Harvard University, he decided to go door-to-door for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in New Hampshire. He quickly became appalled by the software the campaign used to coordinate its campaign efforts. He said the app “looked like it was 20 years old” and lacked key voter data collection features.
“I’ve found, surprisingly, that across the entire Republican Party, there is almost no one with a computer science degree developing software and technology for local campaigns, while on the Democratic side, I think the opposite is true,” Long said.
After earning a computer science degree, Long, who had previously worked as a software engineering intern at Amazon and Palantir, founded Numinar Analytics to create a campaign support platform that could compete with NGP VAN, the web services provider that has hosted the Democratic Party’s voter file for two decades.
But Long soon struggled to get Numinar off the ground. Funders were hard to find and there was no community of innovators to pave the way for conservative founders like him. It was difficult to get advice, let alone investment. That is, until he connected with Startup Caucus. This investment firm and incubator aims to become the conservative rival to Higher Ground Labs, the venture capital fund and accelerator that has invested in more than 70 campaign technology startups supporting Democratic campaigns.
Startup Caucus was co-founded in 2019 by Eric Wilson, who previously led digital strategy for the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign, and his former colleague Joe Pounder, who also ran for Rubio’s presidential campaign. Wilson said the two were inspired to start the company after noticing that Republicans weren’t keeping up with innovation on the left.
“It seemed ironic to me that the left was using capitalism to increase its advantage over the right and that we were being beaten at our own game,” he said.
Wilson and Pounder launched their incubator with a total investment of $150,000 in six startups, including Numinar, their first investment. This includes fundraising software provider Trailmapper, founded by political consultant Dante Vitagliano, whose platform enables political organizations to manage key donor data and optimize outreach efforts. Startup Caucus raised another $500,000 for its second early-stage fund in 2022.
Since its initial investment, Numinar closed a Series A funding round in April and has grown from working with 10 campaigns in 2020 to a client base of nearly 1,000 campaigns for the 2024 election cycle. This year alone, organizers using Numinar’s services to track voter outreach efforts have knocked on 3.5 million doors, according to Numinar.
As for his investment philosophy, Wilson said Startup Caucus aims to achieve similar success with its portfolio by not only focusing on promising technology startups for the campaign trail, but also by changing the Republican campaign culture to encourage strategists and consultants to prioritize innovative technology.
“There’s a more academic culture on the Democratic side, where the big political scientists in the field are working with the left to develop new tactics like relational organizing and vote tripling,” he said. “It’s been a much more significant part of their campaign culture, where they’re doing tests, sharing knowledge, and that’s different than the approach on our side.”
Another reason for the Republican campaign technology lag is that Republicans rely too heavily on paid media because their electorate tends to be older and more likely to watch cable TV. Democrats are being forced to experiment with more innovative strategies because of their changing demographics, Wilson said.
For example, the Democratic National Committee and the Kamala Harris campaign are relying on Reach, a startup that emerged from New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s 2018 primary, to mobilize Democratic voters. That platform, which is supporting several hundred campaigns this election cycle, is based on relational organizing, a popular political mobilization approach on the left that encourages organizers to mobilize their personal networks around causes or candidates.
Republican campaigns are just beginning to jump on this bandwagon; Numinar launched its relational organizing platform earlier this month. Buzz360, another Startup Caucus portfolio company, only launched its relational organizing app SwipeRed in 2020, but there are few competitors on the right.
Relational organizing tools like those offered by Reach and Numinar use contacts on organizers’ phones, which are then matched with voter registration data to identify potential candidates for what Long calls “warm relational outreach.”
“The idea is that in a world where a billion and a half dollars is spent on television advertising, phone calls and door-to-door advertising, this message from a friend is a bright spot in the information overload,” Long said.
Earlier this year, startup Caucus added Campaign Forecast, which develops budgeting software for campaigns, to its portfolio. Its co-founder Chris Leavitt said he was disappointed by the lack of technology available to conservative campaigns compared to their opponents. Leavitt decided to launch the campaign budgeting platform after working with several Republican campaigns that used a simple Excel spreadsheet to track their spending.
Leavitt said the support from Startup Caucus was critical to his startup, not only because Campaign Forecast needed money, but also because he was able to connect with other founders in similar positions.
“When I started this, it was a real passion project that I hoped would work out, but it was a gamble at first, like any small business,” he said. “But having a supportive group of like-minded people with Startup Caucus is hugely helpful and makes the jump a little easier.”
But Startup Caucus and its portfolio companies aren’t the only ones trying to revolutionize the right’s campaign technology. Jesse Sandstrom founded Vottiv with software developer Bryce Lund after working on a Utah Senate campaign in 2021 and yearning for a better alternative to voter outreach platform Campaign Sidekick. Sandstrom said right-wing startups have faced backlash in the past for marketing themselves to conservative campaigns; although his company works exclusively with GOP candidates, it doesn’t describe itself as a conservative software provider, fearing negative impacts on its website’s search engine optimization.
“If you invested in a conservative technology in the last few years, there was probably a fear that you would be delisted, and I think that’s changed,” he said. “As people like Elon Musk have become more vocal, people now don’t care about expressing conservative views, and I think companies are also less afraid of being delisted if they invest in something they believe in.”
Katie Harbath, who previously led digital strategy at the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee and now runs the technology policy firm Anchor Change, said the Republican Party has been hampered by a lack of collaboration on digital innovation – a trend she said has since changed.
“Republicans in particular, not just in the vendor space but in campaigns and others, have always been a little more independent,” Harbath said. “So there were a lot of independent things that popped up, but it was rare that something happened where everyone said we’re going to be fully focused on this one thing, like the folks at ActBlue did.”
Wilson noted, however, that Startup Caucus is not only interested in keeping up with Democratic campaign technology; the company also wants to invest in companies that cater to the unique needs of Republican campaigns and candidates.
“One important lesson I’ve learned over the years is that Republicans and Democrats run different campaigns,” he said. “We appeal to different audiences and face different challenges. Republicans have a different coalition of voters, and that means we don’t need an exact copy of what the left has.”
