Sanders Campaign Rumbles Back To Life After Two Days Without Field Data

There wasn’t much Sanders field operatives could do Thursday and Friday after the Democratic National Committee suspended the campaign’s access to the party voter file. The file is the lifeblood of modern field campaigning: canvass lists, phone lists, and other voter contact efforts flow through it and are measured against it. Without it, there’s basically nothing.

“It looks like a lot of empty chairs,” Jeff Weaver, Sanders’s campaign manager told BuzzFeed News when asked what a day without a voter file looks like. The campaign couldn’t do phone banks or canvassing. It couldn’t even send Sanders around to events to keep things moving during the voter file lockout because the file is used to alert people near where Sanders will be speaking and build crowds.

Volunteers were turned away, field efforts shut down. Staff scrambled to assemble jury-rigged backup systems using paper lists to get canvassers back on the street.

In New Hampshire, Sanders staff couldn’t “cut turf” — campaign lingo for creating canvass routes. That’s a big loss in a state where retail politics are still seen as the key to victory and where Sanders is trying to hold onto his one primary state lead over rival Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in polls. Staff worked through the night to create a functional analog version of the digital outreach operation run through the voter file. But no one expected that system to match what they had before.
“In a modern campaign, you can’t do anything,” Weaver said.



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