Stump’s September 2024 Newsletter
Dear Reader,
First, thank you for your interest in Stump and our mission to reimagine how voters and local political candidates connect. We’ve got a lot of work and learning to do to realize our vision. It will be a long and slow process, but an engaged and informed America is worth supporting.
This is the inaugural monthly Stump newsletter. Many people in the startup space I’ve spoken with say that writing their periodic newsletter is one of the most fruitful activities they engage in. So, here goes nothing. As I look to find a rhythm here, please shoot me any feedback that you are willing to offer or invite folks in your network that may be interested in Stump to subscribe.
I’m covering about five months of content here, so I promise these will be much briefer in the future. If you’re not particularly interested in the origin of Stump or what I was up to in months 1 through 4.5, skip to The Road Ahead section. The tl;dr is Stump has a new community-based tool for tracking political signs called Sprouts. It’s like Waze accident reporting for politics.
The Problem We’re Solving
I founded Stump to scratch my own itch. In the last few years, I spent hours researching the candidates for Mayor and City Council in my local elections and still felt like I was shooting in the dark when I went to vote. Despite the many commendable organizations working to facilitate civic engagement, I was unable to quickly identify who was on my ballot and where they stood on the issues that matter to me. It looks like I’m not alone. Voter turnout in local elections is often 10%-20%. According to a 2022 MIT Election Lab report, the top three reasons people cited for not voting are:
Not knowing enough about the choices
Not being interested
Being too busy
These reasons boil down to speed and relevancy. Local political candidates tend to have a limited and highly fragmented digital and physical presence. It’s a challenge for most voters to piece the puzzle together independently. This kicked off my journey to build a platform where voters can find answers to their questions about local candidates quickly and easily. I chose Stump as the name because of its political connotation when candidates in early America would use tree stumps as impromptu platforms for speeches, and also because of its symbolism as the solid base out of which something much larger grows.
In The Rearview Mirror
The first manifestation of Stump was a SurveyMonkey tool. It was designed for users to take a survey in which they identified the issues that mattered to them, weighted issues based on relative priority, selected the positions on key issues that they liked, and “matched” with their highest-scoring candidate for each office on the ballot. It was an ode to some of the features of online dating platforms that theoretically would be helpful in the political domain. But when I tried using it myself, it wasn’t particularly helpful. For one, many candidates had not offered any substantive position on key issues. Moreover, even if a candidate was aligned on issues that mattered to me, the tool provided no context as to whether they could actually win the election and execute. More importantly, nobody else was using the tool.
The next iteration of Stump was a few dozen ballot guides for competitive Massachusetts elections (some of them are still up on our website). Each guide provides a dropdown list of the candidates’ positions by issue, a bar chart with the campaign fund balance of each candidate, and a bio with their recent professional experience, links to campaign websites and social media profiles, and a list showing the occupation and employer of their top campaign supporters. This iteration of Stump had mixed success.
Stump had over 1,000 unique visitors use its ballot guides in August. On primary election day, Stump’s ballot guides had over 200 unique visitors. The most popular ballot guide on Stump was for a County Commissioner election and had over 600 unique visitors. On the one hand, Stump was a tool that people were seeking out and using.
On the other hand, our top page had reached fewer than 0.2% of the registered voters in its district. Stump pulled some of the fragmented pieces together for voters, but it did not seamlessly answer the first question of “who is on my ballot” using geolocation or “solve” the puzzle to an extent that made voters love the tool and want to share it with family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. Plus, I was personally building the ballot guides. Like all of the other existing voter tools, the process relied on top-down research, which introduces scaling limitations and risks the interjection of bias. In sum, Stump to date has failed to cultivate, serve, and harness contributions from a large and dedicated community of users.
The Road Ahead
I believe that the next evolution of Stump requires focusing on a more acute pain point that is felt by a narrower group of power users. Reddit facilitates a forum with lots of valuable community contributions from political enthusiasts. I’ve noticed a recurring question pop up in different Reddit threads where users ask how many lawn signs each candidate has to gauge the state of an election. Besides anecdotal observations from other Redditors, I haven’t seen any users quantify the number of political signs placed by a candidate, and I’m not aware of any existing tools being used to track political signs.
So, today I’m announcing the release of Sprouts Spotter v1.0, Stump’s community-based tool for tracking political signs. We’re fifty days out from election day, and the lawn signs, flags, stickers, and billboards are out there. Let’s map them together so we can learn how many there are, identify the signs people are seeing the most, and attempt to measure their impact on election outcomes.
I’ll admit, as a digital native millennial, I’ve had my doubts about the relevance of lawn signs in today’s era. Does seeing a sign with a name, office, and slogan really compel people to vote or lean towards a candidate? Although lawn signs are an old tool, politics are still local and take place in real life. Candidates spend much of their campaign budget on signs, stickers, mailers, and more, as well as hundreds of hours knocking on thousands of doors in their district. Many of the most innovative companies today also started by introducing a new spin on distributing old technology (Amazon mailing books, Netflix shipping DVDs to your home).
Sprouts 1.0 is the worst it will ever be and needs a lot of upgrades in a hurry (I built it, so yeah, yikes), but I believe it is a step closer toward meeting the needs of people that track elections closely and building a community map-based tool. Future versions will likely include district mapping, custom filters, third party data integrations to measure foot and vehicle traffic, campaign finance contribution bubble plots, and more. Comment your ideas on the page and share it with your network so we can improve and iterate faster.
Needed Repairs
Right now, Stump would really benefit from the attention of a full-stack web app software engineer, particularly someone with experience working with Google Maps API and shapefiles. Others who could add a lot of value for Stump in the near term may include individuals with deep domain expertise working on political campaigns or voter engagement organizations, data professionals with experience scraping municipal websites and setting up robust database structures for extremely messy datasets, and UX designers that can improve the navigability of the platform. I’m also always happy to chat with anyone who is passionate about politics and improving civic engagement. If you know anyone that might be interested, please put us in contact.
If you’ve made it this far, you must really care about Stump’s mission, and I appreciate you for that. Looking forward to reporting back in a month!
Best,
Chris Madden
