The Invisible Candidates

We’re one month out from the state primary elections in Massachusetts. Campaigns should be dialed in right now, finding ways to engage with as many voters as possible IRL and virtually. Many campaigns will struggle to do the latter, though.

I’ve expressed to family and friends how surprised I am by the lackluster digital presence exhibited by many of today’s candidates vying for elected office. It seems that in every race, there is at least one candidate missing crucial online forms for procuring volunteers and donations, functioning links to social media pages, substantive content about their proposition to voters, or even a campaign website altogether. I decided to audit the online footprint of all the candidates profiled on Stump today. Below are the results.

Some of these mistakes are sloppy but survivable. A candidate is unlikely to win or lose an election because of a broken link to their Instagram, which only had a few dozen followers to start with. But the fact that nearly a quarter of the candidates on the ballot in this sample have no online mechanism for accepting campaign contributions is shocking. As a digital-native voter, it’s also frustrating to see that nearly 40% of the candidates in this sample have no consolidated page online about their views on key issues, and 15% with no dedicated campaign website at all.

On the bright side, this audit highlights an opportunity for Stump to build a platform and auxiliary tools that level the digital playing field for state and local political campaigns.