Lincoln Labs: Vote-hacking Obama

04 Nov 2014
Cody Pickens


During 2012's US presidential election, the Obama campaign's groundbreaking use of tech helped the incumbent achieve a second term. Now, with 2016 looming, the Republican party is trying to go one better. "We're trying to replace the notion that everyone in Silicon Valley is left wing," says Aaron Ginn, cofounder of San Francisco-based Lincoln Labs. Ginn, formerly head of growth at StumbleUpon, launched the startup in 2013 with Republicans Garrett Johnson and Chris Abrams after working on Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. (Abrams also works for the US arm of Condé Nast, which publishes WIRED.)

Lincoln Labs introduces the Grand Old Party to software engineers via a nationwide series of hackathons and events. At the company's first annual Reboot conference in July, Republican senator (and possible 2016 candidate) Rand Paul mixed with libertarian startup founders and VCs. Between keynotes, delegates built apps for crafting crime policy, online voting and raising donations. The Romney campaign didn't make the best use of tech, Ginn explains, citing one plan to create a blog platform which was scrapped to focus on securing donations. "Political campaigns should be building things that generate value, not just extract it - that's how you create a grass-roots movement."

Ginn wants politicians to learn from growth hackers (WIRED 09.14) by using a data-led approach to wooing voters. "Your goal is to make people fall in love with your product," he says. "In politics, the product is the candidate. So we work on things like: how do we motivate people to move from a smaller to a larger donation? How do we make it easier for them to register?" From 2016, he argues, elections will increasingly be won not by trail-hardened campaign managers, but by analysts making decisions based on real-time data.

But can tech alone stop Hillary? "You can't growth-hack a candidate who isn't working with voters," Ginn admits, conceding that the Republicans still have some way to go. "If we just [copy] what Obama did in 2012, we will lose."