The click campaign

JOYCE GREENBERG BROWN FIRST LEARNED ABOUT POLITICAL ORGANIZING from Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957, when he visited her youth group at a Philadelphia YWCA. She worked for George McGovern in Pennsylvania in 1972 and managed field offices in Florida for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. She was so dedicated to Hillary Clinton that after Clinton lost, she dyed purple and green streaks into her white hair—the colors of the original suffragist movement—to protest Donald Trump.

If it weren’t for COVID-19, Brown would be working at a field office for Joe Biden in Florida, where she lives. But the pandemic has prevented the kind of campaigning she’s done for decades. There are no rallies in packed stadiums, no handshakes at parades, no photo lines or kaffeeklatsches. Instead, Brown, 76, is at home, spending hours using Google Voice to text Floridians about voting by mail, sending them a link where they can register for a mail-in ballot. She estimates she’s sent roughly a thousand so far. “Digital is kind of a foreign word to me because I’m not a digital person,” she says. “I would much rather be out on the streets.”

For more than half a century, Democrats have put their faith in field organizing as the key to campaign success. But this year, instead of marching through neighborhoods with clipboards, Democratic staffers, Biden campaign volunteers and activists across the party are texting, messaging and commenting at their neighbors’ virtual doorsteps. Instead of sharing beer in field offices, they’re trading memes on Slack channels. Instead of finding volunteers at farmers’ markets or school-board meetings, they’re scouring Facebook groups and Twitter threads for potential recruits. Campaign events that were once held in high school gyms are now held on Zoom and promoted on Instagram and TikTok. Because