Traditional GOTV apps and phone / door-knocking procedures certainly worked well for the Obama campaign, but that was in a different era where people weren't saturated by pushy telemarketers and the like. I briefly tried volunteering in the last election and stopped because I disliked the pushy scripts that we would work off of to do targetted get-out-the-vote.
Seeing this article about Reach and its effectiveness was really refreshing; talking to random people on the street and organically generating interest was exactly the kind of volunteering I wanted to do.
Said app developer (who's primary source for the quotes and claims) undermines the premise of the article:
> I’d like to think that there was an impact, but you can't see who votes for who. I think it played a big role, especially in bringing out folks that had not voted before.
He didn’t undermine himself. He’s reminding the interviewer that the app/tech isn’t a magic window that allows him to know how voters voted. The full quote which you excerpted makes clear that he thinks there was a “big role”:
> After we won, we looked back, and Reach accounted for about 10 percent of our total positive IDs, or in other words, pledged voters. Reach was only deployed in the last three weeks before the primary. And the difference in the number of votes between Crowley and Ocasio was about 15 percent. So, I’d like to think that there was an impact, but you can't see who votes for who. I think it played a big role, especially in bringing out folks that had not voted before.
Keep in mind that ACO was seen as a massive underdog to the incumbent. A 10 percent increase in identified pledged voters is huge in a primary.
His quote (with or without the context of the paragraph) necessarily means that his app's impact is not understood. If all we have are self-quotes, that's weak support, too.
Maybe the NY primaries were different, but I don't know that turnout numbers bear out any real material impact from efforts to turn out non-traditional voters.
Was there really any doubt that she would win, after she won the primary? Isn't that area so reliably democratic that any primary winner is guaranteed to have the seat?
>When Ocasio-Cortez faced off against 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primaries in June, the app played a pivotal role in her upset victory, according to Sussan.
Seeing this article about Reach and its effectiveness was really refreshing; talking to random people on the street and organically generating interest was exactly the kind of volunteering I wanted to do.