More Signs, Worse Signal

As any urbanite online user probably knows, getting as far as possible away from the city means that you’re likely guaranteed two things: Spotty internet and yard signs for a certain former reality game show host.

The consistently colored yard signs will likely show up first. Maybe as you’re leaving the city, you’ll mostly see yard signs for all the candidates, but as you get further out, they will lean harder in one direction than the other. Road trippers know what I’m talking about.

But as you get further and further out, your 5G signal on your smartphone will start to degrade. Eventually, it will kick down to 4G. (It used to dip to 3G after this, but they shut the 3G network down.) Then, a phone-only signal, sans data. Then there won’t be any bars at all—and you’ll just be stuck looking at the yard signs for entertainment.

It’s pretty easy to connect A and B, obviously—there appears to be a faint correlation between quality of cellular access and political persuasion.

But someone appears to have missed the memo in the Trump camp. According to a recent report in The Guardian, the America Pac, a political action committee associated with Elon Musk, has been plagued by problems with bad technology. The issue? The app they use to canvas, called Campaign Sidekick, requires access to mobile internet that averages around 40 megabits per second. That’s a level that can be easily accessed in many cities, or through Musk’s Starlink satellite internet, but is likely impossible to hit in many rural areas. It’s essentially what you’d get if you turned off the zero-rating on your YouTube videos and downloaded everything in 4K during a long binge session. (It’s also more than the minimum bandwidth needed to play Google Stadia games in 4K, a famously data-hogging activity.)

“We have found that a lot of the user experience begins and ends with your network speed, whether it is an LTE or Wi-Fi network. Many users don’t ever consider this, but using an app like ours requires a certain amount of speed and bandwidth,” the website for the app states, while emphasizing the use of apps like Speedtest to ensure your internet quality.

The result is that the GOP ground-gamers, who are literally being asked to go door-to-door to reach potential voters, are not sure if their canvassers are actually canvassing. The reason? The app doesn’t actually correctly work in many of the areas where it’s intended to work, and is stuck in an offline mode.

This app requires about as much data as using a cloud gaming service on the highest-quality 4K mode.

Just a hilarious, epic miscalculation that could have been avoided had the app been developed slightly differently. They could have developed the app to download data completely offline and only ping back to the home base every handful of minutes. They could have done like DoorDash and had the canvasser take a picture of each address they’re supposed to hit, like they’re dropping off a burger. They could have simply been more frugal with their data-access needs.

But instead, they decided to make a literal data hog of an app that relies on constant data being delivered to given devices.

Perhaps one of the reasons the strategy is struggling is in part because of what it’s being asked to do. As noted by the New York Times (whilst I note that I’m breaking my no-NYT rule), the Trump campaign is trying a nontraditional get-out-the-vote campaign that focuses on people who don’t vote, but who might choose Trump if nudged. It’s risky, essentially a big-data-style play imported in from the tech industry, and requires a more granular approach to reaching target audiences. (There are other issues, too. As Rolling Stone notes, the Musk-backed canvassing is being led by a team associated with the hugely unsuccessful Ron DeSantis primary campaign, which means there’s not only bad tech, but bad blood.)

The truth is, ground games have a mixed track record, anyway, given how much of our political discourse is done online. In 2020, Biden barely had a ground game because of COVID-19, and he still won.

But as we don’t usually delve into political topics here, let’s bring it back to the tech: This situation is an excellent reminder of the gaps our cellular networks still have, and how, by leaving this infrastructure mostly in the domain of privatization, it remains spotty at best. It’s like the problem of weak rural and cellular broadband access, which affects roughly a quarter of rural communities, is staring the Trump campaign in the face—but there’s a good chance he might miss it.

For your rural canvassing project, you want a good app, a good strategy, and good internet access. Realistically, you’ll have to pick just two.