As the Senate Agriculture Committee’s markup of its farm bill approached earlier this month, Republicans sought to attach an amendment that would preempt more-stringent state rules governing the growing conditions of pigs, chickens, and other livestock.
That set off alarm bells for a coalition of independent livestock farmers from across the political spectrum, all of whom raise their animals without extreme confinement. They feared that a national lowering of animal-welfare standards would put them at a competitive disadvantage against larger farms that use confinement farming.
The independent farmers needed to act fast. It was Monday night, and the markup was scheduled for Thursday morning. To pressure senators to hold the line, they needed to build grassroots pressure.
The coalition had engaged Democratic strategist Joe Trippi’s firm Lever Communications, which in turn reached out to ConnectBlue, a relatively new player in the Democratic media ecosystem. ConnectBlue promises one-stop shopping for candidates, fundraisers, and advocacy campaigns looking to get the word out to a left-learning audience.
Bart Myers, ConnectBlue’s founder and CEO, said the organization had nine media outlets and audience-engagement platforms on board within three hours, and the first activations—including SMS, email, social media, sponsored content, and in-app notifications—were live by the next morning. Over a 36-hour period, the campaign spurred messages to all 23 senators on the committee, more than 50,000 in total.
The amendment was defeated, largely along party lines. (The larger farm bill also failed to advance out of the committee.)
Trippi said the rapid response enabled by ConnectBlue was a successful proof of concept.
"At the end of the day, this was about giving thousands of farmers and people in agricultural communities a chance to be heard on an issue that mattered enormously to them,” Trippi told National Journal. “I’ve worked in politics for more than 40 years, and I’ve never seen an effective advocacy campaign mobilized this quickly. We got the green light Monday night, were live Tuesday morning, and within 36 hours had reached every member of the Senate Agriculture Committee.”
Myers, who previously ran CrowdPAC and Countable, views his new venture as part media-syndication platform, part ad agency, and part social network. The network, which has been live for about a year, aims to connect Democratic campaigns and advocates with creators and publishers in a trusted environment.
“If you get a message from someone in Democratic politics, you don’t know if they’re trolling you,” he said. So he vets all the participants in the network.
The ad platform, which launched about two months ago, was also born out of what Myers perceived as a deficiency in the Democratic universe.
“On the Right, whether it’s coordinated or not, there’s a very effective message discipline,” Myers said, adding that messaging on the Left, by contrast, is more like a “continual train wreck."
"Everyone is out there on their own. … There’s a lot of division and distrust. We skip all that.”
For ConnectBlue, that translates to about 50 platforms in the network, from the Crooked Media podcast network to traditional progressive publications like The Nation and Mother Jones to petition engines like ResistBot and Care2.
Myers said that, at the moment, ConnectBlue is primarily working with agencies, PACs, and campaigns to boost Democrats in the midterm elections, and it also has “some federal and state advocacy in the queue.”
“If you get the message in front of Americans, they will act,” he said. “There’s a narrative that they’re lazy, but that’s incorrect.”
