Northstar Campaign Systems brings tech power to the election ground game

The Omaha-based company has been an innovative force behind past campaigns of Chris Christie, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham. In 2008 Andrew Northwall was working in the field for the McCain campaign in Iowa, when he noticed something odd about the Obama volunteers. He saw a transplant from California approach a potential voter and start talking about her…

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A volunteer makes calls on the NorthStar system for Senator Deb Fischer. Photo courtesy of Northstar Campaign Systems.

The Omaha-based company has been an innovative force behind past campaigns of Chris Christie, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.

In 2008 Andrew Northwall was working in the field for the McCain campaign in Iowa, when he noticed something odd about the Obama volunteers. He saw a transplant from California approach a potential voter and start talking about her son’s recent football injury.

“How did they know that?” asked Northwall. “What we found out was that they had better data acquisition technology than we did. On our side we had things written down like the term ‘war’—that’s all it would say. Are they for the war? Against the war? We didn’t know.”

Northwall realized that if he planned to work on campaigns in the future, he would need to make better tools.

“I realized the tools we were using were completely inadequate for what we were given to do,” said Northwall.

What Northstar does

Northwall began testing out new tools during the 2009 Omaha mayoral race, but it wasn’t until the 2011 Republican primary in Nebraska that he decided to take his ideas and turn it into a business, Northstar Campaign Systems.

“I made the decision then that I wanted to concentrate on the software full time,” said Northwall. “I really wanted to take the leap and become an entrepreneur.”

The core of the Northstar system is a voter database, which Northwall describes as “a big CRM system that includes voters of a particular state.”

Volunteers can input data into the system from a tablet in the field. The system is also connected to virtual (VoIP) and real phone systems. Northwall developed proprietary phone servers that can serve up to 48 phones at a time using predictive dialing.

“Predictive dialing works by making calls in advance without dropping anybody,” said Northwall.

Instead of volunteers making the calls themselves, they simply wait on the line until a connection is made. By using this, the system can complete many more calls, and the information about the voter pops up when the call begins.

“It’s a system that a company like West Corporation has been using years, but it has been a late adoption in politics,” said Northwall. “We were one of the first to do it. That’s what made us unique and allowed us to be ahead of the competition.”

Northstar is unique in that many other companies do just the phones or just the database. Northstar integrates all the parts together into a single system that campaigns can startup quickly with little hassle.

War stories

Although the company is typically under an NDA during campaigns, they are happy to share their success stories after the fact.

“[Senator] Ted Cruz [in 2012] was probably the most fun campaign I’ve worked on,” said Northwall. “Just because at the beginning everybody thought the guy didn’t have a chance.”

They also helped with Senator Lindsey Graham’s campaign in 2014.

“In the primary it was well over a million phone calls,” said Northwall. “And it was all volunteer-based. That was probably the best use case I’ve ever seen for our phone system.”

After the campaign is over, it’s the relationships with professional election consultants that generate word-of-mouth leads for the next job, and more opportunities to try new things.

“Our motto is ‘we never stand still,” said Northwall. “If it’s something no one has ever done before, we try it out.”

The future of politics is people

With more and more automated systems, is Northstar worried about a future of robocalls?

“Most of the mature campaigns I’ve seen will supplement with robocalls, but there’s still nothing that can replace person-to-person interaction,” said Northwall.

From his perspective, all forms of mass media have a saturation point at which they lose effectiveness with voters. As campaigns grow more expensive and spend more on air time and mailers, human contact will only become more valuable.

“The constant drone and overexposure of mass media—the person who can best cut through that clutter and can most effectively impact a voter is another voter,” said Northwall. “It’s not TV. It’s not mass media. When you allow citizens to talk to each other, it cuts through all that.”

Ryan Pendell is the Managing Editor of Silicon Prairie News.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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2 responses to “Northstar Campaign Systems brings tech power to the election ground game”

  1. Mike Kennedy Avatar
    Mike Kennedy

    Northstar is a great operation. I crushed my competition in my election with their services.

  2. Patrick John Stevens Avatar

    Very effective for candidates and issues! This is the key, “Most of the mature campaigns I’ve seen will supplement with robocalls, but there’s still nothing that can replace person-to-person interaction,”