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Bloomberg Businessweek October 8, 2018
Congress. “It’s just one of those things that was happening
right after Trump,” he says. “People were quitting their jobs
to start Resistance groups, and then quitting their Resistance
groups to run for Congress.”
Burton was at a crossroads, but he didn’t struggle with his
decision. “He was making money, had a great job, was on the
right career track,” Moser says. “But when Trump won, he
knew he had to jettison his old life.” His boss guessed he was
quitting before Burton summoned the nerve to tell him.
He took control of Daily Action and led it until September
2017, by which point joining forces with a larger institution
made sense. acquired the group, and Burton sud-
denly found himself with free time. Having advised startups
as a banker, he now sought to launch one himself in politics.
Resistance volunteers were already being deployed in daily
activism, voter registration, and fundraising, but nobody had
tried to harness that energy for opposition research. Doing
so at a mass scale posed enormous logistical challenges, and
few political professionals imagined that amateurs could do
the work. “If I were just coming of a campaign or the Hill, I’d
underestimate what volunteers are capable of doing,” Burton
says. “After Daily Action, I knew what was possible.”
Odd as it may sound, his approach to citizen oppo owes
a lot to amateur astronomers, who divvy up pieces of the
night sky to search for new stars, comets, or signs of extra-
terrestrial intelligence. The key is making the research tasks
as small and easily replicable as possible to guard against
error. Using SurveyMonkey, Citizen Strong sends volunteers
targeted assignments, prompting them to pull court records,
for instance, or translate Russian articles, only bumping the
material up the chain of command when three volunteers
produce the same result.
Burton had no problem winning recruits, many of whom
were already volunteering for Daily Action and proved to be
efective diggers. Genevieve, the San Diego science teacher,
had signed up for Daily Action when a relative of one of her
Muslim students was detained during the travel ban. She
jumped at the chance to investigate Rohrabacher, a nearby
congressman. “I’d never engaged in politics at this level
before,” she says. “But the job felt like second nature, pull-
ing together data, helping to ind photos of the Russians he’d
met with. I’m trained as a scientist, so data collection is a very
comfortable place for me to be.”
Choosing whom to go after was the next challenge. Burton
knew Democrats in clear toss-up races would have suicient
resources to conduct their own research. So Citizen Strong con-
centrated on House races the Cook Political Report, a nonparti-
san handicapper, rated “lean Republican,” where Democrats
were likely to be new, underfunded, and unfamiliar with the
darker side of politics. The group focused especially on state
legislative contests in Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Wisconsin,
and other states where the chambers are closely divided and
the politicians unaccustomed to sophisticated attacks.
Citizen Strong’s liberal activists instinctively want to attack
Republicans on gun control, abortion, or other social issues.
But given the political geography of the group’s Republican
targets, such attacks would likely hurt their cause. So their
professional guides steered them toward a more construc-
tive vector. Burton and his partners devised a “Midas Index”
of Republicans, including Representatives Bruce Poliquin
of Maine and Erik Paulsen of Minnesota, who’d taken more
than $1 million in PAC money fromWall Street or Big Pharma.
Alleging greed or complicity in the opioid crisis, as Burton
intends to do, is more apt to engender anger in swing voters
than the thorny cultural issues many Resisters would prefer.
More colorful was the “Sloth Index.” Volunteers tracked
the attendance and output of incumbents, including Facebook
posts, videos, and press releases, on the theory that those
who didn’t bother showing up for work, and didn’t do much
when they did, would be easier to pick of. Many of the pol-
iticians on the list have never faced a tough race and so hav-
en’t taken elementary precautions such as registering their
own domain names. Burton has snapped up 203 domains
of incumbent Republicans that will soon bear the fruit of
his researchers’ eforts. Voters searching for information on
Representatives Mike Bost of Illinois and Dave Schweikert
of Arizona will discover their fondness for staying at Ritz-
Carltons and the Waldorf Astoria, a perilous habit in light
of Trump’s attacks on the Washington “Swamp.” For Tyler
Vorpagel, a Wisconsin state representative who’s voted to cut
public assistance programs, readers will learn that his wife
collected unemployment while she was running his irst cam-
paign in 2014, all the while posting Instagram pictures of her-
self (and her dog Teddy) at happy hours and baseball games.
(“My wife spent countless hours looking for a new job and
never turned down a job that was ofered to her,” Vorpagel
says in a statement. “[T]he bills we passed require every-
one to look at welfare beneits as temporary assistance, not
a long-term lifestyle.”) Meanwhile, will fea-
ture Citizen Strong’s trove of materials on the Putin-friendly
California congressman. And, if the Russian government shuts
it down, will replace it.
Citizen Strong’s volunteer army has come together at a pro-
pitious moment. Not only has the Trump-fueled tumult of the
past two years made hundreds of Republican incumbents vul-
nerable, but the last decade has seen an explosion of informa-
tion sources that anybody can mine. “There’s so much just
sitting out there that’s been made available through sunshine
laws, through states posting personal inancial disclosures and
putting lobbyist disclosures online, and through social media,”
Burton says. “There’s just a ton of content, far more than there
was when I was starting out 10 years ago.”
Burton laughs as he shares more highlights of what his
researchers turned up, tidbits he’s not yet willing to put on
the record. Sometimes, it’s best to spring the trap at the last
moment. “This is what gets found when you have an army who
can read every line of every document,” he says.
After Nov. 6, we’ll know if that’s enough to hand political
power back to the Democrats.