How Bloomberg’s Digital Army Is Still Fighting for Democrats
With expensive data and tech heavy hitters, Hawkfish is backing the former mayor’s promise to take on Donald Trump.
Last month about two dozen engineers, designers, and product managers met on Zoom for a check-in on a software project: an app to help people register to vote by mail. The devs had pedigrees from places like Google and Amazon. Much of the discussion involved weighing each design tweak for its potential to entice users to register—or to irritate them so much that they bail. For instance, the merely curious or the mildly paranoid might balk at being asked for a phone number and jump off long before getting to the end point of finger-scrawling their signature. “We learned this from the Bloomberg campaign,” says one of the tech leads. “Every single element can drag you down.” Mike Bloomberg’s $1 billion presidential campaign is over—having crashed and burned after Elizabeth Warren’s blowtorch attack in the Las Vegas debate last February—but part of it survives as a hundred-person operation dedicated to electing Joe Biden and other Democrats. This is Hawkfish, the surviving digital component of the massive army that Bloomberg mustered last November to try to get the former New York City mayor into the White House. Hawkfish has been described as everything from the secret weapon to counter the powerful data operation of Trump’s digital guru Brad Parscale, to a stealth operation to neuter the increasingly progressive wing of the Democratic party. But until now, its operations have been conducted in secrecy. Months after the company was formed in 2019, a CNBC team unsuccessfully tried to locate the building where Hawkfish employees worked, dead-ending the search at the address of Bloomberg’s accountant. (The real headquarters, pre-Covid, was near Times Square.)
Recently, WIRED got an inside look at Hawkfish and found that the firm built on the Cult of Mayor Mike is still working to make its mark on the presidential campaign. What Hawkfish brings to digital politics is costly data, bought with Bloomberg’s billions and augmented with research and analysis from digital warriors on leave from the tech world. (More than once I heard that the reason for leaving a cushy job in tech was to explain to as-yet-unconceived grandchildren that they didn’t sit out the most critical election of our time.) But as with his presidential campaign, Bloomberg has learned that his name and money don’t automatically equal success. Hawkfish lost its bid for the biggest potential client: It won’t be the main data provider to the Biden 2020 campaign organization.
Still, the company has quietly won the business of several clients, including the Democratic National Committee, two well-funded SuperPacs, and others it has vowed to keep confidential. Democrats may not trust Mike Bloomberg, or even like him. But they like his money, which in Hawkfish’s case has bought a load of digital talent and valuable data stores. And the Democratic ticket needs all the help it can get in the digital battle against Donald Trump.
https://www.wired.com/story/hawkfish-bloomberg-digital-army-fighting-for-democrats/
Anons this is a long article, but you don't have to read far into it to realize, what is described in it, is exactly what is happening here. Mike Bloomberg has pulled out all the stops.. We need a dig on his Hawkfish Company