A senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign, Becky Bond, is known for organizing intensive field operations that successfully defeated several Tea Party members of Congress during the 2012 election.
Now Bond, with deep ties to groups financed by billionaire George Soros, is one of the secret weapons of the Sanders campaign’s efforts to build what The Nation magazine dubbed a “new model of tech-powered organizing.”
In an article last month titled, “How the Sanders Campaign Is Reinventing the Use of Tech in Politics,” The Nation explained that by the end of 2015, Sanders had already generated “more than 2.5 million contributions to his campaign, topping the 2.1 million tallied at the same point by incumbent President Barack Obama during his re-election bid.”
“That juggernaut has continued to expand, with another 2.5 million contributions since the beginning of 2016.”
The magazine highlighted the new model of online organizing, which is taking place in a context that “has never existed before in American politics.”
Close to 70 percent of Americans now own a smartphone, and two-thirds of all adults and a whopping 90 percent of young adults use social networking sites like Facebook.
Indeed, Sanders currently boasts massive Facebook stats, reports The Nation:
165 Facebook pages with 7.3 million likes, and nearly 200 Facebook groups with more than 358,000 members; Clinton’s numbers are roughly half that.
One of the driving forces behind this tech organizing revolution is Bond and another senior Sanders advisor, Zack Exley.
Bond stated, “Because we organize people all over the country and not just in one place, we rely on technology as well as a lot of in-person and on-the-phone organizing to do our part to help Bernie win.”
She explained the differences between President Obama’s 2012 campaign strategy, which relied on “Big Data,” or collecting voter data, and the efforts of the Sander’s campaign, which is driven by “Big Organizing.”
Bond told The Nation:
In Big Organizing, we ask volunteers to do something big, and we put big goals in reach. Like making a million phone calls per day, and of course making Bernie Sanders president of the United States. In the example of the Sanders campaign, Big Organizing’s emphasis is on growing a self-replicating volunteer base that does the work of the campaign. In Big Organizing, scale is limited only by the appeal of your ideas and not the number of staff the campaign can deploy.
Big Data, on the other hand, “is about narrowing down the possibilities and minimizing the work necessary to meet goals at the lowest cost.”
Bond added:
So in some ways Big Data is about the small campaign. In a Big Organizing model where volunteers manage and grow the volunteer base, we’re building the big campaign.
Who is Bond?
The Nation only provides a small snippet of her story, telling readers she has been the political director of CREDO Mobile since 2004, where “she most notably built the group’s 2012 campaign that successfully defeated several Tea Party members of Congress with intensive field operations.”
Bond is more than that. She is a co-founder of the Secretary of State Project, or SOSP, a Soros-financed group launched in 2006 to put Democrats at the helm of state election offices, where important decisions are made on counting close races.
SOSP was also founded by Michael Kieschnick, one of the founders of CREDO Mobile.
CREDO Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator that uses its business to petition for progressive change, both through donations to progressive groups and via its activist arm, CREDO Action.
Credo Mobile and its parent, Working Assets, have boasted of raising more than $80 million for scores of nonprofit organizations, many of which are in turn financed by Soros.
The group has raised money for Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, Doctors Without Borders, the socialist-leaning Democracy Now! and even Color of Change, an advocacy group founded by President Obama’s disgraced former “green jobs” czar Van Jones. CREDO Action has donated to the Soros-funded Brennan Center for Justice, Doctors Without Borders, 350.org and hundreds of other progressive groups.
Bond in 2012 utilized CREDO to set her sights on Tea Party-affiliated lawmakers, opening offices on their districts with the specific goal of booting the Congressmen from office.
“Not interns. These are hard-core field people,” Bond stated at the time of the campaign to defeat Tea Party lawmakers.
Working Assets, which became CREDO Mobile, was co-founded by Drummond Pike, the founder of the Tides Foundation. Tides, a donor advised fund, is one of the biggest financial supporters of U.S. progressive and radical left organizations. Soros is a top Tides donor.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
With research by Brenda J. Elliott.
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