The Biden campaign is desperate for digital access to students as campuses remain closed - Business Insider

Every aspect of society has been upended by the coronavirus pandemic, including the typical fall push that Democratic White House hopefuls rely on to find and motivate the young student voters who can make a big difference in swinging an election."There are going to be people who traditionally we do capture who are gonna slip through the cracks," said Rupi Jain, the president of the College Democrats on the swing state battleground campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.It's a perfect storm of complications: the loss of vital in-person interactions like on-campus rallies, voter-registration sign-ups, constantly shifting mail-in ballot deadlines and a turbulent fall semester has also left students uncertain of where they'll even be when Election Day arrives on November 3.That's meant Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and the organizers who support him have had to reimagine how they will engage an unreliable but predominantly left-leaning demographic using mostly digital means. In the era of COVID-19, smartphones are the new clipboards, and Zoom calls are the new campus rallies.A student might be a "moving target," Greven of NextGen said, but they'll always have their phones with them.The mission is multipronged: convincing young people to vote, educating them about the complicated registration process, helping them request mail-in ballots and keep up with the fluctuating vote by mail rules and different deadlines in each state.NextGen has developed an exhaustive texting strategy to make sure students complete the process. And when a mail-in voter in NextGen's system receives and submits their ballot, the software can provide a young person updates on the status of their ballot."We can say, 'it's coming,' 'it's here,' and chase that all the way to, 'we know the county has received it,'" Greven said.This real-time tracking and constant check-ins can also help NextGen ensure that students required to relocate to or from their college campuses before November 3 can pivot to voting in a different state, or from in-person to voting to absentee, if necessary.NextGen has also been developing a tool called FiredUp to help it pinpoint the social media accounts of young people who have engaged with them on several platforms, all the better to target them online. Jain and her fellow Democrats have been developing a social media campaign to keep students informed, with plans to conduct text banking five days a week, where volunteers blast out campaign text messages —  that age group's preferred means of communication — to potential voters.It's a dramatic shift for a campus in swing state battleground that hosted Barack Obama for a major rally during all three of the past presidential election cycles: 2008, 2012, and 2016.