The Antiwar Activist Who Helped Make Donald Trump Possible. Republicans love a liberal’s campaign technology.

Bloomberg reports:

In late January, Donald Trump held one of his final rallies before the Iowa caucuses at the Dubuque airport. On the tarmac, with loudspeakers blasting the theme from the Harrison Ford movie Air Force One, a crowd of shivering supporters roared when Trump’s Boeing 757 made a flyby. Many of the estimated 400 people in attendance had been notified about the event through NationBuilder, a digital hub for campaigns that handles website design, fundraising, organizing volunteers, and social media.

As Trump has moved from outsider candidate to Republican front-runner, his campaign has been collecting e-mail addresses, cell phone numbers, and other information from supporters and feeding the data into the NationBuilder system to automate the voter-outreach process. The software lets campaign staffers target individuals with e-mails about issues in which they’ve expressed an interest and notify them of events occurring near their homes. It can also track social media so a campaign can see who’s liking or sharing a post.

NationBuilder’s technology is pretty much turnkey. It’s not as sophisticated as a custom-built platform, but candidates who subscribe to the service can immediately start tracking voters and organizing volunteers, for far less money. In the world of retail politics, the company has become a great democratizer since its founding in 2009. It’s given a political novice like Trump access to the type of sophisticated tools that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney had to build in 2012, helping Trump get his supporters to turn out for primaries and caucuses.

An article well worth your time.