Why I Built Campaign Compass

Candidates tend to guess. More often than not, they hire a vendor, and do exactly what they say. They knock every door, mail every voter, trust whatever the vendor recommends.

But as Charlie Munger put it, "Show me the incentive and I'll tell you the outcome". And for vendors, the incentive is commissions. The outcome is your money spent mailing people who haven't voted in a decade and couldn't be moved if you showed up on their doorstep every day for a month. I've seen it happen to good candidates with real community support who just didn't know what they didn't know. That's the part campaign consulting is supposed to fix.

Nobody tells them this. That's what bothered me enough to build something.

I'd been running district analyses by hand for years, for state parties, candidates, county chairs. For just about every race I run the same math: who votes in every election, who shows up for two of three, who leans Republican/Democrat based on primary participation, who never votes, so we should skip entirely. The benefit is having the data layed out in front of you before you need to make your decisions. I got tired of doing it from scratch each time, so I wrote a Python script to automate it.

Ryan Bradburn, my co-founder, found me while I was building it. He was posting data projects on Reddit; I was trying to figure out how to get the thing online. He's run in campaigns and won, which means he understands what a candidate actually needs. You can see more of his work at urnicus.com. We built Campaign Compass together.

The product is simple. You upload your district, and Campaign Compass cuts your voter file into something you can act on. It lays out core supporters to recruit as volunteers and donors, the persuadable middle to target with mail and doors, and the opposition to skip entirely. It produces a phase-by-phase field plan, what outreach will cost, and an honest read on whether the district is winnable before you file. Knowing your district is D+10 before you file is a lot better than finding out after you've spent six months and $40,000.

The price is $500 for the full election cycle. No monthly fee, no tiers, no upsells. You can also request a free sample report for your district before paying anything.

If you want to watch it in action first, there's a full playlist walking through how I use it to build a targeting strategy from scratch, with actual voter files and actual districts:

Watch my Campaign Compass strategy walkthroughs on YouTube.

Get your free sample report at bootstrapoffice.com within one business day.