Storefront Campaigning

This Element explores why storefront campaigning still works for presidential campaigns, even as voter contact goes digital.

Campaigns have been centralized with field offices since Obama's elections. However, 2020 saw a shift with Joe Biden winning without any offices and Donald Trump opening 300. This Element shows the change in the importance of local field offices and assesses the political future between the end of storefront campaigning and becoming purely digital.Since Barack Obama's historic and unprecedented field operations in 2008 and 2012, campaigns have centralized their voter contact operations within field offices: storefronts rented in strategically chosen communities. That model was upended in 2020: Joe Biden won the election without any offices (due to COVID-19), while Donald Trump's campaign opened over 300. Using two decades of data on office locations and interviews with campaign staffers, we show how the strategic placement and electoral impact of local field offices changed over the past twenty years, including differences in partisan strategy and effectiveness. We find that offices are somewhat more effective for Democrats than Republicans, but Democratic field operations are declining while Republicans' are increasing. We conclude by assessing whether future campaigns will invest in offices again – or if the rebirth of storefront campaigning is over and the future of political campaigning is purely digital.