Apps Give Trump, Biden Campaigns Tools to Rally, Track Supporters

The Official Trump 2020 app is in part an organizing tool and a social network. It can be used for fundraising and to collect data on users, such as their location, according to the analysis. The campaign app for Joe Biden, called Vote Joe, engages in some data collection—information about its users’ contacts, for example—but is a tool to mainly organize volunteers, get out the vote and persuade people to support the Biden campaign, the analysis shows.

The apps are a reflection of the digital bets the campaigns have placed and the idiosyncrasies of this year’s election cycle. President Trump didn’t campaign for 10 days after his coronavirus diagnosis became public. Democratic nominee Joe Biden, meanwhile, for months limited in-person campaigning because of virus-related precautions.

In addition, social-media companies are moderating speech around the vote. Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Twitter Inc. are limiting or altogether banning most political ads around Nov. 3 and have taken steps to label or remove posts that could incite violence, suppress votes or violate other policies.

“Politicians are basically trying to circumvent any kind of reliance they have on social-media companies,” said Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of the data transmitted by the apps shows the Trump app collects location data on its users through mobile platform provider Phunware Inc. and has the ability to geofence, or identify users who attend a particular event or travel to a particular location with the app installed on their device.

A Trump spokeswoman declined requests to comment on the app.

The Trump app is built around a gamification system that offers users prizes for encouraging their friends to download the software. An app user nabs 100 points if a friend downloads the app, one point for sharing news about the campaign on Facebook and 10 points for each $1 donation.

Users can cash those in for rewards like frequent-flier miles: A photo with the president costs 100,000 points, while a signed Make America Great Again hat costs 28,000 points. By mid-October, one industrious Illinois supporter only identified as Alexander F. had earned more than 1.1 million points—enough for 11 photos with the president.

The Journal analysis of the Android version of the app found that when users share it with friends, the app sends the friend to a Trump campaign webpage, using the analytics service Branch Metrics Inc. It logs the friend’s relationship with the original user. The campaign then serves an invisible piece of Facebook code, called a pixel, to the friend’s device, allowing the campaign to show them pro-Trump ads on the social-media platform even if they choose not to install the app themselves.

How the apps run on Apple Inc. smartphones couldn’t be determined because of the way the manufacturer handles data.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has increasingly relied on direct communication channels—such as the app, emails and texts—to reach supporters and be less reliant on social-media platforms where content policies have changed, a person familiar with the campaign said. Twitter and Facebook this year have labeled or removed content by Mr. Trump and his campaign for violating their policies.

In an April interview with CNN, then-Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale said the game was aimed at spreading the app, which helps the campaign find voters who may not show up elsewhere, calling them “the hidden Trump vote.”

The Trump campaign’s app has been downloaded more. Sensor Tower, an app-industry research and marketing firm, said the Trump app has had around 2 million installs while the Biden app has had 83,000.

Roohi Rustum, the Biden campaign’s national relational director, described its app as an organizing hub that helps mobilize efforts for voter registration, especially with friends and family. She said the app could help reach groups, such as recent immigrant communities, with newly registered voters who are often untapped in traditional campaign organizing.

Another Biden aide said the campaign sees no need to actively track where people are through the app.

Vote Joe does allow users to look up voting records of friends and acquaintances and to report information about these people back to the campaign. Users can report whether an acquaintance leans toward Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump, whether they will vote by mail, or have already voted, or whether they aren’t voting at all.

Previously, the campaigns could more easily target specific voters using Facebook’s digital advertising system, Mr. Woolley said. The social network has restricted access to some of its data following the Cambridge Analytica scandal where, according to Facebook, its data was misused by a firm that worked on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Even in areas where the two campaign apps are similar, the two sides employ them for different purposes.

Both campaigns use the mobile numbers of people who download their apps as a direct-appeal pipeline for fundraising, but for Trump app users the requests are more frequent.

During a 23-day period between September and October, the Trump campaign sent 98 messages seeking donations—or just more than four a day—to a phone number associated with an app download. Fifteen of them came on Sept. 29, the day of the Trump-Biden debate. During the same period, the Biden campaign made 22 appeals.

Overall, the apps are playing a crucial role in an election dominated by virtual campaigning, Mr. Woolley said, and Mr. Trump’s site has stood out as a news source for his supporters.

“They still are very much spaces where supporters can go to not just interact with one another, but also to get news and information directly from the campaign,” Mr. Woolley said.

Write to Robert McMillan at [email protected] and Emily Glazer at [email protected]