The week since President Joe Biden announced he would not accept the nomination for president has been a roller coaster. From the immediate relief and hope of people glad Biden stepped aside, to the backlash of right wing politicians, emotions have run a gamut. When the 45th president spent time at a Friday campaign rally calling Kamala Harris “liberal” and claiming that “Democrats replacing Biden on the ticket amounts to a ‘coup,’” we know our target was successfully engaged. Some sources report a polling surge for Harris: as many as six points in key states. A single poll is not definitive, yet it is a positive sign Harris’ elevation to the top place on the ballot is positive to many voters.

The 98 days remaining before the November election is not a lot of time. Republicans and their foreign backers are expected to make quick work of returning to the misogyny-laden campaign of 2016. While Kamala Harris arguably possesses more positive attributes than Hillary Clinton did — and less negative baggage — she will be the target using a playbook developed by the Trump campaign in the run up to the 2016 election. I wrote about this in a letter to the editor of Little Village Magazine.

A lot changed in political campaigns since I worked my first for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Democrats and Republicans are now at a place where established patterns repeat each cycle: marching in parades, having a booth at the county fair, putting up sign advertising, and canvassing voters. These may be comforting, yet campaign action has moved.

Both major parties use big data to inform their campaigns.

Perhaps the most dramatic change was the way Trump campaigns used Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to scrape personal data about tens of millions of voters from the internet, and then custom target voters with tens of thousands of distinct daily ads designed to either persuade people to vote for Trump or not vote at all.

Progressive radio host Thom Hartmann wrote that on the day of the third presidential debate in October 2020, team Trump ran 175,000 variations of ads micro-targeting voters. These ads were, for the most part, not publicly seen.

This is way beyond showing up to meet candidates at a county fair.

Despite this use of technology, elections reduce to staying engaged with candidates, and working to cast an informed vote. That pressure from social media to disengage from politics? Someone is working to make us feel that way. We must resist and vote for who best serves our interests. (Letter to the Editor of Little Village Magazine, Paul Deaton, July 15, 2022).

There is a clear wave of support for Kamala Harris as she became the presumptive nominee. Donations to her campaign surged, as did the number of new volunteers. Republicans are already saying, just seven days in, that Harris won’t survive the boost in popularity, that it will be transient and gone before we know it. With 98 days until the election, we have little time for self-doubt. We must roll up our sleeves and get to work because so much is at stake in the November election.