Go for it guys! Make them Feel The Bern!
Via Free Beacon:
Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver assailed the Democratic National Committee at a press conference Friday, accusing it of holding the campaign “hostage” by cutting of its access to the party’s voter database and threatening to file a lawsuit if it was not restored.
“This is taking our campaign hostage,” Weaver said. “We have a grassroots campaign, so when we have people come to our campaign headquarters to call volunteers or to call voters to talk about Bernie Sanders’ campaign to transform America, we can’t generate phone numbers to do that … We are, because of the nature of our campaign, peculiarly affected by this type of taking of data hostage [sic] by the DNC.”
The DNC enacted the punishment after learning that employees of the Sanders campaign improperly hacked Hillary Clinton’s campaign’s private voter data. The staffer responsible was dismissed by the Sanders team.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
The Democratic Party has cut off Bernie Sanders’ access to its massive voter database – a crucial tool presidential candidates rely on to target their operations – after it learned that Sanders campaign employees tapped into the private files of rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
The act of online campaign espionage, and the potential it has to hurt insurgent Sanders at a do-or-die moment in the campaign, underscores the ever-growing role data play in modern presidential campaigns, where resources are marshaled around precise formulas that factor in such details as where voters live, their latest purchases at big-box retailers and even what magazines they read.
