"... Crowdpac [is] a political start-up that helps ordinary voters to find and donate to candidates who fit with their own views ..."

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Steve Hilton, a Brit out to disrupt American politics with Crowdpac
By Sebastian Payne, September 3, 2014

Dressed in a striped T-shirt and shorts, Steve Hilton is enthusiastically gesticulating at his MacBook Air, explaining how he intends to reshape American politics with a Web site. This week, he launched Crowdpac, a political start-up that helps ordinary voters to find and donate to candidates who fit with their own views — a Match.com for politicians.

After bold, unconventional attempts to disrupt British politics, the colorful former aide to Prime Minister David Cameron is turning his attention to Washington. Having worked in politics for two decades, advising the Conservative Party with a radical zeal, the man dubbed by the British press a “pint-sized Rasputin” is aiming high with his new venture.

Powered by a humongous amount of data, custom algorithms and a few political brains from Stanford University, he hopes Crowdpac will further his long-term goal of empowering individuals to make their own decisions about politics without the filter of lobbyists, political insiders and big donors. Whether he will have more success with this venture than similarly ambitious enterprises that fell short in Britain remains to be seen.

“I think the truth is it goes right back to my inspiration for getting involved in politics generally,” he says. “Thinking back to my time in the U.K., before the election and then working in the British government, the thing that has really driven me is this idea of giving power to people and taking power out of the hands of those who try and grab it all for themselves.”

On Crowdpac, every congressional candidate — Hilton hopes to expand the site to more political races in the future — gets scored on a continuum between conservative and liberal and a scale of 0 to 10. For example, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has an overall score of 9.1 conservative. In most categories, Crowdpac rates him as 10 conservative, but in the intelligence-and-surveillance category, he’s a 10 liberal.

The Crowdpac score is calculated from a mixture of how candidates have voted, who they’ve donated to, who has donated to them and what they’ve said. The site has compiled over a million words, 15,000 contributions and 3,100 votes for Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), for example. The patent-pending algorithm then sifts through the data and generates a rating.

“What we’re really trying to do is help people make a judgment about their candidates using objective information,” Hilton says. “I think what people are really crying out for is simple information they can trust when they’re bombarded by attack ads, fundraising pitchers and all sort of comment and opinion all over the place increasingly.”

Crowdpac’s ability to narrow down particular individuals with its variety of filters — on location, party preference and how strongly you feel about 15 key issues — is not dissimilar to a dating Web site. Hilton laughs at the comparison, saying it is not the first time he’s heard it.

“It is what we’re trying to do,” he says. “We’re trying to make politics something that everyone can get involved in and participate in in a simple way.”

Crowdpac also intends to create a series of lists to help voters navigate the world of politics. For example, the names of the most rebellious members of Congress, the most hard-line conservatives and the most loyal party members are all available on the site. Eventually, members of the public will be able to mine information and create BuzzFeed-style lists for themselves.

As with any data-driven site, the usefulness of Crowdpac will be dictated by the quality of the data, since it is based on the assumption that voters have the energy and interest to dig into the information it offers. And candidates, particularly congressional ones, may challenge their scores if they believe them to be inaccurate.

Shelia Krumholz, the executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, has used Crowdpac, and although it is in its early days, she welcomes the site as a way to help people better understand politics.

“It seems to build on work from other watchdogs, including our OpenSecrets.org, but with some streamlined views of issues and ideologies,” Krumholz says. “It will be a while before we can see whether Crowdpac can do everything they say it can.”

“But we need bright minds with expertise in this field to make politics as accessible as possible,” she says. “Breaking down barriers can only be a good thing.”

[major snippage]

Hilton’s ideas to reshape who controls politics are not new. While in government, he pushed for freeing up data, more transparency and accountability in all branches of government, empowering local communities and giving businesses more freedom.

His magnum opus was “the Big Society” — a political ideology that united Hilton’s most radical ideas. The concept formed a cornerstone of the Conservative Party’s 2010 election manifesto, but the government was never able to adequately explain to the electorate what it was.

After just two years at Downing Street, Hilton’s career in the corridors of power came to an end. He quit in 2012 after becoming disillusioned with Cameron’s progress and the lack of boldness and took a sabbatical at Stanford University.

Looking ahead to 2016

From his time in the United States, Hilton has discovered there are similar problems in both nations, notably the apathy and disillusionment that is causing headaches for Obama and Cameron.

“In both countries, you do have a sense that people are really feeling that their political system doesn’t properly represent them,” he says. “There is this sense they want to have more control and more power. There’s a sense of frustration that is something very common.”

There are obviously some differences — the importance and impact of money for one — but Hilton sees change on the horizon in Britain and the United States.

“People are really looking for greater sense of control of what happens in their lives, about the issues they really care about, and they feel that the political system doesn’t necessarily deliver,” he says.

Crowdpac is a for-profit venture, although there are no fully formed plans yet as to how the site will make money. One idea under discussion is to take a percentage of donations made to candidates through Crowdpac. As the project develops, Hilton says “we’ll also be testing different approaches to generating revenue.”

[snippage]

The timing of the site’s launch is clearly targeted toward the midterm elections in November. The team hopes this election cycle will be a launching pad for future versions, particularly ahead of the 2016 election.


“We wanted to really test our service with people in the context of a real election campaign,” Hilton says. “We’ll learn a lot from it, we’ll learn what people find most useful and most interesting and then build on that with the next version of Crowdpac.”

[major snippage]
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