Hey, I appreciate your comment and I'm happy to share. It is very hard to make into a real business, very few people have succeeded. You do it because you believe in a cause or a candidate or a party.

As far as why people don't sell to everyone, the above explains a lot. Another explanation is that political sales (which is different from true election tech, which is purchased by governments) are driven by trust and personal relationships. Once you work for one party in the US, the other will not trust you.

This is interesting and, yes, I do understand. Yet, another take on this is that groups (parties) would then rob themselves from perhaps working with or searching for the most capable of providers.

I am not trying to diminish anyone at all, but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers, particularly so if what drives this is passion rather than a skilled software shop that with proven capabilities and experience across a range of relevant domains with an equally proven track record of delivering quality, well tested bug-free product.

Of course, the parties would have to we willing to pay more than hobby money for what they need.

> but I would think these kinds of party line attachments mean that not everyone ends-up with the most capable developers

This is a real phenomenon, but not in the way you think. Democrats have historically had a tech edge, because the real talent leans left politically. Obama kind of killed that, but for a good cause - he diverted a lot of those politically-driven types into working directly for the federal government under the umbrella of USDS and 18F.

Unless they're A) very large, and B) selling commodities, a company that works with one party will not hired by the other party. The two parties have two completely different sets of infrastructure.

Maybe what I am thinking is that, if it is a real business with products that are agnostic any user would benefit from a much higher quality product. I don't know enough about software in politics to understand just how ridiculous this idea might be.

Perhaps an example might serve as a better explanation of what I am thinking:

Trello is a real company with a product that is agnostic. Politicians of any school of though can use their products to great effect. They benefit from everyone using this product, including, perhaps, their competitors and opposition.

If, on the other hand, each political party hires a passionate coder to create their own kanban board software they are very likely to end-up with a bunch of suboptimal solutions.

In other words, if they can, if the nature of the software allows, it would benefit them to look for universal providers rather than party-aligned providers. If you can trust Trello with your political party data you can then trust a similar company with other data you might produce with their software.

I guess it comes down to the software. What kinds of things are they doing that requires custom tools that have to be written specifically for one party?

The essential factors [1] are:

* There are types of software that are politics-specific, and therefore do not exist until a party pays for it to be made.

* Politics is a zero-sum game: if you're funding software (either institutionally, or by being a tech worker who works below market wage For The Cause), you don't want it to be used by your political opponents.

So commodity stuff that already exists is bipartisan. Any application that is specific to political campaigning is highly partisan.

[1] There's also a secondary issue of data security for cloud products; parties maintain extensive voter files with things like past voting history, up-to-date contact information, and past contacts [1a]. They do not want this information falling into the hands of the opposing party, and so don't want their data touching any organization that might potentially have cross-partisan ties, or godforbid might have cotenancy for D and R data.

[1a] This is basically the king of all CRMs, and these days they might be able to reimplement it as a bunch of plugins on top of a commercial provider like Salesforce, but those only became available relatively recently, data migration would be nontrivial, and there's a substantial amount of politics-specific functionality that would need to be rewritten as plugins.

What is personally interesting to me as a classical liberal is to watch how both main parties engage with followers. I generally sign up for updates from both parties from local all the way up to federal level. I do this with a dedicated email address. It is interesting to watch the approach, intensity and messaging coming out of each camp. It is also interesting to watch how far and wide your email address and info is shared. Definitely do not do this with an email account you care about.

My dentist made me a custom night guard. Is he not owning and growing a real business?

It’s quite the leap you make from there to religion.

You are extrapolating something I did not say.