
Presidential candidate website tech, compared - leahculver
https://paulschreiber.com/blog/2015/04/12/presidential-candidate-website-tech-compared/
======
pandemicsyn
I used to work in support at Rackspace and was fortunate enough to work on 2
presidential candidates and be the lead tech on another. I learned a ton.

The way they raise funds and advance through primaries made scaling out the
infrastructure pretty interesting. It was basically, "If we make it through X
with a big enough lead deploy gear by next Tuesday if not wait". Would have
been a lot easier now that using "the cloud" is an option.

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Animats
I ran those sites through the Sitetruth.com business legitimacy checker. The
results are amusing.

hillaryclinton.com - no street address on web site. SSL cert is domain control
only validated. Known to Open Directory, so it gets a medium rating of a
yellow circle.

tedcruz.org - the robots.txt file redirects to the robots.txt file at
"www.tedcruz.org". We interpret this as "robots go away", which is perhaps too
strict. The SSL cert is domain control only validated. The site is known to
Open Directory as non-commercial, so it gets the grey non-commercial neutral
rating.

marcorubio.com - the robots.txt file redirects to the main page, which was
interpreted as "robots go away". The SSL cert is one of the low-end Cloudflare
certs with a long list of unrelated domains, so that's useless. Known to Open
Directory from an old Senate campaign, and Open Directory says it's non-
commercial, so it gets the grey non-commercial neutral rating.

randpaul.com - no street address on web site. SSL cert is domain control only
validated. Not in Open Directory. No way to validate site ownership, so it
gets the red do-not-enter symbol.

Paul's US Senate site, "www.paul.senate.gov", is much better. The U.S. Senate
has a good Organization Validated SSL cert with full address info. (Our
address parser couldn't parse "The Capitol" as a street address, so there's no
map.) Amusingly, the SSL cert covers the sites of a number of senators of both
parties. That site gets a green checkmark.

There's also "jebbushforpresident.com" and "jebbushforpresident.net". Both are
bogus sites, not from the candidate. No street address, bad SSL certs, not in
Open Directory. They get red "do not enter" symbols.

Not one of the candidate sites has a street address, or an SSL cert better
than the low end "domain control only" validated certs. None of them except
the U.S. Senate site match anything in our business directories, but one would
not expect that for sites like these. The SiteTruth engine did properly
identify the fake Jeb Bush sites as less than legitimate.

~~~
CrazedGeek
Moderately related (in an "it amused me" way): The back of the building
Hillary Clinton's campaign headquarters is in faces a Clinton St.:
[https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/584004566041112576](https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/584004566041112576)

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maxcasey
Have you thought about adding fields for design/consulting firm and CRM? Looks
like Hillary is on Salesforce and Cruz is using (and probably overpaying) for
Marketo.

The consultants are almost more interesting if you know the industry though.
It looks like all the candidates built their sites internally, except for
Rubio who is using Push Digital. Will be interesting to see which strategy
works better.

~~~
maxcasey
FWIW, Dems seem to be outsourcing their digital needs more than Republicans.
Looks like Bernie Sanders is with Wide Eye Creative and Martin O'Malley is
with Blue State Digital. Potentially because there are many, many more
successful Dem web firms (including one I work for lol) than there are
Republican counter parts... Not sure though, just an interesting data point.

~~~
eastbayjake
Which firms are your Republican counterparts?

~~~
maxcasey
Because the Dems have been so much "better" or at least more advanced than
Republican for as long as anyone can remember the entire Democratic
infrastructure is so much more built up than the Republican. Good and bad at
the same time though. There are _a lot_ of really good Democratic firms and
freelancers but there are also _a few_ really good Republican firms and a lot
of not so good one.

For example the Democratic field has some really great players in it like
Bully Pulpit Interactive, Blue State Digital, NGP VAN, Wide Eye Creative,
Target Smart etc... The Republican field has less but still some good ones
like i360, Targeted Victory, Push Digital, NationBuilder, etc.

tl;dr - D's have more and historically better firms. R's have less total firms
but this cycle we could maybe see them on an equal (possibly better? probably
not, but possible) level as D's.

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mwcampbell
I think it's a stretch to assume that the way a presidential candidate's
campaign webmaster chooses to configure a website will be any indication of
how the candidate would lead the executive branch of government. It's probably
better to look at the candidate's previous leadership performance and his or
her positions (as indicated by voting records, not campaign rhetoric) on
policy issues.

~~~
e28eta
I read the article as exactly that, manufacturing a reason why you'd be
interested in the comparison, other than just curiosity.

I didn't read the author's suggestion as serious.

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snowwrestler
This is probably a relevant XKCD:

[https://xkcd.com/932/](https://xkcd.com/932/)

Campaign websites, especially at this point in the race, are as cheap and fast
and possible. The tech that will win a presidency will be almost entirely
behind the scenes--data collection, email segmenting, volunteer coordinating,
etc.

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rvdm
Google Pagespeed: hillaryclinton.com 52 (Desktop) / 41 (Mobile) tedcruz.org 69
/ 52 randpaul.com 59 / 44 marcorubio.com 76 / 51

------
nodesocket
Presidential campaigns have most definitely gone very high-tech. The Obama
campaign was run by some really smart guys
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Reed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Reed))
using lots of services on AWS. Check out their infrastructure diagram (heads-
up its 60MB).

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14405212/AWSOFA-
Print-27...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14405212/AWSOFA-
Print-27x240.pdf)

Finally, here is a great tech talk video by the Obama for America tech team
lead by CTO Harper Reed.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg)

~~~
hga
Ah, AWS/the cloud makes a lot of sense for a campaign. Of limited duration,
and the more successful, the more it'll have bursts of traffic tied to events.

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cmdkeen
hillaryclinton.com: Mail server: Gmail

Ironic given she's such an expert on running her own mail server...

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hanlec
CloudFlare 3 - Fast.ly 1

PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(

GoDaddy 2 :-((

(well, I guess you can tell what PL I prefer)

~~~
esalman

        > PHP 3 - Python 1 :-(
    

Didn't expect that, but not surprised either.

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rvdm
hillaryclinton.com has some sweet ASCII art when you open up the console. A
fun little easter egg.

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belorn
3 out of 4 candidate website do not support winxp. Wonder if this finally
means that winxp compatibility is no longer worth the extra trouble from a
business perspective.

~~~
Zancarius
I read that line as the opposite, that only Marco Rubio's site requires SNI
support to access (hence the red checkmark on his, and the green Xs on the
others, suggesting that requiring SNI is _bad_ ). Although I admit that line
confused me at first.

The footnote is also suggestive that this is the correct interpretation.

~~~
belorn
You are 100% right. That suddenly make me dislike this list quite a lot, as it
suggest that it is a technical achievement to not use SNI. I have seen several
times how SNI has been the primary reason for not supporting https, as winxp
support was seen as more important.

~~~
Zancarius
I can't agree more. With IPv4 space so diminished, avoiding SNI to support
legacy clients at this point almost seems insane. Suggesting SNI, if required,
is somehow _bad_ just illustrates IMO that the list was constructed to make a
political point.

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tzs
I have no idea how to read the table on that site.

What is the difference between a red check mark and a green check mark?

What is the difference between a red X and a green X?

~~~
paulschreiber
Green check mark means its presence is good (i.e. HTTPS support). Red X means
its absence is bad

Footnote [2] explains SNI support (where the red check mark is “bad.”)

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bruceb
This reminds when the Joe Lieberman campaign said their site was hacked when
it was really just cheap setup.

[http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/finding-
liebe...](http://empirezone.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/finding-lieberman-
site-wasnt-hacked/comment-page-1/?_r=0)

------
reacweb
I am surprised that only hillaryclinton.com has public whois data. IMHO,
hidding behind a proxy is not a good cue for trust. Three among four are very
slow to load on my PC. I think this very good article should also compare the
performances of the websites.

~~~
organsnyder
Whois data is more used by spammers than anyone else. It's not like the other
sites are purposefully trying to hide their contact information—if they want
donations, they'll make sure to prominently display a mailing address.

------
rvdm
Hillary also uses Webfonts by Hoefler, Modernizr, jQuery, Google Analytics,
Font Awesome and possible a heavily modified version of Bootstrap.

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Igglyboo
I'd love to see a comparison of front end tech and general quality of their
html/css/js.

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dmix
This chart might be incorrect for
[https://www.hillaryclinton.com](https://www.hillaryclinton.com), BuiltWith
shows it is using:

\- Microsoft IIS 8 for a server

\- ASP.NET

[https://builtwith.com/hillaryclinton.com](https://builtwith.com/hillaryclinton.com)

No mention of python.

~~~
nullrouted
Built with seems wrong, look at the server headers:

Requesting [https://hillaryclinton.com](https://hillaryclinton.com)

SERVER RESPONSE: HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily Content-Length: 154 Content-
Type: text/html Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:07:59 GMT Location:
[https://www.hillaryclinton.com/](https://www.hillaryclinton.com/) Server:
nginx Connection: keep-alive Redirecting to:
[https://www.hillaryclinton.com/](https://www.hillaryclinton.com/)

SERVER RESPONSE: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2015 17:08:00 GMT Server:
AmazonS3 x-amz-id-2:
I7+Tzq0w7Vw6347QHmyedJZfIdyiX4nPiHvXxJw/sD89ltjuop0YG1LgCkf2fo3s x-amz-
request-id: 49406508AC541A03 Cache-Control: max-age=86400 Last-Modified: Mon,
13 Apr 2015 16:36:32 GMT ETag: "112d7310ce2add1d77ec28c6ce824fe5" Content-
Type: text/html Content-Length: 26723 Accept-Ranges: bytes X-Varnish:
3579276881 3567651786 Via: 1.1 varnish Age: 1837

------
Jedd
It's bemusing that we are to assume this is the USA presidential candidate -
neither of the strings 'usa' or 'america' appear on the page. Other countires
that have presidents presumably need to identify themselves so as to not
confuse (other) people.

~~~
qxcv
"The Royal Family" gets similar treatment. I suspect that it's a language
thing---there are only two Anglosphere countries with presidents, and the
other one (Ireland) has ~1/50th the population of the US and lots of Irish
speakers, so if you see an English language post about "the President", then
there's a good chance that it's referring to the US one. I'd like to see
speakers of other languages (or Anglophones from outside the Anglosphere)
confirm or refute this hunch.

~~~
chki
In Germany elections don't rely that heavily on the candidates so it is hard
to say. But generally speaking there is no clear identification as well,
(except for the fact that the address ends on ".de")

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sauere
Why are they using Privacy/Proxy domain registration services?

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throwaway125
All but Marco Rubio have wildcard certificates without an apparent use for
them. It looks like whoever built their websites was keen on using all the
budget they were alloted.

~~~
nodesocket
Who cares, their budget is in the millions. Better to spend the extra couple
hundred bucks, and have it. They will most certainly need it (ex.
donate.hillaryclinton.com, debates.hillaryclinton.com,
vote.hillaryclinton.com).

~~~
voteforchange
The pervasive mindset is that mailings, tv/radio ad spots, and other
traditional media platforms have a known and predictable return on investment.
Using the web for organizing and fundraising is the new kid on the block.
Despite the impressive showing in 2008 and 2012 on the Obama campaign its not
a known/repeatable representative showing.

Every dollar spent on your web presence needs to return 5$ or more to funnel
into these more stable predictable forms of outreach. Its not enough to be
self sustaining or slightly profitable.

~~~
paulschreiber
Nice username.

~~~
voteforchange
Nice blogpost :-)

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killnine
How does one achieve origin ip unknown?

~~~
paulschreiber
CDN origins usually aren't public. I found the Ted Cruz one by checking the
DNS history.

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higherpurpose
Ah, but _their_ sites are using encryption. What's more important is what they
think about _everyone else_ using encryption - and whether they should be
using "golden split key front doors" or not. Do a chart for that next.

