Branch Politics

Market position

Branch positions itself as a nonpartisan civic information platform focused on the local and down-ballot races that receive little coverage from campaign advertising and mailers. Its reported reach has been concentrated in Georgia, where it says roughly 10% of Atlanta voters used the tool in 2021, and where it works with established statewide civic engagement organizations. Press coverage has described it as an Atlanta-based tech platform aggregating ballot information, positioned against the lack of transparency voters face in local races.

Branch's stated differentiators are a formal "Nonpartisan Promise" under which every candidate is asked the same standardized questions and the company reports positions rather than making endorsements; an organizational structure that separates election research from revenue sources; depth of coverage of small, down-ballot offices including judicial races; and technology-driven transparency features such as parsed county campaign finance disclosures. The company cites as evidence of its neutrality that 30% of its users voted across party lines in 2020, which it says is three times the national average.

Technology

Branch combines software with manual political research. The platform geocodes a voter's registration address against local district boundaries — which can be as granular as a single block — to determine upcoming elections and assemble a personalized ballot. It programmatically parses thousands of pages of campaign finance disclosure PDFs from Georgia county websites to surface candidate funding sources and donor size breakdowns, and has developed structured coverage of judicial candidates' legal backgrounds and conduct records plus work on interpreting candidate voting records. The site supports user accounts with email, Facebook and Google sign-in, saved candidate lists, and multilingual delivery.

Go-to-market

Branch acquires voters directly through its website, where users enter an address to generate a personalized ballot, and indirectly through partnerships with nonpartisan civic engagement nonprofits that deploy the tool to their own communities. Named organizational partners and customers include New Georgia Project, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Latinos for Democracy; the company has said such groups, many with more than a decade of local presence, bring Branch to communities that would not otherwise encounter it. It partnered with seven civic engagement organizations for the 2020 general election and counted seven paying customers in 2022, up from two in 2021. Multilingual versions of the tool support outreach to non-English-speaking voters.

Two groups: individual voters in the United States — especially those preparing for local, municipal and other down-ballot races, including non-English-speaking voters served by the Korean, Spanish and Chinese versions — and the paying customers, which are mainly nonpartisan nonprofit organizations working on voter engagement, such as New Georgia Project, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Latinos for Democracy. Candidates and civic engagement organizations are also described as users of its election tools.

Geography

Branch is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and its coverage has centered on Georgia. It began with the Atlanta area, expanded to 27 cities around Atlanta for the 2021 municipal elections, and grew from 6 Georgia counties in 2021 to 23 counties across the state in 2022. Staff are distributed beyond Georgia, with at least one senior researcher based in Hartford, Connecticut.

History

Branch was founded in Atlanta, Georgia in May 2020 and interviewed more than 100 candidates running for federal, state and local office ahead of Georgia's June 2020 elections. Its June 2020 launch drew more than 17,000 voters for the Georgia primary, and in August 2020 it completed a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $25,000 from 350 backers. In November 2020 it partnered with seven civic engagement organizations, with more than 30,000 voters using the site across the 2020 cycle. In January 2021 the company extended beyond elections with The Session, a daily email newsletter on the 2021 Georgia legislative session. For the November 2021 municipal elections Branch covered 27 cities around Atlanta and supported more than 11,000 ballot lookups. In 2022 it doubled its seasonal team, expanded from 6 to 23 Georgia counties, grew from two to seven paying customers, and added campaign finance, judicial-candidate and multilingual features.