The party’s storehouse of everything it knows about American voters required an extraordinary intervention to keep it running, people involved said. A meltdown could have crippled its campaigns nationwide.
Problems with a huge database of voter information that effectively functions as the central nervous system of the Democratic Party grew so worrisome last summer that top Democrats staged an extraordinary intervention to keep it running through the November election, according to multiple people involved.
Had it collapsed, the party’s entire get-out-the-vote operation could have been temporarily crippled, forcing canvassers to work with pen and paper instead of smartphones, and leaving campaigns effectively blind — unaware of which doors to knock on and which phones to call.
To avoid such a catastrophe, a handful of engineers from the Democratic National Committee and the Kamala Harris campaign scrubbed in, spending months to ensure the database stayed afloat, the people said.
The private company that runs the database warned some Democratic groups that it could not handle the large volume of data being uploaded and downloaded. An outside entity raced to install a workaround, while a wealthy Democratic financier, Allen Blue, was asked to fund an emergency engineering operation to keep data flowing.
“This can’t happen again,” said Mr. Blue, a founder of LinkedIn, who warned that an overhaul of the party’s technological infrastructure needed to be part of any broader Democratic rebuilding efforts. “Technology and data are the foundations for how modern campaigns are run.”