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 The newly bulked up operation, including research, of more than 70
people is central to the Democrats' strategy to sink whoever the
Republicans nominate to run for the White House in the Nov. 8 U.S.
presidential election.
Party officials who provided Reuters with details of the operation
increasingly think their target will be Trump, the New York
businessman and former reality TV star who is the surprise
Republican front-runner.
The video clips will be used as grist for attack ads that will be
deployed rapidly on social media sites any time Trump, or either of
his rivals, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Governor John
Kasich, strays during the general election campaign from policy
proposals they touted in the nominating contests across the country.
That could, in theory, hinder them from appealing to the millions of
more moderate voters needed to beat former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton or U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the two
competitors for the Democratic nomination.
Democratic National Committee (DNC) spokesman Luis Miranda, who
provided Reuters with a partial tour of the research operation, said
voters in the run-up to November's election were “not going to be as
responsive to the divisive rhetoric” that Trump used in the
Republican campaign and that was a "key part of our general election
strategy."
Trump's campaign did not respond to requests for comment on the
Democratic Party operation.
Trump leads Cruz with 678 delegates to the Texan's 423 delegates and
Kasich at 143 as of this week after a string of wins in states where
his supporters favored his flamboyant rhetoric and plans to wall off
the U.S. border with Mexico, deport millions of undocumented
immigrants and temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country.
Trump has also called for a revision of laws that ban torture, and
wants to scrap trade deals he blames for job losses.
There are two more Republican nominating contests on Tuesday. A
candidate needs to accumulate at least 1,237 delegates to win the
nomination at the Republican convention in July.
News and video monitoring have been election staples for years, but
the latest operations bear little resemblance to the lower-tech past
because of leaps in technology and the speed with which a
candidate's remarks are distributed.
"Everything is on steroids," said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic
consultant, who recalled campaigns continuously taping news channels
on VHS tapes - a tedious process that limited how much could be
monitored.
NEW TECHNOLOGY
Other new technology, such as the live streaming application
Periscope, makes news from around the world available almost
instantly, said Holly Shulman, a Democratic strategist and former
DNC official.
"Halfway around the world we were able to respond to something
before the reporters looked at it even," she said.
 The Republican National Committee (RNC) said it has also ramped up
its video monitoring efforts, with a focus on Clinton, adding staff
and using newer technology.
Eight people on the RNC staff are devoted to monitoring news
coverage, and the party said it was building a searchable digital
library of Clinton speeches, interviews and other events going back
to 1991, the year before her husband Bill Clinton won the
presidential election.
Attacks on Trump by Republican rivals and Super PACs, independent
political action committees that may raise unlimited sums of money,
have failed to stop his campaign's momentum.
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But the DNC said it believes its strategy will be effective. For
one, the Democrats believe the Republican establishment's efforts to
block Trump's nomination have been slow and disorganized - and
hampered by a fear of tearing the party apart. The Democratic Party
is also betting the general electorate will be more easily persuaded
to counter Trump than registered Republicans have been.
Clinton has a nearly 10-point lead over Trump in a hypothetical
general election match up, according to an average of polls gathered
by Real Clear Politics.
REALITY TV TIPS
The effort to hobble the former reality TV star takes a page out of
reality television itself, where producers comb through thousands of
hours of candid video, index it into an easily searchable library,
and then paste together coherent narratives.
The project helps address recommendations from the Democratic
Victory Task Force, commissioned by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman
Schultz, which in February 2015 suggested the party prepare for the
2016 election and promote the party's messaging.
The DNC did similar work during the 2012 presidential election, but
on a much smaller scale. Its digital and social media staff went
from 5 to 25 people over the past 18 or so months, spokesman Miranda
said.
The current team divides its time on video from a wide range of
sources - from national news to local channels, clips put up on
YouTube by individual users and campaigns, and events webcast by the
campaigns themselves.
It also has scouts that record in the field.
The work has yielded a number of attack videos already, many
prepared and sent out at a moment’s notice.
On Feb. 28, for example, the party released a video slamming
Republican presidential hopefuls for their opposition to action on
climate change, featuring them denying man-made global warming
alongside images of U.S. flooding, wildfires, droughts and heat
waves.
Earlier in March, after Trump cruised to victory in several state
nominating contests, the DNC put out another 40-second video, mixing
news clips talking about how Trump is dominating his party.
"These videos are getting tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands
of views across our various platforms," Miranda said. "He’s not
going to get off as easy with us as with the rest of the Republican
field. We know what he’s said, we know where he’s flip-flopped,
where he’s made mistakes."
(Editing by Richard Valdmanis and Grant McCool)
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