TL;DR
The final days of a campaign are the highest-risk window for security threats, and the moment you can least afford to get hit.
Those risks range from disinformation aimed at your campaign, to misinformation your team has to correct in real time, to harassment aimed at you and your staff.
We just released a new slate of security courses built to help you get through Election Day, intact.
NDTC CEO Kelly Dietrich goes deep on the cybersecurity practices he wants every campaign to follow
You may have heard that NDTC is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Over the last decade, we’ve trained over 130,000 Democrats to win elections, watched our alumni flip seats across the country, and built the infrastructure that generates massive Democratic talent. Now, we’re sharing all those insights with you.
This is the sixth installment of “10 Lessons in 10 Years,” a monthly series where we break down one insight we’ve seen proven true time and again, across thousands of campaigns.
Some of these lessons we’ve had to learn the hard way. Now you don’t have to. Notebooks out, pencils ready.
If you’re a candidate or staffer reading this in August 2026, you’ve spent recent months building a real, viable campaign. Long nights researching your voter universe, hours in call time fielding donations, the whole shebang. The next 10 weeks and change are when all of that work either pays off or gets unraveled, and the risk of the latter is not always by voters or even your opponent.
The final stretch is when your opponent is most desperate, your visibility peaks, and your team is stretched thinnest. That also means it’s the time when campaigns are most likely to get hit with a hack, a coordinated disinformation push, or a harassment campaign aimed at rattling you off your game.
We’ve watched this play out across countless campaigns over the last decade. So we compiled the info you need to know in three free courses. Here’s what to lock down before you cross the finish.
Cybersecurity Doesn’t Get a GOTV Break
Your team is moving fast in these final days. Volunteers are on shared devices, staff are texting and calling from personal phones, your voter file is getting pulled up in coffee shops and church basements. Every one of those could be a point of entry for someone who wants to disrupt your operation for all the wrong reasons.
A few things to check before you’re too busy to catch them:
Every campaign account, email, social, and your voter database should have a strong, unique password and two-factor authentication turned on.
Volunteers and staff using personal devices for campaign work should know the basics: no campaign passwords saved in a group text, no logging into shared accounts on public WiFi.
Have a plan with designated staffers on what to do if an account gets locked out or compromised, and know it before 6 a.m. on Election Day, not after.
If you’re looking at this and going, “Okay but how exactly?” our course, Campaign Security 101, walks through this in more depth, built for campaigns who don’t have a dedicated IT staffer and need the basics done right.
Disinformation Speeds Up as Election Day Gets Closer
Hacks are far from the only threat you’ll face in the final stretch. Disinformation – false or misleading claims spread to confuse voters or damage your campaign – tends to spike in the last days of a race, when there’s less time to catch voters up to speed on fact checks before they cast their ballots.
It shows up in familiar shapes: a fake quote attributed to your candidate, a doctored image, a rumor about your polling location or voting deadline that’s built to suppress turnout rather than inform it.
The campaigns that handle these curveballs well are the ones that had a plan for spotting disinformation and responding before it spread. That’s the gap our new course, Combating Disinformation for Democratic Campaigns, is built to close. And, this is key, you’ll leave with an actionable companion worksheet for practicing how to spot and respond to it before you’re doing it live, under pressure.
Misinformation Is a Different Problem, and Needs a Different Response
Disinformation is deliberate, while misinformation is often just confusion, like an old news story getting recirculated, a voter repeating something they heard wrong, a volunteer accidentally sharing outdated information about a polling location. But if you’re not careful, you might be disseminating information started by bad actors, even if your own intention is good.
Our course, An Individual’s Guide to Combating Disinformation, also covers how to monitor for misinformation, quickly correct information, and keep your team’s messaging consistent when the pressure to respond fast is highest. Correcting misinformation starts with combating disinformation, because that’s how the spread of false news usually starts. Alongside it, we’re releasing a monitoring spreadsheet template your comms or digital team can use to track what’s circulating and how you responded.
When It Gets Personal
Sometimes what you’re dealing with isn’t about your platform at all. It’s harassment, aimed at you, at your staff, or at your volunteers. It escalates in the final stretch for the same reason everything else does: more visibility, more buzz, more to throw you off your game when you don’t have the time to set the record straight.
If it happens, document it with screenshots, timestamps, and the platform it came from. You might not need it right away, but a pattern is harder to act on after the fact than while you’re building the record. We’re also releasing a guide and spreadsheet template for documenting online harassment and abuse, so your team has a system in place before it’s needed.
Get Ahead of It, While You Can
To be clear, these precautions aren’t meant to make you feel like the worst is coming. They’re about not being caught off guard if it does. Our new courses are like insurance, the rare resources we hope every campaign implements, but never needs to act on. You’ve put too much into this campaign to lose ground in the final weeks to something you could have prepared for.
Take an afternoon this week to check your accounts, brief your team, and get familiar with the resources below. Ten years of watching campaigns win and lose has taught us that the ones who protect themselves early are the ones still standing on Election Night. And like we said, if you never have to use these resources, that’s a win!
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