Ogles campaign paid consultant who tracked rallygoers’ phones

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles hired a consulting firm run by a Republican operative who once boasted about stealing voter data.

Between August 2025 and January 2026, Ogles’ campaign reported paying more than $46,000 to Frontline Strategies, an Illinois-based business that helps Republican candidates with digital messaging and fundraising.

One of Frontline Strategies’ partners is Darian Rafie, a former digital advertising executive who helped implement fundraising strategies for the Republican National Committee and President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

In 2019, Rafie was interviewed by OpenDemocracy and detailed how he uses geospatial technology to clandestinely scrape data from political rally attendees.

“There is a lot of stuff to be done with mobile phones and geo-fencing areas,” Rafie said. “Say there’s a rally somewhere, one of these big Trump campaign rallies. What we’ll do is we’ll draw a polygon around that event, and then we’ll register all the phones that were there.”

A polygon, in this context, refers to a custom-drawn boundary on a map used to identify which phones are within a specific area.

“We follow those phones home,” Raife continued. “Then we know who they are, and what they do, and now I know what your Netflix unique ID is, and I’ve got your Facebook unique ID, so then I can communicate with you through a whole variety of ways.”

While generally permissible under federal law, privacy advocates say the practice falls into an ethical gray area, as many people don’t realize their phone settings make them vulnerable to this kind of tracking.

Ogles is running for a third term this year. His Democratic challenger will be chosen in an Aug. 4 primary.