Dean Leaves Legacy of Online Campaign
My earlier post on this point.
Yahoo! News - Dean Leaves Legacy of Online Campaign
By Brian Faler, Special to The Washington Post
Howard Dean (news - web sites)'s presidential campaign ended this week much as it began: lagging in the polls and nearly broke. But along the way, the campaign used the Internet in sometimes radically new ways -- a legacy that experts predict will live on as they try to divine the lessons of Dean's innovative if, ultimately, unsuccessful bid.
Was it the political equivalent of Pets.com, the widely mocked Internet start-up from the late 1990s that ran on little more than hype? Was it a glimpse into the future of campaigning -- a blueprint that other candidates will someday adopt as a matter of course? Or was it something else entirely?
Few quibble with Dean's success raising money online. The former Vermont governor entered the race a virtual unknown, with little in the way of a national fundraising network. But he raised $41 million in 2003 -- much of it online -- eclipsing all his Democratic rivals and breaking former president Bill Clinton (news - web sites)'s party record for money raised in a quarter.
His success has been attributed to any number of real-world factors: his straight-talking persona, his opposition to the war in Iraq (news - web sites), the favorable media coverage he enjoyed much of last year. But experts also credit his campaign with developing savvy online fundraisers -- essentially online telethons that posted their goals alongside urgent deadlines and icons counting the donations as they came in.
It was a simple idea, employed by any number of public TV stations. But it was a campaign innovation, allowing Dean to turn otherwise mundane fundraising pitches into a high-tech call to arms. Experts said it was a significant improvement from how candidates had previously asked for money online -- usually, by simply urging supporters to send a check sometime before the next election.
That Dean's money came mostly in small contributions from hundreds of thousands of supporters was particularly impressive, given his party's anemic efforts over the years to harvest such small donations. Republicans have long raised more from small donors, while Democrats have instead relied on "soft money" -- big, unregulated contributions that federal candidates and parties no longer may accept.
Simon Rosenberg, president of the centrist New Democrat Network, said his party is adopting much of Dean's strategy. "We had a different model in the '90s," he said. "The other model was: There are a few thousand people who we needed to fund our politics. Now, regular people and their labor -- and their money -- is a core part of what we do every day."
The Dean campaign is also credited with introducing the political community to blogs, Web pages where thousands of people post their thoughts, musings, rants and commentaries. In 2000, candidates' Web sites were rather staid, designed mainly to introduce themselves to broad segments of the electorate.
But the Dean blog -- like those his rivals later launched -- gave his most fervent supporters a place to hang out (virtually), meet, chat and sometimes suggest ideas for the campaign honchos in Vermont. Campaign officials said they read the thousands of comments that Dean supporters posted and adopted many of their suggestions. But more importantly, the officials said, the blog helped create a sense of community among far-flung supporters, deepening their commitment to the former governor.
The Dean campaign also broke new ground in political organizing, using the Internet to help most anyone, anywhere to campaign on its behalf. It created an array of online tools -- a Web-based directory of supporters, a site that enabled them to find and schedule their own Dean events. But its noted achievement was realizing the potential of Meetup.com, a nonpartisan Web site that helps people interested in politics and other subjects find one another. More than 185,000 people signed up in support of the former governor, while tens of thousands more joined on behalf of one of his rivals.
"The big question with online stuff [in previous elections] was: Okay, great -- they're online. But can you get people to do anything off-line in their communities by using the Net?'" said Joe Trippi, Dean's former campaign manager. "One of the big achievements in Meetup was showing you could."
In the end, the online innovations did not put Dean on top in a single primary or caucus, prompting questions about the strategy's value. Some political activists say the campaign focused too much energy on online supporters at the expense of the general electorate. Others say his campaign did not give enough direction to its army of supporters.
Richard Davis, a Brigham Young University political scientist and co-author of "Campaigning Online," attributed Dean's spectacular collapse to several factors -- his sometimes impolitic remarks, for example -- that had nothing to do with the Internet.
"I don't think we should blame the Internet for his failure," Davis said. "It was not his salvation, and it was not his failure. It was, quite simply, a tool that he actually used pretty effectively."
February 20, 2004 at 04:05 PM in Politics | Permalink
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