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| ILLUSTRATION BY RAFFI ANDERIAN/TORONTO
STAR | |
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| Web plays U.S. election wild card
Vermonter Howard Dean's bid for the U.S. presidency let
loose a new grassroots force in American politics — the
Internet. In a democracy that sometimes tilts toward
plutocracy, is it the tip of a peoples' revolution?
ALEXANDRA
SAMUEL
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
If you want to know what the Internet is doing to
American politics, head over to Toronto's Duke of York pub
Oct. 28.
There you'll find the local outpost of the Kerry
campaign: a group of exiled Americans and concerned Canadians,
doing their part to get George W. Bush out of office.
It's thanks to the Internet that the members of this
crowd have been able to find each other — and to link up with
861 other such groups across the United States and around the
world.
Now observers are looking to the November 2 election
for proof that the Internet's role in creating groups like
this one — not to mention its role in campaign fundraising —
represents a political transformation. They want to know
whether the same innovations that almost kept Howard Dean from
losing the Democratic nomination can be applied to winning the
White House.
But this transformation isn't about the politics of
right and left. It's about the politics of up and down.
Look no further than the leading candidates' Web sites
for evidence that power is shifting from the elites to
grassroots.
The site http://www.georgewbush.com/ has raised $13
million online, recruited 1.2 million volunteers, and enlisted
over 6 million e-mail activists, according to Chuck DeFeo, the
Bush-Cheney electronic campaign manager.
And http://www.johnkerry.com/ has attracted
750,000 volunteers, 2.5 million e-mail subscribers, and $82
million in contributions, according to Kerry e-campaign
manager Josh Ross.
Those numbers represent a long-awaited shift: "It's not
like you punch a button and a genie pops up," says political
consultant Phil Noble, the editor of e-campaigning news site
Politics Online.
"Cavemen burned themselves for years before they
understood how to use fire," Noble says. "That's where we are
here. The Internet is a new tool, and we're learning how to
use it. In some ways we're still burning the meat, but in some
places we're getting it out."
If anyone can be credited with snatching the meat out
of the fire this time around, it's Howard Dean. Thanks to his
savvy online campaigning, Dean broke away from the rear of the
Democratic field and emerged as an early frontrunner.
While Dean did not survive the primaries, his Internet
campaign innovations did. The two biggest stories of the 2004
online campaign are directly traceable to the Dean campaign:
peer-to-peer event planning, and online fundraising.
Peer-to-peer event planning merges the efficiencies of
online organizing with the momentum of face-to-face meetings.
"Up until the peer-to-peer stuff, we were just doing what we'd
always done faster, cheaper, quicker and smarter," Noble says.
"Peer-to-peer is truly a new thing." What peer-to-peer
refers to is any system where computer users can connect
directly to each other without going through a middleman. When
music sharing network Napster was driven out of business,
software writers created a decentralized variant known as P2P
in order to share music directly with each other, rather than
going through a music site. But there are many other uses. For
instance, people use P2P to connect with each other to create
groups and plan meetings, rather than relying on a central
campaign to plan it for them.
The catalyst for the U.S. transformation was a
for-profit business, Meetup.com. Created in 2002, Meetup lets
people form local meeting groups with people who share their
interests — whether that interest is in dancing, dogs, or
democracy. The Dean team started using Meetup at the very
beginning of 2003, organizing monthly meetings in cities
across America, and sending Dean to make in-person appearances
on each meeting date.
Thanks to its whole-hearted embrace of the Meetup
model, by April 2003 the Dean campaign had over 13,000
supporters on Meetup — compared to about 700 for John Kerry.
But that was just the beginning. The Dean campaign soon signed
an official agreement with Meetup, and linked its site
directly to Meetup's system. By July of 2003, his Meetup
network had grown to 61,000 members; by October, to 110,000.
And by February 2004, it reached a peak of 189,000
supporters using the Meetup system.
But when the Democratic candidates finally reached the
primary ballot box, Dean's thousands of cross-country
gatherings failed to translate. Barely a month into primary
season, Dean withdrew from the race without winning a single
state — with the exception of his own state of Vermont, which
voted after he had already withdrawn.
To its credit, Kerry's team heeded the lesson of Dean's
success rather than the warning of his defeat. The Kerry
campaign signed its own agreement with Meetup in July 2003, at
which point it had only about 2,400 Meetup supporters; by the
middle of this month, that number had grown to over 130,000
people using the Meetup system.
`If the
Democrats win, the Internet is part of the story. It's
the place where they found each other and generated
money'
Michael Cornfield, a political
scientist with Pew Internet and American Life Project.
| And the Bush camp has
made its own foray into the fusion of Internet and in-person.
Rather than embracing Meetup, which had become a virtual
Democratic colony, the Republicans developed their own Meetup
equivalent. Called "Party for the President," the Bush
campaign's proprietary software gives Bush backers the tools
to host their own parties or canvassing walks: an online
invitation system, downloadable flyers and a zip code lookup
that lets you find parties in your area. The site sells "party
packs" that include the Bush-Cheney buttons, bumper stickers
and drink cups that remind your guests of their purpose at
every turn.
In a predictable cycle of one-upmanship, the Kerry
campaign has supplemented the Meetup network by creating its
own party hosting system on JohnKerry.com, in response to
comments that came in on the campaign Web site. "One of the
biggest things that we saw was [supporters'] desire to be able
to host their own events," says Ross.
"In response we built in a big event planning tool and
have had 30,000 house parties planned through the Internet."
If peer-to-peer event planning is bringing in more
supporters, it's also changing how those supporters relate to
politics. A survey of 820 Meetup participants published this
spring showed that with every Meetup attended, supporters
become more committed, more likely to volunteer for the
campaign, more vociferous in their support and likely to give
money.
That linkage explains how Dean's Meetup success set off
a record year for online fundraising. Dean turned his Meetup
network into a tide of small donations — demonstrating that
small online donors could replace the big corporate donors of
pre-reform days.
Kerry took that lesson and ran with it. When he became
the presumptive nominee, he had only $86 million in the bank,
compared to Bush's then-$215 million. Political observers
wondered how the imbalance in funding would affect the race,
without ever considering the possibility that Kerry could
close the funding gap.
But with the Internet's help, Kerry proved them wrong.
By the time July's Democratic Convention rolled around, Kerry
had raised $82 million on the Internet alone — not including
the millions collected at parties that were organized through
Meetup and his party hosting system.
Those fundraising efforts combined to take the Kerry
war chest to a total of $248 million — within easy reach of
the Bush campaign's funding levels.
The Bush campaign, in contrast, can thank the Internet
for only $14 million of its $260 million in funding.
That $68 million difference in online fundraising
reflects dedicated effort and innovation in the Kerry camp. As
consultant Noble notes, "one of the things that Kerry has done
is combine online advertising and fundraising. It's the first
time it's really been done. They've figured out where and how
to buy ads that will promote fundraising."
The significance of the Democrats' online fundraising
success could go far beyond simply closing the funding gap in
this election. "The Democrats have been out-networked on small
donations by the Republicans for 30 years," notes Michael
Cornfield, a political scientist and expert on e-campaigning
with Pew Internet and American Life Project.
"If Democrats after 30 years of depending on large
donations are now developing their own network of small donors
and activists, they close a gap at the national level that has
existed since Ronald Reagan rose to power in part through
small donations through the mail."
But the art of the online dollar is still relatively
new. The Democrats' online advantage this time out could spur
the Republicans to rattle their digital tin cups a little
louder in 2008. If so, the newly-level playing field of small
donations could once again tilt in the Republicans favour.
"If the Democrats win, the Internet is part of the
story," according to Cornfield. "It's the place where they
found each other and generated money. It's less a part of the
story if the Republicans win."
But that's not to say that the Internet can be left out
of the Republican equation. "It's like the old arms race,"
says political consultant Phil Noble, comparing the two
Presidential campaigns. "One side has more warheads but the
other side has more powerful ones."
Whichever way the field tilts in 2008, it's clear that
the field itself has shifted. After decades of concern about
the influence of big business, the small donors are now the
ones who define fundraising success.
Campaign finance laws laid the groundwork by limiting
large donations, but it was the Internet that made the favour
of small donors into the most crucial form of political
currency.
And the impact of the little guy is only magnified by
the emergence of peer-to-peer event planning as an
organizational powerhouse. The shift to mass-driven,
decentralized organizing combines with the shift towards
small-scale donations to give grassroots volunteers a far
bigger role in the 2004 election than they've had in any
campaign in recent memory.
It's enough to make even a professional campaigner like
Ross sound awed when he talks about "how many new people have
been brought into the process, people who've never made a
contribution or volunteered before."
Alexandra Samuel is a technology writer based
in Vancouver.
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