One Utah

The New York Times published a great article about the growth and impact of the Internet in campaigns.

Full article here -> Politics Faces Sweeping Change Via the Web

In two recent campaigns, I believe the Internet played a primary role in bring completely unknown candidates from “no chance of winning”, to so close to victory, both races could have easily gone the other way.

The first was Jan Lovett’s campaign for Democratic State Party Chair. Against a field of well-known candidates including Wayne Holland who had the backing and endorsement of everyone from Congressman Jim Matheson to almost every sitting elected democrat in the State, Jan entered the race 7 weeks before the election ultimately losing to Wayne by a margin of thirteen votes.

We used the Internet to raise money, activate volunteers, communicate with delegates, and to create an interactive forum for discussing the issues. The website went live 5 weeks before the election and in the days prior to the election, was getting hundreds of visitors each day in an election in which only about 1600 people voted.

The other campaign was Janneke House Salt Lake City Council race last November against the incumbent Eric Jergensen. An odds-maker would have given 100 to 1 odds against the twenty-three-year-old virtual unknown. We used the same Internet strategy. Janneke lost by a less than 2% margin and got MORE than twice as many votes as any of the winning candidate in the other council races.

The transformation of American politics by the Internet is accelerating … prompting the rewriting of rules on advertising, fund-raising, mobilizing supporters and even the spreading of negative information.

Democrats and Republicans are sharply increasing their use of e-mail, interactive Web sites, candidate and party blogs, and text-messaging to raise money, organize get-out-the-vote efforts and assemble crowds for rallies. The Internet, they said, appears to be far more efficient, and less costly, than the traditional tools of politics, notably door knocking and telephone banks.

…officials in both parties say the extent to which the parties have now recognized and rely on the Internet has increased at a staggering rate over the past two years.

The percentage of Americans who went online for election news jumped from 13 percent in the 2002 election cycle to 29 percent in 2004, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center after the last presidential election. A Pew survey released earlier this month found that 50 million Americans go to the Internet for news every day, up from 27 million people in March 2002, a reflection of the fact that the Internet is now available to 70 percent of Americans.

A classic example of the democratizing power of the Internet is this siple case study. If you Google Sim Gill, a candidate for Salt Lake County District Attorney, you will discover the third entry is THIS BLOG; as the result of only one mention of Sim in January.

Not incidentally, as it becomes more integrated in American politics, the Internet is being pressed into service for the less seemly side of campaigns…Both parties have set up Web sites to discredit opponents.

Sim’s opposition has anonymously registered SimGill dot com in an attempt to compete for top-positioning on search engines, and has also begun to post negative comments on this blog only one of which has passed through the censors after heavy editing.

Mark Warner, the former Democratic governor of Virginia, began preparing for a potential 2008 presidential campaign by hiring a blogging pioneer, Jerome Armstrong, a noteworthy addition to the usual first-wave of presidential campaign hiring of political consultants and fund-raisers.

The techniques for getting visibility on the Internet is fairly complex and changing constantly, but absolutely critical for getting and keeping the upper hand. It should also be fairly obvious to anyone, that maintaining a good blog requires substantial commitment of time, energy which cannot be overcome by any technique or investment.

Forward thinking Utah progressive have taken the pre-emptive step of filling up the “space” with progressive blogs in order to get a jump on the other side such that it will be very difficult for the opposition to compete in the coming elections. Most of those blogs are listed on the side-bar of this blog.

Mr. Warner is now one of at least three potential presidential candidates…who are routinely posting what aides say are their own writings on campaign blogs or on public blogs like the Daily Kos, the nation’s largest.

Particularly for small local campaigns, the Internet represents THE ONLY way to get a message out without a stamp, and importantly, to control your message and correct the media.

Analysts said that the Internet appeared to be a particularly potent way to appeal to new, young voters, … In the 2004 campaign, 80 percent of people between the age of 18 and 34 who contributed to Mr. Kerry’s campaign made their contribution online.

For their part, Democrats have set up decoy Web sites to post documents with damaging information about Republicans. They described this means of distribution as far more efficient than the more traditional slip of a document to a newspaper reporter.

This entry was posted Sunday, April 2nd, 2006 at 10:07 pm and is filed under 4th Estate (Media), National Politics, SLC Politics, This Blog, Utah Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.