Election 2008: The Internet Campaign - ' State of the Art'

Six months before primary season and 16 months before the 2008 general election, Democratic candidates are raising record sums of money online and signing up thousands of contacts on social networking sites. Obama led the pack in early August with about 122,00 Facebook contacts—more than twice the combined total of all the Republican candidates combined—and more than 158,000 MySpace friends. GOP candidates lagged their Democratic rivals by large margins in fundraising, too. Small contributions via the Internet have provided Obama, the fundraising leader, and Edwards with about one-third of their funding; small donors (usually defined as those giving less than $200) are prized because they can be tapped repeatedly without violating giving limits.

For the first time, each campaign has hired an experienced professional to develop an Internet strategy. Campaigns also are reaching out to bloggers online and off. Presumptive GOP candidate Fred Thompson has been blogging himself, and the Democratic front-runners appeared in early August at the YearlyKos convention, a new-media-and-politics event that grew out of the powerful liberal Web site Daily Kos. Meanwhile Web video, in its larval phase during the last presidential race, helped shift control of the Senate in 2006 and has become as essential as baby-kissing (see sidebar).

In at least some campaigns, the Internet pros have penetrated the inner circle. "This is the new reality: the Internet people are at the most senior table," says Elizabeth Edwards, the candidate's wife and adviser, herself an early proponent of online campaigning. "Trippi reports to John. It's a straight line. Whenever there is a process of trying to get out a message, or engaging people on an issue, the Internet is honestly the first place we start." Trippi, who works with a full-time Internet staff of eight from Edwards headquarters in Chapel Hill, says the candidate understands the online environment and participates online to a much greater degree than the early 2004 Democratic front-runner Dean ever did.

The Edwards campaign, trailing Clinton and Obama in dollars and the polls, is strongly committed to the Internet for reasons of philosophy and necessity. Other campaigns use the Internet without making it part of their DNA. "Even if they say they give a seat to the Net person, many conversations are happening without that person involved," says Michael Turk, an adviser to Thompson's shadow campaign and former online campaign director for the Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney '04. Some campaigns seem not to understand the essentials of e-mail list usage. "On Friday night, I got e-mails from McCain, Giuliani and Romney within 20 minutes of each other. There wasn't 2 cents of difference among them, and they were sent at a time when nobody would read them." Turk criticizes McCain for responding to bad news on fundraising and staff turnover by sending out an e-mail filled with what he calls "campaign platitudes" instead of speaking with the frankness expected by Internet users.

Online politics will not reach its potential until overall campaign strategy is planned with the Internet in mind. "When a bank builds its advertising campaign around online banking, it's not the Internet guy pushing it, it's the senior marketing people and the consumer banking, the ones at the top," Democratic consultant Exley says. "In campaigns, the Internet gets delegated and ghettoized." Ultimately, says Ruffini, the campaign manager should be the Internet director and understand the Internet as the essential platform for communication. Even Trippi says his organization is not all the way there yet: "It's an evolution, putting the Web at the center. The problem is that people trained in a top down world—including me—take orders from the top, and that's not the way YouTube and MySpace work. It may take a few cycles to get there."

One measure of success will be the building and benefiting from much larger online communities around campaigns. "In a country of 300 million people, we're still jumping up and down about having 250,000 donors," says Trippi. "We're still scratching the surface. As amazing as the tools are, we ain't there yet."

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