By the late 1990s, it was expected that a presidential candidate would have some sort of campaign Web site. Candidates used their Web sites to publicize their issue positions and to present their image to the American public. In short, candidate Web sites were little more than glorified versions of the traditional campaign brochure. The advantage to having a Web site was that it made the dissemination of campaign materials much less expensive than traditional printing. Plus, candidates could also solicit funds and announce campaign events, and Web sites could quickly be updated as the need arose, so they were multifunctional. In the primary season of the Campaign of 2000, Republican hopeful John McCain was notable for raising $3.7 million in campaign funds online, although in the end, he failed to earn his party’s nomination. One of the drawbacks to relying too much on an Internet-based strategy during this era was that most voters did not seek out campaign information online. The Internet was still primarily the domain of young persons, and this age group has historically been among those least interested in political campaigns and voting.
In the Campaign of 2004, Democratic hopeful Howard Dean tried to change the way candidates used the Internet. Dean was the first candidate to appear in a chat room, where he interacted directly with prospective voters—many of them younger people who wouldn’t normally be interested in politics. His campaign also used Web sites such as Meetup.com for grassroots organizing (eventually creating their own automated system) and raised a record amount (at the time) of funds online, mostly in small donations. Dean’s supporters wrote handwritten letters to registered voters in Iowa and compiled their own database of volunteers to further assist in their outreach efforts. And Dean closely followed the blogs of his supporters to determine what issues were important to them and adjusted his campaign accordingly. While Dean ultimately lost his party’s nomination to John Kerry, his campaign provided a blueprint for future candidates who sought to use the Internet in ways that were less traditional, and it also provided useful examples for more decentralized ways to organize grassroots support.
By the time the Campaign of 2008 rolled around, many candidates had recognized the potential that Dean saw in the Internet four years earlier. In particular, Republican hopeful Ron Paul and Democratic hopefuls John Edwards and Barack Obama developed sophisticated, interactive Web sites and integrated these with overarching campaign strategies designed to encourage supporters to mobilize on their behalf at the grassroots level. The Obama campaign employed Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes as a campaign strategist and quickly established an online presence using a variety of sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, BlackPlanet, AsianAve, MiGente, and Glee. By the general election, Obama had over two million Facebook supporters, while his opponent, John McCain, barely reached six hundred thousand. Even in the primary season, hopeful Hillary Clinton was handily outnumbered on Facebook by Obama supporters, an early indication of his campaign’s advantage in the digital realm. Political analysts believe that Obama’s online presence was more than a virtual phenomenon—Obama was consistently able to perform well in caucuses, in large part because his campaign was able to organize and mobilize large numbers of young voters to show up for these events.
By Election Day, Obama had over 112,000 people regularly following him on Twitter, whereas McCain had only 4,600 (after a belated effort to set up a Twitter account in the waning days of the campaign). The Obama campaign used Twitter to collect more detailed sociodemographic information from its followers, enabling it to tailor its campaign communications so that supporters would be notified of events, via e-mail and text messages, in their geographical area. And Obama’s supporters retweeted his messages to their friends. The BarackObama.com channel on YouTube contained over eighteen hundred video files and attracted more than eighteen million visits (and ninety-seven million views), whereas the JohnMcCain.com channel contained only three hundred and thirty videos and attracted only two million visits (and twenty-five million views). Obama’s campaign even developed an iPhone app for its supporters.
Similarly, Republican hopeful Ron Paul was a notable presence in the campaign, primarily because of his ability to reach out to his supporters online. Like Obama, Paul was especially popular among voters, and like Obama, Paul invested considerable time in his online presence. Most notably, Paul raised a record $4.2 million in twenty-four hours online during November 2007. The Paul campaign generated attention by tying the fund-raising drive to Guy Fawkes Day, and even created video mash-ups of the Fawkes character in V for Vendetta and posted them on YouTube as part of the event. Paul was able to raise funds from over thirty-seven thousand donors during this drive, which put him ahead of all other GOP candidates in funds raised in the last quarter of 2007.
In addition to the candidates devoting more resources to online activities in 2008, so too did the media. The Democratic and Republican conventions provided press credentials to bloggers, who provided real-time coverage of events to their readers online. Facebook and ABC shared news content and cohosted online forums about the campaign. And YouTube and CNN paired up to cohost presidential debates, which were made available for viewing on television and online (making it more likely that voters would have an opportunity to view them).
By the Campaign of 2012, Twitter, the microblogging Web site, had expanded in importance, with the number of active users increasing by a factor of ten since the 2008 election. Democrat Barack Obama had 20.42 million followers on Twitter during the campaign, while Republican Mitt Romney had 1.225 million followers, one indication that the Obama campaign was, once again, dominant when it came to campaigning online and through social media. Obama’s content was retweeted by followers approximately twenty times more than Romney’s content was retweeted. Both Obama and Romney had Facebook profiles as well, and like with Twitter, they used the site to post updates about daily events, photos of their travels, and comments about events going on in the world. Obama’s content received more than twenty-nine million likes over the course of the campaign, compared to the just under eight million likes received by Romney’s content, again suggesting something about the reach of the content being disseminated by the campaigns—more people were sharing Obama’s content on both Twitter and Facebook, broadcasting it far beyond those viewers who originally chose to follow him or access his profile. Obama had a similar advantage on his Pinterest account (four times as many followers as Romney), his Instagram account (1.4 million followers compared to Romney’s 38,000), and Spotify (where 14,600 people subscribed to his playlist, compared to the 400 people who subscribed to Romney’s). A systematic ability to maintain this many online accounts requires a great deal of campaign organization, and a recognition that the candidate’s public image is no longer defined by interactions with broadcast and print media alone.
A candidate’s Internet presence is a means for the candidate to create a public image that is sympathetic and friendly, and it even permits candidates to exhibit their sense of humor—something that isn’t as easy to do in the formal confines of presidential debates, or in the impersonal setting of a mass rally. Candidates may also choose to use their Internet presence, as Howard Dean did, to create new opportunities for voter interaction. For example, on August 29, 2012, Democratic incumbent Barack Obama answered questions on a Reddit thread entitled “Ask Me Anything.” Reddit users asked Obama about items both serious (specifics about his tax policy, his commitment to NASA) and lighthearted (his favorite basketball player, the recipe for the microbrew served at the White House).
Although online contributions were nothing new by 2012, in this election, for the first time, the Federal Elections Commission permitted campaign contributions to be made in the form of a text message. While texting donations to organizations like the Red Cross during times of disaster have long been used for fund-raising drives for other nonprofits, FEC rules had prevented candidates from easily raising funds from donors via mobile phones. Rather, online donors have had to use a computer in order to enter the needed information to document their contribution. Changing the device that can be used to make a donation, and the type of application in which a supporter can make a donation, makes it easier and more cost-effective for candidates to raise donations online—both in terms of the number of donors reached (it broadens the potential scope) and the size of the donations (it makes it easier to reach small-dollar donors). Direct mail and phone banking are far more costly, reach a smaller potential base of supporters, and tend to have a far lower rate of return for dollars spent. Based on surveys conducted in late September, the Pew Research Center found that 13 percent of Americans had contributed to a political campaign in 2012. Yet Pew found that texting remained the least common avenue for political donations up to that time, being utilized by only 10 percent of those who had given money to a candidate. Significantly, 67 percent of donors had given money in person, sent a donation through the mail, or given a donation over the phone—decidedly traditional forms of fund-raising. Half of those polled had also made a contribution online or through e-mail, suggesting that using the Internet for fund-raising, overall, has become a common form of fund-raising for those who contribute to political candidates. (Pew found that one in ten Americans had made a charitable donation of any kind using a text via cell phone, compared to one in one hundred Americans who had made such a donation to a political candidate in 2012.) Democrats were twice as likely to contribute online or via text, whereas Republican voters were more likely to contribute funds in more traditional ways. There were no partisan differences in overall likelihood of contributions, however, suggesting that it is the candidates and their fund-raising strategies that are the main sources of difference in type of donation.
In the Campaign of 2016, CNN broke records for debate viewership when it live-streamed its coverage of the second GOP debate, enabling online viewers to watch the event as it unfolded. Fox News, which had hosted the first GOP debate, did not stream the event, restricting viewership to those with cable access. As Americans, particularly millennials, have abandoned expensive satellite and cable subscriptions, the Fox News format left sizable segments of the viewing public in the dark. The CNN debate was more widely viewed and more widely covered by the press (and was even live-tweeted by Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders), which established a model for the coverage of future campaign events: In order to generate visibility, and to maximize viewership, the transmission of such events cannot be limited to traditional broadcast sources.
Online fund-raising had broken new records in 2016 as well. By the end of September 2015, Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders had raised $1 million online, far earlier than any other candidate had managed to accomplish such a feat. By mid-September of 2015, Twitter announced a partnership with Square that permitted candidates who subscribed to the Square payment system to embed a donation button in their Twitter feed, enabling interested donors to click on the button, input a donation amount, and also enter their name, address, and other information required by the FEC (all without leaving the app or the feed).
Throughout 2015 Donald Trump used Twitter and other social media platforms to great effect, mastering the craft of repeatedly stirring controversy to his political advantage. Nowadays, all candidates are expected to have Web sites, to tweet the daily events of their campaign, to be part of an online community on Facebook and elsewhere, and to routinely post campaign materials on YouTube. More effective campaigns use their online interactions with supporters as a means to disseminate information, but also to interact with and organize supporters, and to harvest data about the electorate for later use in data analytic models. Public opinion polls suggest that older voters are an expanding presence online, and particularly in the use of social media sites. As more voters rely on these technologies, candidates will be compelled to adapt their campaign strategies to this changing world of social mass media or risk finding their campaigns widely ignored.
See also Big Data; Twenty-Four-Hour News Cycle
Bimber, Bruce, and Richard Davis. Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Fraser, Matthew, and Soumitra Dutta. “Obama’s Win Means Future Elections Must Be Fought Online.” Guardian, November 7, 2008.
Lapowsky, Issie. “Campaign Donation Buttons Come to Twitter, Thanks to Square.” Wired, September 15, 2015.
Obama, Barack. “I Am Barack Obama, President of the United States.” Reddit thread, August 29, 2012. https://www.reddit.com/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obama_president_of_the_united_states/. Accessed October 6, 2015.
Smith, Aaron, and Maeve Duggan. “Presidential Campaign Donations in the Digital Age.” Pew Research Center for Internet, Science, and Technology, October 25, 2012. http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/10/25/presidential-campaign-donations-in-the-digital-age/.
Walensky, Robyn, and the Associated Press. “Ron Paul Sets Online Fundraising Record with $4.2 Million in One Day.” FoxNews.com, November 6, 2007.
Wolf, Gary. “How the Internet Invented Howard Dean.” Wired, December 1, 2004.
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