After Senator John McCain admitted to being computer-“illiterate,” the McCain campaign’s best efforts at damage control amounted to assuring the American people that “Senator McCain is aware of the internet.”1 As part of his continuing effort to recover from his admission, McCain tried again, this time saying, “I do understand the importance of the computer. I understand the importance of the blogs.”2
Democrats aren’t just beating Republicans online—we’re spanking them, as Carville would say. The competition isn’t even close. Obama left McCain in the dust last year, in the process establishing online networks and lists that will ensure continued Democratic success in organizing and fund-raising online.
Republicans will try to rebut most of the arguments and evidence presented in this book. Even the ones that are res judicata, or settled. To refute Carville’s points on energy, they’ll brandish “experts” bankrolled by ExxonMobil to say there’s no such thing as climate change. For the chapter on the economy, they’ll produce a few questionable authorities of dubious academic accomplishment to defend supply-side insanity. Along the way they’ll toss in a few personal attacks—Carville is a party hack, a sycophant, a mere mouthpiece twisting the facts.
But not even the Republicans can argue with this chapter—in fact, throughout it, we’ll be relying on top Republican operatives to help us make the case. Put simply, Democrats are light-years ahead online. Our candidates’ Web sites get more visits. We have larger email lists. Our blogs are more popular. Finally, we have exponentially greater success raising funds online.
Even the top online consultants in the Republican Party admit how far behind conservatives are.
Take David All, a former Republican staffer and one of their top online guys. He admitted that “the problem is no longer simply a failure to communicate effectively in a modern world, but Republican candidates are now failing to match, or even come close to, Democrats in online contributions.”3
All isn’t alone. Michael Turk, the former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee, put it more bluntly when he said, “We’re losing the Web right now.”4
Republicans lie, but numbers don’t. By every metric, conservatives are losing online. Let’s start with the easiest numbers, online fund-raising. Ironically, the first big success in the political online fund-raising world was not Howard Dean’s campaign—it was John McCain’s in 2000.
McCain might not know how to use a computer, but in the two days following his win in New Hampshire in 2000, his Web site raked in more than $1 million in donations.5 That’s chump change by today’s standards, but in 2000 it was an impressive haul—one that would not be matched until 2004.
McCain’s success was not an accident. He’d taken his cue from former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura, who raised $70,000 online in 1998. Believing the Internet would be an important part of the 2000 campaign, “McCain sent advisors to Minnesota last year to borrow from the Internet playbook of Gov. Jesse Ventura…. The plans appear to have paid off.”6
Although McCain and Ventura’s early success made conservatives hopeful they could dominate the medium, they quickly fell behind. Since 2000, Republicans have been unable to compete with Democrats online.
In 2004, Howard Dean used online activists to propel him from being the obscure governor of a small state to front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Dean didn’t make it to the White House, or even to the Democratic nomination, but his success caused other Democrats to stand up and take notice.
As Dean himself noted, much of the campaign’s early success was an accident: “We fell into this by accident,” he admitted. “I wish I could tell you we were smart enough to figure this out. But the community taught us. They seized the initiative through Meetup. They built our organization for us before we had an organization.”7
With a nod to Carville, who, as his wife, Mary Matalin, points out, thought the Internet was a special highway as recently as a few years ago, here’s a quick history of Meetup and the Dean campaign for those who don’t know it:
Meetup is a Web tool for forming social groups. In early 2003, Dean himself was lured to an early New York City Meetup where he found more than 300 enthusiastic supporters waiting to greet him. Meetup quickly became the engine of Dean’s Internet campaign. Back then, the leading group on the site was a club for witches. Zephyr Teachout, Dean’s director of Internet outreach, describes sitting across from campaign manager Joe Trippi in the early weeks and hitting refresh again and again on her Web browser. “I was obsessed with beating Witches,” she says. “Witches had 15,000 members, and we had 3,000. I wanted first place.”8
Dean was the first candidate to effectively use mass movement organizing online to fuel his campaign. Some of this was Meetup, but much of it took place through his email list. Dean’s email list reached more than 600,000 people at its peak and was the primary force behind the $25 million he raised online.
Democrats have achieved this type of edge before, only to let it slip away. It was the Democratic Party that pioneered the use of direct-mail fund-raising, only to see Republicans use the technique more effectively for the next twenty years.
To channel Carville for a moment, let’s take a quick trip to the archives:
In 1970, George McGovern, the way-long-shot antiwar candidate, began to experiment with the novel political fund-raising technique of direct mail to finance his unlikely primary race.
This political marketing strategy, according to an article that appeared in September 1972, was the brainchild of Morris Dees, who would become among the most prominent southern liberal activists, but who was then the head of a publishing company that sold special-interest books through the mail.
The idea—born not so much from marketing brilliance as from a lack of fund-raising alternatives—was to use the mail to solicit people who had already identified themselves as likely McGovern partisans. It was the method, not the goal, that was new—after all, politicians are always looking for help from their core supporters.
But the method introduced a heightened efficiency into the process. Almost all of the mail sent by the McGovern team went to three groups. You got a solicitation if you subscribed to liberal magazines: The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Ramparts, or Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, for instance. If your name appeared on lists maintained by organizations like Americans for Democratic Action or the ACLU or Zero Population Growth, you got a letter. Or if your name and address had been among the hundreds of thousands collected over the years of the antiwar movement (perhaps you had contributed to the campaign to support the end-the-war McGovern-Hatfield amendment), you got a sincere, well-crafted, multipage pitch from the McGovern marketers.9
Republicans took note of McGovern’s success, and they quickly threw themselves into building their own direct-mail lists. Democrats, perhaps burned by the outcome of the general election, let their advantage slip away. There would have been incredible opportunities to build direct-mail lists during the Watergate era, which would be the height of dissatisfaction with Republican governance until Bush. But we let Watergate pass by, instead opting to focus on large donors and soft money.
Democrats would not repeat the same mistakes in the online world. While the Republican Party dismissed McCain’s success in 2000, Democrats took their cue from Howard Dean and began to build on his successes. In December 2003, while he was still a long shot for the nomination, John Kerry spent time building a strong Internet operation.
Kerry’s online turnaround was dramatic. While raising only a little more than $1 million online in all of 2003, by August 2004 he had raised more than $80 million. The New York Times reported, somewhat wonderingly, that “The Internet helped Mr. Kerry cut President Bush’s financial lead substantially. Mr. Bush raised about $273 million, while Mr. Kerry raised about $249 million. The amount Mr. Kerry raised online virtually ensures that few presidential and Congressional campaigns will develop in the future without the Internet in mind.”10
Add to that $80 million the tens of millions of dollars the Kerry campaign raised online after the convention to help fund the Democratic Party, and you can see the difference the online world made in 2004.
By comparison, Bush was able to raise only $14 million through the Internet, even after three years unchallenged as the leader of the Republican Party and despite incredible popularity among the Republican base.11 Quick math says that Bush’s $14 million goes into Kerry’s $80 million almost 6 times.
After that miserable November, John Kerry and Howard Dean could have packed it in and called it a day. Instead, both decided to use their online infrastructure to help the party as a whole. Howard Dean turned Dean for America into Democracy for America, using his email list and network of local chapters to help candidates around the country. Meanwhile, Kerry took his email list and fund-raised for Democrats running for the House and Senate. In the 2006 cycle, Kerry ended up raising millions for other Democrats—an impressive feat. Today, the applications for Hillary’s and Obama’s lists are tremendous.
In 2008, Democratic dominance of online fund-raising has continued. From January to March 2007—yes, 2007—Clinton, Obama, and John Edwards raised more than $14 million online. Compare that to the anemic $6 million scraped together by McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudolph Giuliani.12 As of June 2008, Barack Obama had already raised more online than John McCain had for his entire campaign.
Remember that part about how numbers don’t lie? Numbers may not lie, but Republicans still try to lie about numbers. When the Romney campaign filed its first-quarter report to the Federal Elections Commission in 2007, it claimed Romney had raised $7.2 million online—proof of deep, widespread support. That would have put Romney $300,000 ahead of Obama and $3 million stronger than Hillary online. Problem was, $7.2 million would be nearly a third of his total fund-raising.13
Romney was just shuffling large donors to the Web, defying the purpose of Internet fund-raising as a way to gather new, small-dollar, and grassroots donations. As far as the numbers go, the important one here is the dollars-to-donors ratio. A fellow Republican, Michael Turk, the eCampaign Director for Bush-Cheney 04 and the Republican National Committee, notes, “Romney reports about 20,000 donors who gave less than $200 and another 12,000 who gave more than $200…there’s no way Romney’s online numbers add up to more than $7 million unless his team directed many of his maxed-out contributors—people giving $2,300 each—to give via credit card on his website.”14
It’s one thing in politics to exaggerate your success. It’s another to outright lie, try to make yourself something you are not, then get caught. If Republicans had any capacity for shame, the Romney camp would have to be somewhat embarrassed.
Online fund-raising is the easiest metric for candidates; but what’s even more impressive than Democrats’ online fund-raising is the movement we’ve been able to build up online. Barack Obama communicated with more than 13 million Americans through his email list. He asked them to take real action to deliver his message—knock on doors, make phone calls, talk to their friends. His email list gave the campaign an opportunity to have the equivalent of a daily conference call with all of his most active supporters every day.
The campaign also used my.barackobama.com as a platform for supporters to gather to take action. The campaign even used the Internet to check in on how far-flung field staff were performing.
While covering the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York, Politico’s Ben Smith wrote, “One of the interesting revelations is that they’ve been using online feedback to keep tabs on their field staff, in the form of a questionnaire sent to supporters in primary states who interacted with Obama’s staff or volunteers. [Obama’s new media director Joe] Rospars said the campaign had produced a long report based on the ‘hundreds of thousands of responses.’ ‘We know who the staff were in different congressional districts, and what the performance was,’ he said, citing a level of staff accountability familiar from elements of the service industry but utterly unknown to politics.”15
The fact that an entire online movement numbering in the tens of millions exists is a testament to Barack Obama and the campaign he chose to run. One that is powered not only with Internet dollars, but with real grassroots support organized online.
It’s not only our candidates who have been more impressive online. What really puts Democrats over the top is activism from our grassroots supporters. Nothing exemplifies this more than ActBlue. The mission statement on the ActBlue Web site reads: “ActBlue is a political committee that enables anyone—individuals, local groups, and national organizations—to fundraise online for the Democratic candidates of their choice.”16 ActBlue has raised more than $88 million for Democrats since 2004. Most Democratic candidates have received contributions through ActBlue. In 2006, Senator Jim Webb of Virginia raised almost $850,000 on ActBlue and Senator Jon Tester of Montana raised close to $350,000. The right wing tried to imitate the success of ActBlue with RightRoots. com. So far their efforts don’t even come close, in dollars raised, candidates supported, or any other metric that means anything. In February, Right Roots attempted to plan a big fund-raising campaign called “F7 2008: One Day to Stop Hillary and F7 2008: One Day to Stop Obama.” According to the events description, “One Day to Stop Hillary (and Obama) is a grassroots campaign by Right Roots to mobilize thousands of Republican donors to contribute to our party’s nominee on Thursday, February 7, 2008. This critical date falls two days after the ‘Super Duper Tuesday’ primary on February 5th, the soonest (and still most likely) date that the presumptive nominee will be known.”17
How did they do? According to a graphic on their site, they raised $2,646 from thirty-two donors. To use a favorite printable expression of James’s, that’s pathetic.
The Blogosphere
The progressive blogosphere puts its conservative counterpart, or lack thereof, to shame. From the Huffington Post to Daily Kos to Open Left to Americablog, we’ve got bigger readership and a greater ability to direct audiences to action. While not a perfect metric, a quick look at blog traffic on BlogAd.com reveals the top ten liberal blogs combined have 19,414,394 impressions per week, while the top ten conservative blogs lag far behind with 4,710,244 impressions per week.18
It is not just size or traffic that matters. While conservative blogs claim the scalp of Dan Rather, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo can take credit for having pursued the U.S. Attorney scandal until the media finally paid attention.
Name That Idiot
Here are the rules for a fun and simple drinking game for you and your progressive friends. Get yourselves some alcohol and get ready for a good time. The first person up names a Republican idiot and gives a detail about his or her particular brand of corruption and incompetence. Participants to follow have to come up with a new name and corresponding information or offer a new detail on a previously mentioned idiot. If you can’t come up with something, drink. (It goes without saying that if you get something wrong, you also have to drink.)
To look at the other accomplishments of the progressive blogosphere, we need only to turn to Harry Reid and his speech to the YearlyKos Convention in 2006:
As a former boxer, I know a fighter—and a winner—when I see one, and as Senate Democratic Leader, I’m glad there are so many of you fighting on our side. Whether it’s spreading the truth or fighting for what’s right, you have made a tremendous difference for our country and the Democratic Party. It was you who was quick to stand against the Swift Boat Smear of John Kerry. It was you who defended Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson against Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. It was you who helped Democrats win key victories in Social Security and the Nuclear Option. And it is you—today—who are making sure the truth is heard.19
The blogosphere also played an active role in Ned Lamont’s primary win in Connecticut and in the Web-fueled elections of both Senator Jim Webb and Senator Jon Tester.
The explanation for Democrats’ success online is simple. Successful efforts online, from MoveOn.org to Dean to Obama, involve open communication and opportunities for participation. Interaction builds and sustains communities. It’s no surprise that Democrats excel at building movements and enthusiasm in this democratic medium.
When it comes to the Internet, there are three core questions. First, “How much money can you raise?” Then, “How many people can you get signed up?” And, finally, “How many voters can you get to the polls?” Democrats beat Republicans on all three metrics—indisputably, irrefutably, and dramatically, in fact—and Republicans have little hope of catching up in time to do anything about the emerging Democratic majority.