In this little ditty called British Politics Dives Into the Web, WaPo reporter Robert MacMillan puts his ignorance on display with a little quotational backup from a academic at Oxford:
Despite predictions in the United States that 2004 would usher in an era in which Web campaigning would rival the 30-second TV spot in importance, elections are still about knocking on doors and glad-handing on the sidewalks. The same appears to be holding true in Britain.
"I think it would be a mistake to assume that the Web has become a significant campaigning tool either at the national level or at the constituency level of candidates," said Stephen Coleman, a professor at Oxford University's Internet Institute and an expert on the use of the Web in elections. "They have a fairly symbolic value. You need to be seen to have one, but [the parties] are not quite sure what to do with them."
Dutton might be right in that the parties are not quite sure what to do with the web, but MacMillan's obliviousness to the connection between a campaign's online life and it's on-the-street activities betrays a profound ignorance of what happened in the US in 2004. Either he never bothered to investigate the Dean campaign (beyond fundraising), Meetup or GOP Team Leader, or he's taking the inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom over the evidence.
The reality is that a number of campaigns in 2004 (Dean, Clark, Kucinish and Bush) made highly effective use of the internet. Fundraising grabbed a lot of headlines, but that's an old story. John McCain raised a million dollars in two days in 2000; the GOP has been raising tens of millions through direct-mail for years. What happened in 2004 was that the effective campaigns were the able to turn donors into activists by giving people a sense of ownership in return for their online donation. The $20 donation helps keep the campaign alive not just by adding to the bank account, but by more effectively binding the donor to the campaign.
The effective online campaign maximized this by providing opportunities to contribute via sweat-equity (aka volunteering) in combination to a direct financial gift. They used their online presence to recruit, organize and monitor these volunteers, as well as to seed dense grassroots networks which helped support their campaign without technically being a part of it. While this is not exactly a revelation in politics, the changing ways in which the net allows a campaign to communicate with its constituents are integral to the deployment of these tactics in 2004.
The conventional wisdom on what drives a campaign is broken. TV ads do not put people in the street or knocking on doors. To do that, you need organization. The internet is opening up new ways for campaigns to organize constituents, and more excitingly for "regular people" to self-organize independely of campaigns. TV and print ads are and will remain important for the sake of visibility and framing. Though the net is transforming those aspects as well, the old media remains dominant (object lesson: the Dean scream). However, when it comes to organizing, there's no question that the internet plays an integral role for savvy campaigns and parties.
The ironic thing is, until old-media reporters begin to understand and respect this distinction, the current frame around internet campaigning will remain largely intact. That provides some opportunities as well as frustrations. The GOP did very well in 2004 by keeping a lot of its organization off the mainstream radar. While I find journalistic ignorance to be annoying, I also kind of hope people keep underestimating the internet.
