An interesting article in Sunday’s NY Times. Short version: everyone knows the internet has got to be the key to winning elections. But no one has yet figured out how to use it.
Read it, and tell us what you think!
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NY Times: internet is the future of politics
The internet makes some things – like high volumes of contributions – easy, and it’s great for information and discussion.
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However, it requires a pro-active user and our political system is a bit short on those. You can send emails to your heart’s content, but they’re easier to trash than regular mail. Additionally, email shows a lack of effort on the sender’s part, as opposed to mail or a live phone call.
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In this day and age, a campaign can’t afford to forgo the internet. But I think we’re still pretty far from the day when email and web pages replace more traditional campaign tactics.
When I said in my comment below that Nagourney shows only a “partial understanding” of how the Internet is being used in politics, part of what I meant is what you highlight here: the misperception that using the Internet for politics is about using email as a voter contact method equivalent to phone banks or canvassing. That’s what happens with any new tool: people try to look at it as a direct one-for-one replacement for the old tool, and notice the drawbacks. That’s really not the point of using the Internet for a campaign.
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As one example, I think one of the strongest ways to use the Internet in a large campaign (for Governor, Senate, or President – where field+GOTV will account for less than half the vote) is as a tool to enable grassroots self-organizing. The campaign can use the net to give motivated people the resources to find each other, get together, plan activities, share materials, and find out what the campaign wants from them.
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Without the Internet, you could have 5,000 highly motivated individuals statewide wanting to support your campaign for, say, Governor. Out of a total of several million voters, that’s not a lot. With the Internet, you can get 2,000 of those people actively organizing in groups, coming up with ideas and implementing them. They’ll accomplish far more than they would have as disconnected individuals. And even in a state with several million voters, 2,000 people participating in active grassroots organizing on a local level is huge.
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There is simply no other way to take 5,000 otherwise disconnected but motivated people scattered around the state, who don’t have any existing social capital tying them together, and use the simple fact that they all want to support the same candidate to harvest 2,000 of them into a real grassroots organization. If you had the social capital built in advance, painstakingly over years (for example, in the form of a labor union, or a church network), then you could do something with them. But the number of disconnected potential activists outside of these existing networks of social capital is a large mostly untapped resource for campaigns. The Internet, in this case, serves as an instant catalyst for building something equivalent to social capital, in a matter of several months, that might otherwise have taken years. For a campaign, that’s a critical difference, because many campaigns have several months, but few campaigns have several years.
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That’s just one example. The point I’m trying to make here is that the most powerful ways of using the Internet for politics are not on-for-one plug-in replacements for currently known campaign tactics; but that doesn’t mean they can’t be more powerful than currently known campaign tactics.
I don’t think that’s an accurate summary of the article. What you say doesn’t contradict what the article says, but it’s more your view of it than it is a characterization of what Nagourney’s message is.
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My “short version”: The internet is becoming more and more important in politics, and politicians are starting to figure that out. Soon it’s going to overtake TV ads and other traditional campaign tools in importance. Politics is actually coming to the game late, and the transformation is similar to what started 5 or 10 years ago in other fields (such as retail).
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I think he shows only a partial understanding of how the Internet is being used in politics, but that’s much better than most newspaper articles about the Internet in politics.
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He lists three 2008 presidential candidates who are now blogging (Warner, Kerry, and Edwards). How did he miss Feingold, who has been blogging longer than any of them?
That’s why I wrote it. I was going more for pithy turn of phrase than for wordy precision, but whatever floats your boat.
“Short version:” sounds like you’re giving a short summary of what you think the article is about or what you think it’s saying. But it’s not. It’s your view of the topic that the article is about, but it’s not what the article says. Call it “my take:” and it’d be clearer.
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(Unless you really think that’s what the article is saying, in which case, I think you’re wrong, even though your statement may be right đŸ™‚