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February 21, 2004
Two on Dean (one stupid, one smart)
Posted by Clay Shirky
Hylton just pointed me to the Campaigns Online report,
The Profound Impact of the Internet, Blogs, and E-Technologies in Presidential Political Campaigning (from January 2004, so the title feels a bit premature.)
The staff of Campaigns Online made the mistake many of us made, assuming the impressive numbers from the Dean campaign were signs of future votes. The phrase that leapt out at me was "Dean has been very successful in recruiting supporters. On November 15, 2003, the number of supporters exceeded more than 500,000", going on to quote the Dean campaign on that historic milestone.
The problem with the 500,000 number is that it wasn't real, or, rather, it wasn't true. Anyone who has had any dealings with an internet business in the last decade knows how user figures are arrived at -- any row in the user database is a "user." Someone fills in the "Join the Dean Campaign!" form just to look around? Count 'em. A login for Mr. Nobody at 123 Main St? Count 'em. Two people from Sheboygan with the same email address but different logins? Count 'em twice. And so on. The ease of listing yourself as a supporter lowered the value of the supporter count as a signal of strength.
In the same way that the polls didn't translate into votes, the half-million lines in the database was less predictive of voter behavior than we thought.
The good news about the Dean loss is that voters still matter, no matter what tools are being used. My new rule is: If I hear someone talking about using the internet to transform democracy, I'll listen for 5 minutes. If, in that time, they don't use the words vote, voter, or voting, I'm going to go back to reading slashdot.
Which brings me to the smart Dean post. Britt Blaser has a great post on
the use of Dean tools post-Dean, with a particular emphasis on the effects of such tools on voters.
While the customer for these open source tools is any campaign that wants to do things even better than the Dean campaign, their user is the potential voter and campaign donor-activist.The crucial design challenge is the user experience of a voter coming upon a candidate's web site and discovering that there is a place for each voter's voice in this campaign. The thing the campaigns have to do better is to solicit each voter's input on the issues, not just to promote the horse race between two stylized candidates.
This is an inversion of the Dean model, where people could only discuss issues among themselves at Meetups and in blog comments, for there was no explicit means for voters to express their policy preferences in a way that could be aggregated as a coherent direction for the campaign. I always maintained that this is what the people wanted most from the campaign, and their admirable efforts would have been amplified if the issues had not been on the back burner.
It's great. Read it.
Comments (2)
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1. Korby Parnell on February 22, 2004 6:29 PM writes...
I disagree with the statement, "...there was no explicit means for voters to express their policy preferences in a way that could be aggregated as a coherent direction for the campaign..."
The Dean campaign asked its supporters to vote *via email* on at least one very substantive matter: whether Dean should forgo public matching funds or opt out of the system so that he could exceed the spending cap.
You might argue that this was a minor democratic gesture in an otherwise top-down campaign. But consider the risk for Gov. Dean.
In 1996, I was a volunteer on Senator Kerry's successful reelection campaign against then MA Governor Bill Weld. I don't ever recall the Senator involving anyone outside his inner circle of advisors and contributors in even trivial campaign decisions.
It's true that the longterm effects of the Dean campaign on American politics may have been overrated by amateur and professional pundits alike. But the Dean campaign did, accidentally or otherwise embrace a new breed of truly [little 'd'] democratic campaign methods that will radically transform the way in which politicians and activists mobilize and empower their supporters to contribute, recruit, vote, and remain active.
DeanforAmerica was the Alpha release. I have no doubt that the Beta will be much better, whether it is implemented by a major American political campaign, or otherwise. Personally, my one hope is that social computing technologies such as blogs, email, meetups, etc will enliven public discourse and lead to a rennaissance of American political and social activism. The best measure of success would be increased voter turnout in local, state, and national elections across the country.
Permalink to Comment2. misuba on February 22, 2004 8:56 PM writes...
Would anyone have asked Gov. Dean about his decision to forgo public matching funds in a debate? If they wouldn't have, it isn't an issue in the sense I think Clay is talking about.
As for your charge about Kerry, though, it certainly doesn't look like he's adopting any of the Internet-based techniques we're talking about. I have a feeling that uptake of these strategies is generally going to be slower than pundits predict.
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