The Dean technique
Despite the fact that the former Vermont governor's presidential campaign fizzled in the Democratic Party's Iowa primaries, there is no doubt that Dean's impact on the way political candidates harness the power of the Web will persevere. From using the Internet as an effective way to collect campaign contributions to fostering interaction among supporters, the Dean campaign made one fact abundantly clear: The Internet is the killer application for generating grassroots political interest.
Online-campaign managers for both candidates agree that the biggest leap forward in the 2004 race is the use of campaign Web sites to communicate directly with the public. Whereas in the past, candidate sites largely served as libraries of information already available through the offline campaigns, this year the emphasis has been placed squarely on interactivity.
"We believe that there is no one better than our grassroots supporters to spread the president's message," DeFeo says. "The Internet has been our most powerful tool in empowering and energizing people. The site is getting people activated and providing them with the tools we feel will best help re-elect the president and vice-president."
DeFeo points to the Bush site's success at recruiting supporters for door-to-door neighbourhood walking tours, during which campaigners hand out literature and ask for votes. He says several thousand walks incorporating tens of thousands of volunteers were organised online during the first two weeks after the effort was launched. The Bush site also serves as a contact point for supporters willing to host campaign rallies in their homes, and it offers users the ability to garner contact information on 20 undecided voters in their region, whom they are encouraged to recruit.
The approach is very similar in the Kerry camp. Ross says volunteers have increasingly looked to the campaign's Web site for information on how to get involved on both the local and national levels.
"The Internet has been extremely successful at connecting with the public," Ross says. "In addition to recruiting volunteers, the site is also putting volunteers to work and giving them campaign-sanctioned activities to participate in. It's an absolutely vital tool, in that the site gives people the ability to organise in their own local communities and get other people involved."
The Kerry site mirrors the Bush site in many ways, offering the ability for volunteers to organise meetings, recruit fellow voters and host events. Both sites prominently feature tools to help get unregistered Americans signed up to vote in this year's election.
In one sense, however, interactivity on the two sites is very different. Both the Bush and Kerry sites offer blogs, with timely bits of information and news related to the presidential race. But the Kerry site allows registered users to post to its blog, while the Bush blog serves largely as another channel for distributing campaign-approved information.
To Ross, the difference in blogging philosophies is representative of the candidates' respective politics.
"Rather than just sending out the message, our blog is an interactive source for building a community, for facilitating discussions and giving feedback, or for volunteers to communicate with each other and [the] campaign," Ross says. "That's a pretty big difference in terms of how we approach it."
