The Obama Campaign’s Tech-Savvy Revolution
Since the Howard Dean 2004 presidential campaign, a debate has emerged among Republicans that takes the form of either “Is the Right behind online?” or “Why is the right behind online?” On the Thursday after Election Day, the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican National Committees discussed a range of issues, including technology, and those discussions told us quite a bit.
Dean, soon to be the ex-DNC chairman, said, “But the Internet is an extraordinary — what the Internet is, is a community. It’s a community of people who don’t happen to live in the same place.”
RNC Chairman Mike Duncan responded: “I want to compliment you on what you did to inspire us and challenge us. Your use of the Internet fund-raising in your presidential campaign, what you did there, the social networking that your team has done.”
This is a fundamentally different perspective of what the Internet is for — forming a social network or raising money. But these views don’t necessarily tell us much about technology.
The Democrat’s vision of community dominated in a quantitative sense. Using TwitVote as a proxy, that community broke 6-1 for Barack Obama, explained in part by Wired magazine’s Technology Scorecard. Clearly, technologists were for Obama and the Democrats.
However, this is not a complete analysis. Compare the technology story with the youth vote, which Obama won. The Republicans once again leveraged their youth activists more successfully. In an interview, the executive director of the Young Democrats of America celebrated their voter contacts as a measure of their activism. The spokeswoman for the College Republican National Committee responded in that interview that in two weekends, the CRNC had exceeded the YDA’s voter contacts in the entire general election. The YDA’s executive director was shocked into silence. Indeed, the CRNC claims credit for phone call volume totaling nearly one-quarter of all voter contact in some states. Did the left win the youth vote? Yes. Did the left win youth activism? Perhaps not.
Just as the left winning the students doesn’t translate into superior student activism, winning the technologists doesn’t translate into superior technology. Between students and technologists, the left has a much more technologically-savvy community and has clearly dominated high-tech activism. Where the right has translated technology into traditional low-tech forms like call sheets and targeted scripts, they have been as, or even more, successful.
Let’s consider some examples from fundraising, GOTV, and communications.
Fundraising
In the Republican primary, Mitt Romney’s campaign argued that they were achieving tremendous success at online fundraising. While strictly true, former RNC eCampaign Director Michael Turk demonstrated that they were using the Internet for fulfillment of offline pledges. They were melding traditional high-dollar fundraising techniques with a new, more efficient mechanism for clearing checks and credit cards.
The Democrats have used online fundraising to lower the barrier to entry for medium and low-dollar donors, which flooded into the system creating the financial juggernauts of the Dean and Obama campaigns. By contrast, Republicans added, say, 5% efficiency onto an old system, as Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry have noted. (Note that one constituency on the right, Libertarians and Ron Paul supporters, did engage in significant online activity. But these were significantly — and unfortunately — rejected by the McCain campaign and the Republican Party.)
So Democrats have broken new ground with fundraising technology, while Republicans merely used technology as a tool in their existing efforts.
GOTV
The RNC has been successful at integrating the use of highly-targeted information into their get-out-the-vote operation. They have matched consumer data to the list of voters, allowing them to predict the voting behavior of unregistered or unreliable voters. The Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas noted in a profile of the RNC’s Cyrus Krohn:
For 3 1/2 months, using online micro-targeting and data-matching, he identified a set of voters and turned them out to the polls. Statewide turnout for the Louisiana race was 46 percent. Of those voters who interacted with Krohn’s online targeting — he won’t say how much of the total vote — 76 percent voted, he claims. Krohn says he’s not suggesting that the RNC is responsible for Jindal’s win. What it does suggest, however, is that the model could have significant impact on voter turnout, he adds. “Everyone is talking about Obama and his success with the youth vote. Well, there’s a significant older demographic on the Web, and what I was able to do in Louisiana is identify and interact with an older voting bloc,” Krohn says.
Krohn used technology to identify people who could be persuaded to get out and vote. These lists of people were converted into call sheets, walk sheets, and scripts that volunteers could use to reach these voters. The volunteer didn’t have to understand the modeling. The core of the 72-hour program involved converting high-powered IT programming into something volunteers can use.
Use of micro-targeting and data-matching to find people who should support you, register them, persuade them with targeted messages, and get them to vote with those messages (early if possible)worked quite well. And all the while, field staff, perhaps as ignorant of the technology as the volunteers, only needed to tweak scripts and call sheets.
As ingenious as this was, the problem is that the left could catch up. Dean noted:
Because we had a national voter file, all that information of those millions and millions of voters that came out and voted in the late primaries. We know — we knew who people were who moved from, say, Indiana to North Carolina and needed to be re-registered. And that kind of database — we haven’t had that capability before. So we raised a lot of money but we spent an awful lot of it catching up with these guys, who, frankly, when I got there had a 15- year technological advantage over us. You know, we now can do what they can do. We have your credit card data like they do.
I suspect that the RNC’s GOTV program is still more efficient in both time and money than the DNC’s. However the DNC has more volunteers and money so that the impact of that efficiency is irrelevant. To maintain their previous advantage, the RNC will need to continue to innovate and recruit substantially more volunteers.
Communications
The third way that technology has affected campaigns is the ability to communicate. With Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, and Think Progress, the left completely reshaped the news cycle. These outlets introduced information that the McCain campaign was forced to respond to, while the blogs on the right rarely forced the Obama campaign to react. The Center for American Progress, the parent of Think Progress, has made clear that their role is to play in the media and public opinion. And they have succeeded. One of the great challenges for the right over the next cycle will be to develop an infrastructure for investigating and propagating politically powerful information that impacts the news cycle.
This is a significant shift over previous years. Since the 1990s, the right has dominated communication with talk radio, Drudge Report, and, later, Fox News, providing a structural advantage by allowing them to talk to their base and also impact the mainstream media cycle.
But 2008 was different in several ways. Talk radio and Fox addressed conservatives, but there didn’t seem to be many persuadable voters who were listening and watching. Several significant Drudge stories failed to get real traction outside of Fox. Meanwhile, Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo were able to regularly push fact-based stories into CNN, MSNBC, the networks, and newspapers. Sometimes, the effect was merely to flood the zone with enough questions that the McCain campaign and RNC was in full defensive mode.
The great conservative media success of 2004, the destruction of Dan Rather, was a story about the media getting something wrong. In 2008, the great liberal media success was not letting the right get a word in edgewise.
There was one significant advance on the right this cycle. Prior to 2008, Election Day operations were meant to document the path to litigation and recounts. In 2008, however, another component emerged: an Election Day media operation.
Election Journal and Vote Fraud Squad documented voting irregularities around the country. Two readers of Election Journal captured live footage of Black Panthers at a Philadelphia precinct that looked like voter intimidation. This video made it onto Drudge, Fox News, and local media. In a close election, these powerful images could have moved public opinion.
Obama’s secret sauce
In the end, the Obama campaign’s various technologies for fundraising, GOTV, and communications were side shows. They all derived from a much more fundamental innovation. Rolling Stone described the most important insight of the Obama campaign from one of their trainers: “We decided that we didn’t want to train volunteers. We want to train organizers — folks who can fend for themselves.” Obama’s website then empowered these organizers. The article continued:
“At the same time, the campaign was developing a new high-tech toolbox to enable its supporters to keep the momentum going — both online and off. With the help of one of the founders of Facebook, the Obama campaign created, MyBo, its own social-networking tool, through which supporters could organize themselves however they saw fit.”
You can make the fundraisers a little more efficient. You can make the GOTV more efficient. You can have a better message and get it out better. These are linear improvements. But political organizations grow exponentially when you improve the organizers. That’s what the Obama campaign did. Everything was focused on making the organizer better.
Ultimately, the GOP will have to learn this message. We will have to learn to empower our activists by incentivizing recruiters. The person who recruits 100 volunteers will have to be as important as the person who raises $100,000. When the GOP organizes itself around these principles and deploys technology to make these people better, then the center-right electorate will translate into winning electoral majorities.
I’m going to learn how to be a community organizer, like our president elect.
I did notice any and all talking heads for Obama on TV, would take over the
interview or talk over the other person. They were rude. They would only
talk the prepared message and not answer questions.
That’s why Megyn Kelly at Fox made news herself, She insisted Bill Burton
answer her question.
It’s good to see credit given to the Ron Paul campaign for doing quite well in this regard. The lesson from the Paul campaign is that the only way you are going to be able to match the left in its use of technology is to attract the young, libertarian crowd that Paul won in droves during the primary. McCain’s defeat in this area was inevitable because of the way that he stood against so many of the ideals that this segment of the Republican Party stands for. Who would want to go work for a candidate who has that relationship with your ideas and principles?
Also, and in some ways more importantly, in collecting contributions via credit card on the internet one has to make sure they turn off security check elements like address, billing zip code verification and the 3 digit security on the back of the card.
This makes it easier for people making donations with less boring detail to fill out, etc. and lets the person make a donation more efficiently with less bother.
Occasionally you’ll get people claiming an error on their statement but this can be easily credited back.
There’s no doubt that electronic media & technology play an important role in this new millennium.
Internet sales are a $200+ billion industry. Cell phone have commercials. The ‘New Media’ is in the blogs & E-Zines. Radio & television are old standards.
Obama utilized all to great information, and fund raising advantage. Some say illegally. But was that really the difference?
The 18-25 demo, which is more tech savvy and plugged in, is always touted, but rarely votes.
Didn’t McCain have a web site? Yes. Didn’t McCain collect donation online? Yes. Didn’t McCain advertise on radio & TV? Yes. Didn’t McCain robo-call? Yes.
So, what was the difference? Besides Obama’s huge (some say illegal) stash of campaign dollars which purchased consistent, continuous & expensive mega watt advertising?
The difference was Obama’s opponent: a low watt, inconsistent, middle of the roader that wasn’t all that distinguishable from some of the contenders Obama vanquished in the primaries.
But even then, Obama needed every bit of that $600 million dollar war chest, and every up to the last campaign hour to finally, -finally-, close the deal on a maverick.
All that was needed to defeat the Obamanator was a strong, hard core, on-point conservative message – and a man or woman who believed in it.
Although technology had something to do with the Obama winning, the real culprit of the Republican defeat was their misguided policies and irrational positions. They forgot what humans look like . . .
How funny is it that on a page called “TwitVote”, most people voted for Obama…
you live by the sword, you die by it.
after the ignorami who voted him in witness a jimmy carter-era presidency of choking inflation, 10%+ unemployment, long lines and outrageous prices at the gas pumps, the internet savvy culture will use the web to slay the monster, too.
Obama ran a great campaign. He would have lost if the media were not in the tank for him. His connections and associations with unrepentant terrorists, unrepentant racists, anti-Americans, bigots and his quid pro quos with corrupt slumlords and terrible record as a state senator were all suppressed by all but Fox New’s Sean Hannity and talk radio. Having a weak opponent was a great plus and taking both sides of every issue and getting away with it also helped. It was the perfect storm to elect the worst choice for America. With the House and Senate rules by Democrats Obama will be a virtual dictator. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely and the power to tax includes the power to destroy and when combined with a Commander in Chief with hubris filled ambition the results could push America into a depression and a weak second rate power with enemies that cannot wait to take advantage of our new appeaser in chief.
Did these internet-savvy techniques create the Obama fashionability, or did the the Obama campaign just ride that wave effectively? The “community” activities of the campaign were low on thought content, big on breathlessness. Even in the Ron Paul campaign, the youth support was much more hype-driven than libertarians usually are.
As to the news stories driven by the internet left, getting over the hump into the newspapers and networks still seems to be the threshold – and thus bias still applies. Obama could ignore because there wasn’t sufficient critical mass of pressure, as there was for McCain. As the MSM loses audience, I don’t know how long that will hold, but it was still true for this election.
Anyone wanting to jump in with a new GOP or third-party caucus will find any democrat advantage isn’t built on any lasting foundations. All will find practically none of the software will be difficult to reverse engineer, as most is free-open source, anyway.
In the last year, I’ve been astonished to find out just how old many of the “tech-savvy” activists really are. There are a whole lot of retirees out there doing these things, not at all what the popular conception is. I’ve concluded a conservative candidate won’t have any trouble at all in gaining volunteer/community organizer support if they can pass the tests of skeptics.
As for conservative youths, I’m sorry, but they’re not going to turn out and go through the whole grind just to install a new boss. If you want Ronulons or “Rontards” in the trenches, they’ll want Mark Sanford at the top of the next GOP ticket. They won’t settle for some contrived pick.
I have worked on GOP grass roots organizing since 1972 and your article is the first time I have gotten a complete picture of how the Democrats have been successful. One of the issues appears to be how do you teach old folks(like me how to use facebook.
Jerry Pournelle, if I’m remembering right, said that the Country Clubbers were disdainful of a ground operation. Instead, I gather they want to hire pros.
Well, from their perspective of all money and no principles, I suppose that makes sense.
I believe he also said that the GOP stiff-armed Ron Paul.
Now, I’m not a Paulian, but we need their help. We need to talk to them, and see if we can come to an arrangement. I doubt if Mark Sanford being on the top of the ticket is on the table since Sarah Palin is far and away the numero uno contender for that spot.
There are people that need to be purged from this party, but I don’t think Paulians are generally among them. RINOs are, and not just any RINOs, but the ones that refuse to accept that this is a conservative party with a libertarian winglet.
So it all comes back to the country clubbers….bad politics and bad execution all in one…a gift that keeps on giving for the Dems whom they seem to like more than us.
This is no doubt self-interested, but it would be immensely useful. Remember the ten thousand ‘Bush is bad’ books? What if before the election, a couple dozen new books by ordinary Americans supporting the R ideals were circulated, and put on websites, and interviewed on talk radio?
Or maybe a more steady drip of them all along?
Book writers are the heavy artillery. If there were some tech-savvy way to make them more ‘mobile’ and ‘lighter and faster’ and ‘with heavier punch’….like sites that enabled conservative authors to promote easier, and tools that helped conservative authors write quicker, and research tools that pulled up details for convincing arguements and editorial help, and so forth….it might be the military difference between a cannon pulled by horses and a tank.
Being able to pilot a boat in fair weather and smooth seas does not indicate a good sailor. Any analysis of campaign strategies must take into account that Dem’s always campaign in favorable media conditions while Republicans are always trying to make their way into a gale force headwind. This is not an outright dismissal of things the Dem’s may have done well, but a caution in assessing how effective a particular strategy or technique really is.
For example a large part of Obama’s fundraising comes from small donation over the internet. However, considering Obama opened the door to campaign fraud by being the only candidate (Rep or Dem) to: a) Turn off all anti-fraud online checks (which rejects false names and international contributions); and b) Refuse FEC scrutiny of these small donations. Isn’t it interesting that half of his fundraising comes from these sources? Had a Republican done this the media would have descended on this story like a ton of bricks and quickly pressured the campaign to open up the books to the FEC. Instead they kept a lid on it and allowed Obama to take fraudulent donations (a number of bloggers donated fraudulently to prove the point).
In the end, can Republicans learn something from the Dem’s about online fund raising? Not likely, unless they want to break the law. And if they did we can be darn sure the media will expose them.
In the end, can Republicans learn something from the Dem’s about online fund raising? Not likely, unless they want to break the law.
Did they break the law? If the law isn’t strong enough, then the law and enforcement needs to be stronger. I’d put this at the top of the list of things Republicans need to make happen with campaign financing.
You know, I don’t think the problem was “not being conservative enough,” it was Republican politicians not being republican enough.
GOP.com is boring. republicanforareason.com doesn’t work – I’ve signed up several times and never got a confirmation. Pathetic.
what the Internet is, is a community. It’s a community of people who don’t happen to live in the same place.”
It’s a community of people you don’t know, have enver and will never see and who may not actually exist. So much for reality based.
AS we shrink into irrelevance, how about we consider why we are out gunned by the musicians, artists, educators, etc. of our time. Is it perhaps that our ideas are outdated and we fail to see the world at large in its current climate. Is culture, education, and science that scary? Not to those involved.