With Elective Offices on the Line, More Campaigning Goes Online

By STACY FORSTER

Madison – Click on, log in, check out.

What started as an online political counterculture of a few activists is growing into a major force in American elections. Campaigns reach out to bloggers to feed content; online media report the ins and outs of campaigns; and candidates frequently update their own Web sites to make them must-reads for loyal supporters.

“There’s just an explosion of content out there that’s campaign- related,” Tom Bevan, co-founder and executive editor of RealClearPolitics.com, said Thursday during a conference on how the Internet will affect candidates and media coverage in the 2008 presidential campaign.

The Online News Association and WisPolitics.com sponsored the conference.

Each election brings an innovation. In the 2000 presidential race, candidates learned how to raise money on the Web. In 2004, blogging came of age. And in the 2006 midterm elections, you weren’t a major candidate if you didn’t have a page on Facebook and video on YouTube.

With the interaction among activists, bloggers, candidates and media outlets, the Internet is “increasingly one of the places where politics is happening in a very seamless way,” said Ben Smith, a reporter and blogger for The Politico Web site.

But just because a campaign has an online strategy doesn’t mean that it can ignore its real purpose: appealing to voters and getting a candidate elected.

“Getting 100 people at a $100-a-plate fund-raiser or getting people at your town hall meting is just as important,” said Brian Fraley, a Republican strategist for the Markesan Group and author of the Daily Takes blog.

‘Notable class’

Americans are increasingly turning to the Web for information about politics and elections. In the 2006 midterm elections, 15% of American adults said the Internet was their primary source for campaign news, compared with 7% in the 2002 midterm elections, according to a survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

What’s more, 23% of campaign Internet users created or forwarded original online commentary or videos – what the Pew project called a “notable class of online political activists.”

The candidates for the 2008 presidential election are stretching their Web offerings, allowing visitors to create their own Web pages, sign up for text messages, contribute to blogs and watch video.

Online video and social networking sites that the campaigns create will likely be the innovations of 2008, Vaughn Ververs, senior political editor for CBSNews.com, said at the conference.

As bureau chief for IowaPolitics.com, Chris Dorsey has a front- row seat to the action ahead of Iowa’s January first-in-the-nation contest. Though the Iowa caucuses will still be won on face-to-face campaigning, he said, the Internet is one way for candidates to make their way into more living rooms on the computer, if not in person.

“Back in the ’70s and ’80s, they needed to call big-time press conferences to announce something big or to defend themselves,” Dorsey said in an interview. “Now they can use the Internet.”

Bevan said news outlets in Iowa and New Hampshire were posting such things as raw interviews with candidates or video of editorial board meetings, giving candidates a broader reach to voters in other states.

When every campaign stop shows up on YouTube, it can spell problems for candidates who misspeak. Jim Brady, executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, pointed to a racial comment by Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) that was caught on video last summer. Allen lost the election and his Senate seat.

“Now when (candidates) are out speaking, is everybody thinking about that moment?” Brady said at the conference.

Too much credit?

The candidates are also subjected to greater scrutiny, with citizen bloggers poring over campaign finance documents or records for dirt on contestants.

And by taking a message to bloggers, a campaign can keep alive an issue that hasn’t been covered in the mainstream media, Brady said.

Cory Liebmann, who writes the One Wisconsin Now blog, said mainstream media have become more accepting of following up on a blog posting.

“Most bloggers will admit we can only take it so far,” he said in an interview.

Fraley, who was a consultant for J.B. Van Hollen, said the Republican’s campaign for attorney general last fall used bloggers as sort of a focus group to test how well a campaign message played.

But Jay Bullock, who writes the blog Folkbum’s Rambles and Rants, said bloggers were sometimes given too much credit.

“Blogs don’t vote, and what’s going to change an election or change a campaign is a lot of people on the ground and a lot of money on television,” Bullock said at the conference.

The march of technology is making some traditional campaign tactics harder. Pollsters, for example, have a hard time getting a representative sample because more people are shedding land-phone lines for cellular phones.

“We worry a lot about that problem,” J. Ann Selzer, president of pollster Selzer & Co in Des Moines, Iowa, told the conference.

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