Election 2000: The Net and Politics

On Tues­day, US votes will go to the polls and select their next pres­i­dent. This elec­tion will mark the first time the Inter­net has played a sig­nif­i­cant role in pol­i­tics and it seems there is no turn­ing back. In today’s col­umn, I’m tak­ing a look at how the Inter­net changed pol­i­tics and what can be learned from it in the future.

Web and Email: Essen­tial Cam­paign­ing Tools

In 1992, the Clinton/Gore cam­paign was one of the great inno­va­tor in that field. Using a list server, the demo­c­ra­tic ticket sent out pol­icy papers, press releases, and announce­ments of gath­er­ing to thou­sands of sub­scribers. After they moved into the White House, they con­tin­ued pro­vid­ing detailed pol­icy infor­ma­tion via the Inter­net. In those days, how­ever, few peo­ple cared as the Inter­net had not yet cap­tured the pub­lic imagination.

This year, politi­cians fully seized the Inter­net as an essen­tial cam­paign­ing tool. As the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign hits its last few hours, tons of emails are invad­ing my mail­box. They come from all par­ties and it is inter­est­ing to see them pile. Peo­ple are ask­ing me to vote for Bush, Gore, or even Nader. One has to give credit to all the par­ties involved: they are get­ting the Inter­net and are using it to not only rally their base but also expand beyond it.

Going beyond email, the can­di­dates bypassed the tra­di­tional media fil­ter by post­ing their posi­tions directly to the web. Both Gore and Bush have exten­sive reper­to­ries of poli­cies listed on their site. If you want to know about a candidate’s posi­tion on just about any­thing, you can just check their site and see where they stand on dif­fer­ent issues. In research­ing a story about their Inter­net stance, I made heavy use of the web sites and dis­cov­ered them to be fairly com­pre­hen­sive. By using the web, the can­di­dates appealed directly to vot­ers, mak­ing them­selves more acces­si­ble and pro­vid­ing their view of the world to any­one inter­ested enough to read the sites. The web has essen­tially allowed, for the first time, to assess politi­cians side, judg­ing them on their comments.

How­ever, the web has been treach­er­ous to can­di­dates too. Bush, in par­tic­u­lar, made a few mis­steps at the begin­ning of his cam­paign when a spoof site popped up and he tried to shut it down. By leav­ing the Inter­net com­po­nent to vol­un­teers instead of putting full paid staffers on it, Bush set him­self up for prob­lems. They arrived in the way of gwbush.com, a par­ody site which was very crit­i­cal of the can­di­date and got him to say that “there ought to be lim­its to free­dom on the Internet.”

Gore, on the other hand, found him­self entan­gled in a web of ridicule when he said that he had been instru­men­tal in the devel­op­ment of the Internet.

Fur­ther­more, sites like OpenSecrets.org have tracked PAC dona­tions to can­di­dates and made it pos­si­ble for more peo­ple to see who’s being sup­ported by cer­tain groups. This has made con­tri­bu­tions a lot more trans­par­ent and can­di­dates a lot more ner­vous as they try to dis­tance them­selves from some of the more con­tro­ver­sial PACs.

But inter­est­ingly enough, the cur­rent front con­tenders were not the early adopters of cam­paign related tech­nol­ogy in this elec­tion. The also-ran (McCain and Bradley) showed the way in terms of using the Inter­net by lever­ag­ing its ubiq­uity to help them in their fundrais­ing effort.

Both McCain and Bradley pointed peo­ple to their web­sites in every speech, col­lect cam­paign dona­tions and mobi­liz­ing vol­un­teers online. While their bid for can­di­dacy failed, they real­ized tremen­dous sav­ings by using the Inter­net for fundrais­ing and devel­oped a new chan­nel for cam­paign con­tri­bu­tions. This, I believe, will become a sta­ple of cam­paigns in the future.

The Inter­net as Issue

Another inter­est­ing fac­tor in this pres­i­den­tial elec­tion has been the pres­ence of the Inter­net in pol­icy dis­cus­sions. Accord­ing to a search on the debate tran­scripts, the Inter­net was men­tioned 17 times dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial debate. Bush sees the Inter­net as both evil (link­ing the Inter­net to the Columbine mas­sacre) and use­ful for edu­ca­tion, as long as there is fil­ter­ing the Inter­net in pub­lic places. Gore, on the other hand, sees the Inter­net as the solu­tion to many prob­lems includ­ing reduc­ing the size of the gov­ern­ment by mov­ing more of its ser­vices online and deal­ing with the cri­sis in agri­cul­tural by spon­sor­ing sup­port for Inter­net busi­nesses in rural areas. While in the final analy­sis, lit­tle in those com­ments may have any influ­ence in the next four years, they show dif­fer­ent states of mind when it comes to tech­nol­ogy and they serve to illus­trate that the Inter­net has gone a long way from being ignored four years ago to being included in pres­i­den­tial debates nowadays.

Also of inter­est is the fact that each can­di­date has artic­u­lated his posi­tion on a num­ber of Inter­net issues. It’s the first time each can­di­date has pre­sented what can be con­sid­ered a net agenda and rep­re­sents a major step in the advance­ment of the indus­try. The Inter­net is no longer just a new tech­nol­ogy trend, it now per­me­ates every aspect of busi­ness, and pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates rec­og­nize our industry’s impor­tance in the economy.

The rise of the E-class

Both Bush and Gore have gone out of their way to get the sup­port of big name VCs and other tech­nol­ogy lead­ers. The good thing for those of us involved in the indus­try is that Inter­net issues are now on the national agenda. The bad thing is that most peo­ple in the tech­nol­ogy arena are polit­i­cally naïve, when com­pared to lead­ers in other indus­tries. There are only few efforts to lobby con­gress on rel­e­vant issues, and when those come head to head with groups lob­by­ing for brick-and-mortar com­pa­nies, they usu­ally loose. It will take some time for the tech­nol­ogy indus­try to recruit the right kind of lob­by­ists, peo­ple who have had a lot of expe­ri­ence in the field and are well con­nected on both sides of Penn­syl­va­nia avenue. How­ever, the good news is that the sup­port the two front con­tenders for the president’s job have received will prob­a­bly come with strings attached and the lead­ers who are sup­port­ing the win­ning can­di­date will get wider access to the White House, hope­fully help­ing gov­ern­ment to under­stand some of the crit­i­cal issues related to our fast mov­ing industry.

Voter Trader: Legal or not, they won’t go away

Another impor­tant devel­op­ment in this year’s elec­tion is the rise of vote swap­ping sites, like Nader­Trader, Vote Swap, and Vote­Ex­change. The basic premise of those sites is that peo­ple in one swing state can exchange their vote with peo­ple in other states. Many of those sites have been estab­lished as a way to rally sup­port for Gore in swing states, where Nader could end up giv­ing a win to Bush. Whether they will have any influ­ence is still up for dis­cus­sion at this point (we’ll only know early Wednes­day) but those sites rep­re­sent a new way in which the Inter­net could influ­ence elec­tions. If peo­ple start swap­ping their votes, one could start see­ing a larger focus on cam­paign­ing directly to those sites’ con­stituen­cies. In the future, sin­gle issue vot­ers might end up exchang­ing votes at a more local level in order to get their agenda to pass. If, as the media seem to say, most vot­ers are truly cen­trist, what we may end up with is a set of loose coali­tion formed on the web. Imag­ine two peo­ple: One of them wants a new rail­road, the other a new bridge. Using one of those sites, they could essen­tially say “Vote for the Repub­li­can mayor because he sup­ports con­struc­tion of a new bridge and I’ll vote for the Demo­c­ra­tic state sen­a­tor who sup­ports the con­struc­tion of a new rail­road.” This could rep­re­sent a new trend in pol­i­tics that would prob­a­bly shock politi­cians as they would have to choose their con­stituen­cies care­fully and fol­low through on their promises. In a way, this could actu­ally be the rise of an E-democracy.

Instant Polling: Get your wrong num­bers quickly

How­ever, the influ­ence of the net on pol­i­tics this year also had some darker sides. The one I am the most wor­ried about is that of doing instant Inter­net polls after a candidate’s com­ment. Dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial debates, the major news chan­nels all posted mul­ti­ple choice ques­tions on their site. Peo­ple would instantly reply and the TV chan­nel would report the result about 15 min­utes after the polls had been posted. What wor­ries me about this instant polling is that it is far from being sci­en­tific. Because the peo­ple who go to those sites were self-selected, the polls were largely skewed in favor of one can­di­date over the other. Fur­ther exac­er­bat­ing the prob­lem was the fact that many news­pa­pers would then pick up those polls and reprint them. All that was accom­plished in the process was cloud­ing the sta­tis­ti­cal pic­ture by rely­ing on people’s gut reac­tion to a can­di­date. If there is one thing that needs to be refined in the future, I think that kind of gotcha polling will have to go.

In the early 90’s, before the Inter­net was as pop­u­lar as it is now, many of the peo­ple on Usenet talked about the net even­tu­ally becom­ing what Jef­fer­son envi­sioned: a mar­ket­place of exchange of ideas. With its grow­ing com­mer­cial­iza­tion, the net has gone beyond just being a nice place to chat and become the back­bone of a whole new world. On Tues­day, Amer­i­cans will vote and we will see how the online exchange of ideas can influ­ence the rest of the world.