2004 : The Year the Internet Changes Politics

The recent rise of social soft­ware, weblogs, flash­mobs, and online polit­i­cal cam­paign­ing may rep­re­sent new oppor­tu­ni­ties for the technology-aware politician.

Already, Gov­er­nor Howard Dean, a demo­c­ra­tic can­di­date in the 2004 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign is show­ing that good under­stand­ing of those new tech­nolo­gies can help increase the vis­i­bil­ity of a can­di­date in an oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult field. At the cur­rent time, his site lists the fact that 255,173 peo­ple have signed up for his list. While the num­ber may be small in terms of estab­lish­ing a win in the long run, it is an inter­est­ing sta­tis­tic. Wit­ness, for exam­ple, the growth of social soft­ware net­works like Ryze and Friend­ster, which both have over a mil­lion peo­ple with lim­ited mar­ket­ing being done.

For exam­ple, my Friend­ster page tells me that, through only 11 peo­ple, I am con­nected to over 100 thou­sand peo­ple. Let’s assume that only one per­cent of those peo­ple are actu­ally inter­ested in chat­ting with me and I am still deal­ing with a thou­sand peo­ple. Account­ing for over­laps, Dean could turn his base of hard­core sup­port­ers into a group that needs to con­vince about 52 mil­lion peo­ple in order to win the next elec­tion. In terms of doing so, each of his sup­port­ers would need to con­vince 200 peo­ple (or less than one every other day until the next elec­tion) in order to ensure a win in the next elec­tion. This is a fairly major dis­rup­tive force in the long run.

I would ven­ture to say that 2004 could finally become the year the Inter­net actu­ally has an impact on pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics. Here are some areas where the Inter­net will have impact:

Financ­ing

: In a semi-tongue in cheek chal­lenge, Dean raised half a mil­lion dol­lars online in only a few days. This is hardly insignif­i­cant in that, up until recently, Dean was con­sid­ered an also-ran who could not pos­si­bly get the nom­i­na­tion from the demo­c­ra­tic field. His use of the online space for financ­ing has allowed him to bypass the tra­di­tional chan­nels of fundrais­ing and take his case directly to his con­stituents, ask­ing them to act and get­ting good results at it. I sus­pect that, as the cam­paign con­tin­ues, all can­di­dates are going to start pay­ing more atten­tion to this end of things as smaller con­stituent, in large num­bers, can cre­ate large pools of cash.

Word of Mouse

: This is another area in which some­one in the Dean cam­paign has a good under­stand­ing. While the main­stream was ignor­ing his cam­paign, some­thing was hap­pen­ing in the weblog world. Dean some­how man­aged to cap­ture the atten­tion of weblog­gers and get him­self hyped up in that fash­ion. This is another area worth keep­ing an eye on in terms of how it will shape the debate over the next few months. As Trent Lott prob­a­bly knows by now, weblogs are a pow­er­ful voice that can slowly change the national dia­logue. Con­sid­er­ing Dean’s early lead in that space, there are good poten­tial for a lot of this cam­paign being waged online.

I sus­pect that some of the smear­ing that usu­ally accom­pa­nies pres­i­den­tial cam­paign will start mov­ing to the online world within the next few months, with rumors and innu­en­dos being cir­cu­lated online as well as in the tra­di­tional media. How­ever, this is going to be an inter­est­ing chal­lenge as such rumors are usu­ally tightly ana­lyzed in the blo­gos­phere. The ques­tion here is whether one can actu­ally smear a can­di­date in the blo­gos­phere with­out suf­fer­ing some reper­cus­sions if the alle­ga­tions are false (or even if they are cor­rect, as the attempted smear may be worse than the actual act). Con­sid­er­ing the fact that the blo­gos­phere tends to be more left­ist than the rest of the elec­torate (although there are now more right-wing weblogs crop­ping up), alle­ga­tions against left-wing can­di­dates will be dis­sected and countered.

Activism

: The next ques­tion, and really the only one impor­tant in a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, is whether peo­ple in the blo­gos­phere will actu­ally go out and vote. While there is con­sid­er­able dis­cus­sion in the online world, there is lit­tle data about the cor­re­la­tion between online par­tic­i­pa­tion in polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion and actual vot­ing pat­terns. Con­sid­er­ing the demo­c­ra­tic débâ­cle in the 2002 elec­tion, one might even be tempted to assume that the blo­gos­phere is merely noise and that blog­gers do not rally to the vot­ing booths. If that is the case, the blo­gos­phere could turn out to be cre­at­ing a dis­tor­tion effect that will have to be ana­lyzed by poll­sters in the future as it might affect polls in a neg­a­tive fash­ion, mak­ing track­ing polls almost irrel­e­vant prior to elec­tion day. On the other hand, if blog­gers turn to the vot­ing booths in drove, poll­sters will have to fig­ure out how to break into that world and sus­tain a rela­tion­ship with this new consistency.

The chal­lenge for politi­cians in engag­ing the blo­gos­phere is that they would have to enter into more of a con­ver­sa­tion with their con­stituents. This will be an inter­est­ing chal­lenge in and off itself as the blo­gos­phere is not united by any under­ly­ing ide­ol­ogy, but by the use of a basic set of soft­ware tools. Estab­lish­ing one’s own blog, as the Dean cam­paign did, may work well in start­ing that debate. But estab­lish­ing the blog is only the first step. The next one (and the more dif­fi­cult part) is to ensure that the dia­logue con­tin­ues and that the con­stituents feed­back is included in the over­all shap­ing of the cam­paign. This rep­re­sents a chal­lenge and a switch from the idea of a few peo­ple (gen­er­ally mem­bers of a party, either Democ­rats or Repub­li­can) shap­ing the plat­form, to open­ing up to a wider group that may not always agree with one’s pol­icy. Lis­ten to the online world too much and you might loose some of your largest con­trib­u­tors, as well as the sup­port of your party. Lis­ten to your party too much, and you might loose poten­tial vot­ers. This polit­i­cal tightrope is one politi­cians will have to nav­i­gate carefully.

Any way you look at it, though, it appears that the Inter­net is now get­ting to the point where it will affect the pres­i­den­tial race. With over half of all Amer­i­cans now being online, it is obvi­ous that the net will have some impact. As to whether this impact will be major or not, it is too early to tell but, at the cur­rent time, it looks like 2004 may join 1960 as a year when a new medium changes the polit­i­cal landscape.