Excerpts from the article below are from David Weigel piece in Campaigns and Elections, October/November 2005. The article featured is titled, "Blogging Down the Money Trail: Candidates look to Web activists outside their campaign structures." (pp. 19-22). The full article is not included, because I don't want to be accused of theft, so I sampled the sections pertaining to our Kos community.
Frankly, I believe the author misses the point. Granted, the authors in this magazine, which is an "industry" type journal, are interested in learning about the technique and utility of contemporary political trends and practices, but they ultimately reduce the net to a fund-raising tool. He completely misses the importance of the community built within the blogs. Quite obviously not a user.
When U.S. Rep. Rob Portman left the house in April to become U.S. trade representative, Democrats were not expected to make much of a race for his seat. After all, the congressman's district in Ohio's rural, southwest 2nd district had been in Republican hands since 1974. More recently, it gave Portman and President George W. Bush respectively 72 percent and 63 percent of the vote in November 2004. But some liberal activists spied an opportunity. At the blog Daily Kos, a liberal Web site with more than 500,000 daily hits, a law students with the handle DavidNYC posted a short essay titled "OH-02: Let's Take This Open Seat on a Trial Run." Sixteen months earlier, the Daily Kos regular had launched a blog called "SwingStateProject" that monitored Democrats' chances at capturing key states in the 2004 election. After the party's defeat, David kept up the blog and posted prominent commentaries on Daily Kos.
Four months later, the national media was turning cameras on the second district to report on the down-to-the-wire race. The Democrats' candidate, a marine major and lawyer named Paul Hackett, had raised nearly $1 million and run the party's first congressional TV ads there in decades. The National Republiucan Congressional Committee swept inot the race with $525,000 ad buy, which the Democratic Congressional Committee rushed to counter. On election night, Republican Jean Schmidt overcame an early Hackett lead to scrape out a 52 percent victory. Hackett instantly became a guest on cable talk shows and a potention Senate candidate for 2006.
Between the time that the first murmurs surfaced on Daily Kos and the Aug. 2 election, the Hackett campaign went online and built a network of support through political blogs. By campaign's end, he had raised more than $500,000 in internet-based donations from around 12,000 donors in 50 states. The episode offered a stark lesson about how fast the INternet's political class -- called netroots -- is growing, and how a campaign can use the Web to build momentum.
[Jerome Armstrong] updated and maintained MyDD alone until the following April, when he upgraded the site to let readers to sign in and post comments. One reader, Berkeley, Calif., lawyer and techie Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, launched his own blog, "Daily Kos," in late May. A growing liberal blogosphere devoted itself to discussions and predictions of the 2002 midterm elections and their aftermath.
"So how does Dean translate this nascent support into cold, hard campaign cash?" asked Moulitsas on his blog. "Beats me. If I knew, I would be a highly paid political consultant."
Moulitsas was onto something. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, a MyDD reader, met with Armstrong and Moulitsas in January of 2003 to discuss how the canddiate could build his own community online. In March, another MyDD poster named Mathew Gross showed up at Dean's office in Burlington, Vt., to become the campaign's Internet communications manager. Trippi and his Internet advisors did not want to create a site simply advertising Howard Dead, so they launcher the ambitious Blog America.
When the Dean campaign collapsed in March 2004, the population of liberal blog readers at BFA, Daily Kos and other sites had swelled to more than 100,000. In July Moulitsas introduced a list of the dKos8, his choices of poorly-funded challengers in swing states. Eventually he expanded his list to 12 candidates, then 15. At the same time, Dean reorganized his campaign's infrastructure in Democracy For America. The new group, which kept the Dean blog and e-mail list, began releasing regular lists of candidates - 12 at a time, the "Dean Dozens" - whose campaigns readers were encouraged to help fund.
In July, a Republican response to the liberal netroots finally arrived. An activist named Mike Krempasky, who had worked for the conservative Leadership Institute training organization and direct mail icon Richard Viguerie, helped launch a conservative group blog named Red State. It looked a lot like Daily Kos, and as Krempasky admitted, "we started it in response to the fact that the left had built a really effective infrastructure with the blogs." The sites bloggers quickly endorsed a set of Republican House and Senate candidates, encouraging readers to donate to them directly.
When Election Night came, the netroots got their first assessment of their influence. All of the Daily Kos candidates lost their races. Democracy for America had eventually endorsed more than 600 candidates, and half of them won. The small candidate list endorsed by Red State, including Jon Thune in South Dakota and Tom Coburn in Oklahoma, got around $17,000 only from the Web site's readers, but still managed to claim victories in each race.
Regarding Hackett:
[Hackett's manager, David Woodruff] had been monitoring Web sites that were commenting on the campaign. There was a buzz on Daily Kos, MyDD and Swing State Project, and some local blogs had sprung up to discuss the race. A pivotal site was "Grow Ohio," launched in June by U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio's 13th District. In 2004 that site's chief blogger, Tim Tagaris, had worked for Daily Kos-endorsed candidate Jeff Seeman in Ohio's 16th district, who had lost the rrace but earned more than $100,000 from online donations. Tagaris, also a blogger at Swing State Project and Daily Kos, had learned how to direct the eyes of media and bloggers to a campaign.
To Sum:
While Democrats currently have a huge advantage in online activism and donations - Daily Kos is the most popular blog, period - the Republican netroots are primed for growth. Patrick Ruffini, the the Web master of the 2004 Bush campaign, maintains a blog where more than 12,000 readers participate in polls about the GOP's best races and candidates. Meanwhile, Red State is becoming a hub of conservative activism.
Whichever party's candidates manage to get the biggest benefit from blogs, the one certainty is that they will be there to be used. Political activists are not going offline. The number of people that can be activated for donations, spin, or volunteer work is only going to increase, and the benficiaries will be campaigns that can guide them through the door.