Grassroots politics is basically a matter of list-keeping: first, your people canvas the target area. You find out who is for you, who is against you, and who is undecided. Those for and against you are rated (usually 1-5) according to the strength of their sentiment. Then you write off those that are dead-set against you, bombard the undecideds with your campaign material, and make sure your supporters go out and vote. Time was, candidates spent a lot of time and money building organizations that kept these lists.
The Internet is changing all that.
The other day, I was thinking about Howard Dean's campaign (I'm a Dean organizer, so I do that a lot.) I realized that for a winning campaign, the guy isn't exactly following this formula.
In Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thomspon writes that George Wallace "operated on a philosophy that one big crowd was as good as a lot of little ones."
Wallace didn't exactly follow the grassroots blueprint in 1972; he didn't shake hands, he didn't have a lot of people canvassing. Wallace ran less like a politician than a rock star; he spoke to packed houses and concert halls every night. He whipped his supporters into a frenzy. That got him a lot of votes that year, in both Florida and Wisconsin.
Still, it was Wallace's lack of organization that ultimately doomed him (getting shot hurt, as well.) Because no one in his campaign expected him to do well, they did silly things like fail to nominate slates of delegates in states where Wallace performed well. If they'd followed through with most of the grassroots "rules," Nixon might have been defeated in 1972 by a former segregationalist, and American politics would be very different.
Dean campaigns the same way; I was lucky enough to see him on the Sleepless Summer Tour in Seattle. The Governor spoke to packed streets, and by the time he wrapped up the speech by repeatedly shouting "you have the power," I honestly think the audience would have followed him into the bay. Like Wallace, Dean has the ability to inspire people, to make people angry.
Dean will succeed where Wallace failed (assuming he's not shot), however, because he's got the organization. And he doesn't have the organization because he built it; he has the organization because the Internet built it for him.
"[They] found us," said one Dean campaign strategist in Newsweek some time ago. The strategist understandably declined to be named; it doesn't look very good for you as a strategist if you have to admit that a bunch of disorganized citizens built crack political organization for you.
But that is exactly what they did. Forget campaign contributions for a minute; people were talking about Dean in bars and coffee shops before his campaign gained serious national notice. As Dean grew in the polls, so did the numbers of people who came to meetups. I saw it, because I was there.
I don't think that Dean was ready for front-runner status, when he was given that crown back in June/July. But there were plenty of people all over the country who thought he was ready.
Thus, when Dean started needing people to write letters, donate money, put up signs, and drive to Iowa for the caucuses, he didn't have to go looking for them. It's only been reccently (like, the last month or so) that I think the Dean campaign has really realized this; it's only been reccently that the Vermont office started sending serious campaign material to the meetup people. It's only been reccently that they've started taking us (as well as a growing national coalition of pro-Dean student groups) seriously.
This is the future of grassroots politics: to hell with building a movement. If you get a candidate that can inspire people it doesn't matter, because the movement will build itself.