Blogs Pump Bucks Into Campaigns
Not even his own staff would call Democratic congressional candidate Ben Chandler a nethead.
"He uses the Internet almost exclusively for fantasy baseball," said campaign spokesman Jason Sauer, who added that he wasn't sure whether, until recently, Chandler even knew what a blog was.
But that was before Chandler's campaign turned a $2,000 investment in blog advertising into over $80,000 in donations in only two weeks. Chandler -- who won a seat in the House of Representatives Tuesday evening -- definitely knows what a blog is now, Sauer said. "It's that thing that brings in money."
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Nickolas bought ads on 11 mostly left-leaning blogs, including Daily Kos, Political Wire and Eschaton, planning to make up the money out of his own salary if the ads didn't pay for themselves.
He needn't have worried. By the end of the day, the campaign had made back its money and then some.
The following Monday, Nickolas showed Chandler 65 e-mails that had piled up since the previous night.
"I said, 'Oh my god, these are all contributions,'" Nickolas remembered saying to Chandler. "And he said, 'Since when?' and I said, 'Since last night.' He was in disbelief that people around the country would care about this race."
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Nickolas said the campaign's finance director is already fielding calls from other Democratic campaigns that want to put Chandler's fund-raising tactics into action.
Several other Democratic candidates have started running blog ads over the past week, including Oklahoma Rep. Brad Carson, Georgia attorney Doug Haines and Chesapeake, Maryland, city councilman Harry Sampson.
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Let's hope that this is the start of (good) things to come... :-)
