Disruptive Party Building: From a Straw to a Funnel

Posted by Matt Stoller, Open Left at 11:29 AM on May 15, 2008.

The evolution in field and the reimagining of politics continues apace. Back in May, 2007, I pointed to this quote from David Plouffe.

"Don't get me wrong," said David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager and Rospars's boss, "the Internet is a powerful organizing and fundraising tool, and it's getting more and more important every day, but it's still not the persuasion and message tool that TV is."

Though I criticized him at the time, I believe Plouffe was correct. Obama's speech on Wright was perhaps a singular messaging moment for the internet, and the pushback on the gas tax came from the internet. But by and large, the messaging from Obama has been TV messaging, and it has worked. Plouffe was correct about the internet's impact on field, as I noted at the time.

Social networks will be combined with voter files, which have seen dramatic improvements since 2000. And fundraising, field, and media will have converged. Candidates will be putting out youtube clips early to raise money, identify supporters, and win primaries. All of this has been tested already, and it works.

Rock the Vote, in 2004, registered 1.2 million voters with a simple online voter registration download tool. That's more than twice as much as they had ever registered in any other cycle, including the youth-spike year of 1992...

The number of 18-29 year old voters who voted in 2004 versus 2000 jumped from 15.8 million to 20.1 million, an increase of 4.3 million. With Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube turning intensely political, it's pretty clear that voter registration, and specifically, being able to count voter registration and compete over it, will be a killer app.

Finally, field will be at least in some part measurable and put online. Facebook alone has 22-24 million members, and is growing at 150,000 members a day. MySpace is over 100 million. And though it's unclear how many of these user accounts are citizens and how seriously they take participation in these public spaces, the fact that there are these public spaces, and that they are gargantuan, is a game-changer. My guess is that the opinion leaders in these communities are traditional pundits and stars, but it doesn't have to be this way, and bands and bloggers are in the mix as well.

If Rock the Vote experiences the type of growth of regular Web 2.0 startups like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc, there's no reason that 18-29 year old voting block can't expand its share of the electorate by 3 or 4 points. This would swing Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. And it would put North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas into the swing category, while pulling New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania out of swing state territory.

So far, according to Rock the Vote, more than 3 million new voters have registered this cycle, and the youth vote has roughly doubled. According to an email from Kat Barr at RTV, "since July 2007 more than 860,010 people have used our online system to register to vote, including 592,016 under-30 voters!" This online tool, which Credo Mobile was instrumental in putting together, is just one of the many significant innovations in and outside of the party developed from 2004-2007.

The sheer hunger of the country for something different is pushing organizers to use these tools. In 2004, it took a good amount of time before Zack Exley and the Kerry online team could convince organizers to use email to build crowds for events. They had a 'straw' approach to organizer: phone trees, community leaders, robocalls, free and paid media, mailers, issue groups. The raw hunger of the country and a maturing set of organizers has turned this upside down. Now there is a giant funnel, where energy and money and people can be pulled into an extremely narrow top-down structure. People can organize themselves, register themselves to vote with simple reminders from centralized groups, find events, find each other, and bother one another to vote.

I'll have more on this soon. The key distinction between what we have now and a fully functional 21st century political apparatus is that the content creation is still fairly centralized and distributed. At the margins, you see some disruptions, like parkridge47 and 'Yes, we can'. But Plouffe was correct. The primary did not end until Tim Russert said so, even though all of us knew it has pretty much been over since March. The internet has not displaced king TV, yet.

Tagged as: technology, internet, tv, progressive movement