Howard Dean’s Web-powered fund-raising efforts are scoring headlines across the country this week with the former Vermont governor nearly certain to top all other Democratic presidential hopefuls in second-quarter cash, but Dean’s adroit use of the Internet for grass-roots mobilizing may be the bigger story.
Dean’s robust fund-raising, with more than $7 million collected in the last three months, is one indication of how well he’s making the Internet work for him.
Of the more than $3 million the Dean campaign has raised in the past eight days, two-thirds has come from Internet or e-mail appeals, according to Joe Trippi, Dean’s campaign manager.
But Trippi would rather emphasize the the Internet as organizing tool. Through Dean’s Web site and the Meetup.com site, volunteers are helping the campaign to stretch its resources.
Paid staff can concentrate on early primary and caucus states such as Iowa while the self-starting volunteers organize states such as Washington, which holds its caucuses next Feb. 7.
‘STRONGEST INSURGENCY’ “This is the strongest insurgency in the history of American politics,” Trippi told MSNBC.com in an interview. “Our goal is to have 1 million people involved by the end of the year,” he said. “Today we have 150,000” who have donated money, pledged a contribution or volunteered to stage events promoting Dean in their city or town.
“What we’re doing is putting the grass-roots back into politics, putting the people back into politics. This is something that was lost when television entered politics,” he said.
Not that Dean doesn’t use TV when he thinks it appropriate — he was the first of the Democratic presidential contenders to air TV ads in Iowa early this month.
The Dean Web site allows the campaign to weave together a network of like-minded believers who can organize their own events, such as leafleting or holding a house party.
Go to the Dean Web site and type in, for example, the Zip Code 91766 and you’ll be given a list of volunteer-organized events within 100 miles in the next few weeks, everything from a billiards-and-cocktails party at the Shark Club in Costa Mesa to leafleting at a July 4 festival in Claremont.
Once you register to take part in one of these events, the Dean campaign has your name and e-mail address.
The Dean campaign is also paying Meetup.com $2,500 a month to help it organize the 46,000 people who used the Meetup site to set up Dean soirées all over the country.
If a group of 15 people in La Crosse, Wisc., wants to meet and figure out how to organize a local Dean effort, Meetup helps them find a pizzeria or other venue.
Last week, Dean rival John Kerry hired Meetup.com to help his campaign mobilize its volunteers. Supporters of retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a potential late entry into the Democratic race, are also using the Meetup site to get themselves organized.
This week, the Dean campaign will attempt a blend of the traditional and the new: at Dean Meetup groups across the country, the campaign is asking 20,000 volunteers to each write personal letters — using old-fashioned pen and paper — to two or three rank-and-file Iowa Democrats who are uncommitted, explaining why the Iowans should vote for him in next January’s caucuses.
Veteran Democratic campaign consultant Phil Noble, who is not affiliated with any of the presidential contenders, said, “The Dean campaign uses the Internet to empower people to do things, as opposed to telling them what to do.”
Through their contacts with each other, Dean’s community of true believers is also inoculated against what reporters and pundits might see as bad news for the campaign.
Case in point: When the pundits decided that Dean had fared poorly in his “Meet the Press” interview two weekends ago, the Dean faithful simply shrugged it off, saying it was refreshing to have a candidate who candidly admitted it when he could not specify how many people were serving in the U.S. armed forces.
Trippi said some his counterparts in rival campaigns “have been saying, ‘So you get 40,000 people signed up on a Web site, so what?” Now in the aftermath of Dean’s strong second-quarter fund raising, “they’ll be saying, ‘Oh, shoot!’”
A SIX-MONTH LEAD? He added, “We’ve known the power of this all along. I can’t believe they gave us a six-month lead” on Web-based organizing.
“One reason that this doesn’t work for the other campaigns is that they are all command-and-control” campaigns in which the campaign manager sends directives to a state director who in turn relays it to country or precinct organizers.
Four years ago, Republican John McCain and Democrat Bill Bradley used their campaign Web sites to raise funds, leading some reporters to speculate about a revolutionary new Web-based politics. Such talk was premature. The day after McCain scored a win in the New Hampshire primary, 40,000 people flocked to his Web site to donate funds and volunteer, but the McCain campaign didn’t have a grass-roots mechanism for putting them to work.
Trippi said, “The mistake is to build your Internet organization to get money. We built our Internet organization to build our organizing, so that, for example, we’ll have a huge precinct organization in Washington state for the caucuses.”
WHY STRATEGY WORKS Noble said, “They’ve done a wonderful job. And one of the reasons it works is that Dean has a very clear message to a very well-defined constituency group: the peace wing of the Democratic Party and those people who think that the Democratic Party doesn’t stand for anything anymore.”
“There is hope and energy in Dean’s campaign, with new money that does portend the future,” said Democratic campaign consultant Cathy Allen, who is not working for any of the presidential hopefuls. “One caution, however: You have to be a little wary of those headlines ($7 million online, etc.) as they can be killer characteristics if they are not sustainable. The good headlines this go-round can be the death knell if next quarter he drops in total new money, new donor totals, etc.”
The Dean campaign also faces a challenge — the function of generation, income and education gaps: Can they spread Dean’s message beyond Internet users? How does Dean get through to the 70-year-old retired autoworker or the night-shift janitor who doesn’t have a laptop and never uses the Internet?
More server capacity can only solve so many practical political problems.
For more traditional forms of contact with non-Web-savvy voters, the campaign will need to rely on TV ads and field canvassers — which is why the millions Dean is now raising through his Web site will come in quite handy come December and January.