How To Use the Internet in Campaigning By William S. Bike In 1995, candidate Lamar Alexander announced he was entering the
presidential race not at a rally or press conference, but on the Internet. This action is
credited as the beginning of a whole new world of political campaigning. The Jesse Ventura
Minnesota gubernatorial campaign of 1998 conquered that world, because he could not have
won without the Internet. The Internet already has significantly changed campaigning forever, and it will continue to do so. E-technology never will replace grassroots activity, but it has become a mandatory addition to it in terms of getting your message out to voters, volunteer recruitment, communicating with staff and volunteers, fundraising, media relations, overcoming an opponent’s superior resources, doing research, and in defending against negative campaigning. With a majority of registered voters connected to the Internet, campaigns cannot afford not to jump into this vote-rich pool.
According to
Michael Cornfield of George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political
Management, in six of the eight House and Senate races won by challengers against
incumbents in 2000, the challenger spent less, but had a better web site, and won. Web site maintenance is inexpensive, and helps level the playing field between candidates with widely differing monetary and volunteer and staff resources. A web site can raise money and volunteer staff, and also can take the place of broadcast and print advertising for the severely underfunded campaign. What formerly was an afterthought now has become the place to begin. Long before you announce, start buying up web site domain names for your campaign. Also, buy web site names that your opponents could use against you, as when the 2000 George W. Bush campaign bought up web sites like <http://bushsucks.com> to preempt pranksters. Put your web address on all your campaign literature, and mention it whenever possible. Some candidates even have put it on the roofs of their cars and campaign buses so helicopter TV cameras will pick it up when covering a campaign caravan. You’ll use the Internet a lot, so consider a service that offers unlimited use for a flat rate. The Ventura campaign was billed a minuscule $30 per month, after paying startup costs of under $200.
Here are a few
web page creation tips found in the publication The
A3C Connection from consultant Joy Hyzny:
?Use cascading style sheets. These make sure your pages have similar structures and layouts. ?Use “relative” font sizes. The user can then read the pages no matter what his or her browser settings. ?Choose text colors that provide enough contrast from the background color. This way, the text will be easy to read both on screen and printed out. ?Create a
text-only version of your web site. Voters with older computers
that just cannot
download graphics will therefore not be shut out
of your site.
?Guarantee
ease of navigation by not requiring multiple mouse clicks to
get
to basic information.
The home page should contain a short biography of the candidate, a photo (but make sure it does not take forever to download on older systems), information from news releases, and the candidate’s stand on issues. Also, make sure your web page can collect the e-mail addresses of people who access it. This will be your database of online supporters, all of whom are potential voters, funders, and campaign volunteers. Several political consultants now offer CD-ROMs for sale that provide all the information a campaign could need for getting Internet access, setting up a web page, and more.
The campaign
must publicize the web page on all advertising materials. Because surfers want new
material constantly, the page must be updated frequently, and a staffer must be assigned
to the task. For a barebones campaign, this could even mean a volunteer high school or
college student, but spend the money on a pro if you have it. It always has been difficult to get the media to cover lower-ballot races; now with the Internet, you can do the media’s job for them. You can load up your web site with all the information you want about you and the office you’re seeking. This makes for a fundamental change in voter contact. Voters formerly were passive recipients of information from campaigns. For the first time ever, the Internet allows the interested to actively seek and obtain information easily. Not only will voters who are interested (or whom you make interested by your other campaign efforts) look at it, but the media will, too. With the information right in front of them with no digging required, the chances that they’ll actually cover your race are increased. While the initial information on your web site should be short and sweet, you can link your page to additional pages where you have put everything--press releases, speeches, position papers, and more--on the web. This allows the truly interested voters and the media to get all the information they will ever want. The Ventura campaign set up its page to be easy to link into, but difficult to link out of--on purpose. Once surfers entered the Ventura web site, they stayed a while.
Your web page
also allows you to “cover” a large geographic area. If you’re running a
barebones campaign that just doesn’t have the fieldworkers to get everywhere, heavily
promote your web site in your literature and advertising to help do your “fieldwork”
for you. For campaigns with fieldworkers, e-mail has revolutionized campaigns’ ability to communicate both with them and with others related to the campaign, such as the party or multiple campaign offices. “E-mail takes hours off your day,” noted Al Gore for President 2000 staffer Becky Carroll. “You used to have to try to page people, track them down on the phone, leave a message, call them back if you think they missed the message, plus spend time talking to them once you reached them. When you send an e-mail, boom, it’s there, and you wasted no time.” E-mail also is vital when something big happens and you need everyone in the campaign to speak with the same voice and message. “Before, you’d have to fax pages to maybe hundreds of people or call everyone,” Carroll explained. “Now in one minute you can send three pages of talking points to hundreds of people.” For campaigns without fieldworkers, the Internet can obtain them. The Ventura campaign used the Internet, and no other source, to announce a meeting late in the campaign. More than 250 people attended, and were persuaded to help run a “Jesse Drive to Victory” tour by which a Ventura auto caravan would travel the state. These volunteers contacted friends to attend rallies along the caravan route, and the tour was a huge success. Some of them also became “lead local organizers,” who got their instructions on how to organize a rally from the Ventura web site. The Internet allows even the smallest campaign to provide a daily update for the staff, the public, and the press. It also allows rapid response to a negative attack or other surprise development. It may even allow the particularly financially strapped campaign to operate without a campaign office. That was true for the Ventura effort, which ran a full campaign through its web site and did not even open a physical office until very late in the race. The Internet provides a different way to use volunteers. With no money to hire data entry professionals, the Ventura campaign asked for volunteers online. It mailed packets of information to the volunteers, who entered the data on behalf of the campaign on their home computers. Consider also holding a chat session between the candidate and Internet users. Monitor your web page constantly, and have a web pro, such as the person whom you’ve already assigned to do the updating, available to quickly deal with any dirty tricks. The Internet opens the possibility for success of something that almost always was doomed to failure before: the “flash campaign.” A flash campaign is a last minute entry into the political process due to unforeseen circumstances, such as another candidate dropping out, getting involved in a scandal, going to jail, or changing his or her views on a hot topic. “A flash campaign is a completely new phenomenon emerging from the radically reduced cost of communicating,” notes the web page of MoveOn.org <http://www.moveon.org>. MoveOn.org’s campaign to stop the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton was a flash campaign. On Sept. 18, 1998, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd launched their web site. By Sept. 29, they had garnered 100,000 names for an anti-impeachment petition. By Oct. 1, they had gotten 80,000 people to call or fax their representatives. They also raised volunteers. More importantly, they raised money: $5 million pledged to 2000 congressional campaigns. They were racking up numbers that had never been achieved by political organizations that had existed for decades. MoveOn.org proved that neophytes can enter the political process through the Internet and, through judicious use of it, become major players immediately. Just as some jurisdictions have begun mail-in voter registration and voting, some will experiment Internet registration and voting in the near future. Moves also are afoot to allow e-mail “signatures” to count in petitions for getting candidates and initiatives on the ballot. Such changes will change campaigning forever, and they’re coming.
William S. Bike is the author of the book Winning Political Campaigns (Denali Press, 2001), a how-to guide on political campaigning, and is vice president of the media consulting firm ANB Communications in Chicago, IL. |