Since 1995, I've been saying that the Internet will revitalize politics. With the emergence of television as the dominant medium about 1960, Americans have been more observers than participants in politics. Grassroots organizations down to the precinct level in many states withered on the vine. But the Internet is changing that. Charlie Gallie and I used to talk about the concept of "cyber-ward healers," precinct walkers using digital tools. They would use the Internet to access, develop and post details to the voter file, identify political allies in the neighborhood, develop an online community, hold real-world meetings and use the tools of community organizing for get-out-the-vote efforts and to connect with and lobby their elected representatives.
Now we see Barack Obama's campaign taking the next steps in innovation, drawing on his own experience as a community organizer in Chicago and viewing his effort as not just a campaign but a political MOVEMENT that will help sustain him and back him up once he becomes president to offset the power of lobbyists and special interests.
Salon reports that "grassroots organizing could be the deciding factor in the campaign...shrewd grassroots organizing has helped Obama grab primary victories nationwide, and could prove key to vanquishing Hillary Clinton in Texas." Though Hillary narrowly won the popular vote in Texas (51%-48%), Obama is expected to garner more delegates due to his superior grassroots organizing.
Obama's Deputy Campaign Manager, Steve Hildebrand, is "one of the Democratic Party's top grass-roots organizers," Salon reports, and was crucial in the Iowa campaign. "The strategy is built on frequent, personal contact with voters." In Texas, the campaign has trained more than 4,000 volunteers for the 8,300 precincts.
The campaign is also shrewdly leveraging technology: Its 29-page info packet takes volunteers through the Texas Obama Precinct Captains Web site, which the campaign set up to give activists direct access to a massive database on voters. They can print out address lists that help them walk their neighborhood looking for Obama voters, or read from scripts while doing outreach by telephone from home. Whatever they find then gets uploaded to the Obama database through their own computers, which frees up field staffers who, in previous campaigns, might have spent hours typing in the same information...
At Obama rallies with overflow crowds, the campaign collects e-mail addresses and invites people to join the precinct captain network. All the online tools also tell volunteers how to quickly get in touch with organizers offline, and they let the campaign keep track of what its activists are up to without having to check in on them constantly...
Around the country, Obama staffers have linked up with networks that supporters built up themselves long before paid field organizers even arrived.
Volunteers are using the Internet to organize counties months before the national campaign apparatus comes into states.
National Public Radio reports on how Obama volunteers in Texas are being trained in "old-fashioned political organizing," drawing on Obama's own experience as a political organizer.
A Wall Street Journal article suggests that Obama's community organizers in Texas are not well supervised, and may be less than organized. But the story offers an inspiring story of one Austin organizer for Obama who by himself has used online tools to generate more than 5,000 volunteers.
Obama's web site, according to the WSJ article,
gives campaign volunteers unsupervised access to names and phones numbers of potential supporters nationwide, which campaigns usually treat as proprietary information. The idea is to create a virtual national phone bank. Volunteers pick states they want to call. They can place calls from home, from a cellphone in a coffee shop, from anywhere they want. The campaign provides phone scripts tailored for particular states....The campaign ranks volunteers by the number of points they accrue for making calls, recognizing top workers by posting their names on the Web site.
The online system "was responsible for 250,000 calls in a single day to California voters in advance of that state's Feb. 5 primary," the Journal reports. Even so, there are some problems with unsupervised volunteers, and a few renegades have been banned or locked out of the online system because they proved to be poor representatives of the campaign.
Rolling Stone, in a long article dated March 20, 2008, documents the effectiveness of Obama's online-to-shoe-leather campaign:
"The Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s. "They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it," says Joe Trippi, who masterminded Dean's Internet campaign in 2004. "It's light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They'll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That's never happened before. It never was possible before."
Previous:
- Vision of a New Democracy: Internet Gives Citizens A Chance to Reconnect with Politics (1995)
- Early Vision of New Democracy Has Come True: Internet Has Revitalized Both Political Parties (2005)
- Electronic Democracy is Born (1996)
- Internet Requires New Thinking, New Paradigm of Interaction (1996)
- New Era of Participatory Democracy? (2000)
- Internet and Political Passion: A Discussion (1996)
- Building an Online Community (1994-1996)
- Skeptics Take On Internet Hype: With Politics Change, Or Not? (1999)
- Online Activism: Taking the First Step (1994)
- How the Internet is Changing Advocacy (1999, 2001)
- Ten Lessons from Internet Use in the 2004 Presidential Campaign
- How Bush Beat Kerry in Key Battleground: Internet Organizing
- Innovations in Online Fundraising Inspire New Givers (2005)
- On Building Online Communities for Real-World Action (2007)
- How Does Social Change Happen? (2008)
