The 2006 election has been dubbed by many in the media as the “YouTube election”. While amateur or user-generated content is a powerful emerging phenomenon, and with time can be designed to feed the needs of campaigns and organizations, professionally produced viral content still has an important role to play. High-end content is content in which the story is designed as part of a complex communications strategy, and the material is used in various distribution avenues reaching a wide audience. The best approach combines both amateur and professional styles to reach the full spectrum of audience subsets.
Old Man McCain: Updated, Revised and Worrisome
New PoliticsOver the last several months, I've written a series of essays about how U.S. Sen. John McCain was turning out to be one of the worst candidates we've ever seen run for President (for the latest see here and here). His montrous flip flops, the serial mistatements about enormous issues like the difference between Sunni and Shiite, the number of troops in Iraq, his position on Social Security, his vote on the 1986 Immigration Act, his position on Immigration Reform today, his admission that he doesn't know how to use a computer. The list seems endless now.
Add that he loaded up his campaign with active lobbyists, certain to draw negative attention, his bumbling of the rehiring of Mike Murphy, and the new extraordinary set of things this week - well chronicled here by Max Bergman on the Huffington Post - and it all adds up to a man simply not up to the job of running for -- or actually being -- President of the United States. In a recent appearance, I even surmised that the GOP would become so concerned with his performance that there would start to be a quiet movement to replace him at the Convention with another candidate. This moment may be upon us as the media, and the public now has no choice but to confront that there is a man running for President who seems so out of touch with basic facts, reality, his own voting record that one might even conjucture that it would be a grave risk for the United States to put him in charge of the country.
After a Republican era where governing always played 2nd fiddle to politics and power - resulting in one of the worst governments in our history - we all hoped McCain would represent a break from the truly disapointing politics of the Bush era. But his performance these last few months shows that his lack of seriousness and knowledge about policy - even running an ad saying that his energy and drilling proposals would immediately address high gas prices when everyone knows this to be, let us say, not true - shows that the McCain candidacy has itself become an extension of this awful Republican era that did so much to harm the national interests of the United States, leaving us less prosperous, less powerful in the world and certainly less free here at home.
In putting Steve Schmidt, a Bush/Rove protege, in charge of his campaign, McCain has told us all exactly what kind of man he has become, and what kind of Presidency we can expect.
Engage: Commanding the New Tools and Reestablishing Equanimity with the Netroots
Blogs | New PoliticsSan Francisco — On July 2, 4,391 people joined the group "Senator Obama - Please Vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA Right," expanding the group by fifty percent. The following day the group added another four thousand or so members. And to date, the group has become the largest on U.S. Senator Barack Obama's very own social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. But by the holiday weekend the growth in membership dropped dramatically. Just under two thousand joined during the 4, 5 and 6 of July combined. Granted it was a holiday weekend, but the trend was evident on Monday, July 7, as well when only 1,627 people signed onto the group. What accounts for this steep decline in interest? Did all of the sudden the well of outspoken activists run dry? Did the Netroots stop caring about FISA and retroactive immunity? While I'd imagine that the latter seems unlikely, the former could be true if weren't for the fact that there is a more plausible explanation based on a significant event that took place right around the time the drop occurred.
At 4:38 Eastern on July 3, Obama responded. Joe Rospars, the campaign's director of new media, posted an entry to his MyBarackObama.com blog containing a response written by Barack Obama addressing the mounting groundswell of dissent. But that's not all. Three members of the campaign's policy staff spent over an hour trying to address comments submitted to the post. In essence, Obama and his presidential campaign made it clear that they are listening even if they are unwilling to capitulate. And it appears that many felt as if being heard was not insignificant. Not only did the number of new members per day drop dramatically after the action taken by the campaign, but there has also been a steady decline in traffic on the group's listserv. 464 messages were sent to the group on July 3 and by the 7th, 218 were sent.
Just to be clear, I don't think the decline in activity surrounding this group should be taken to mean that Obama has suddenly erased the deep concerns that many of his supporters have over his acceptance of the FISA bill. I don't think he has. But what I do think, is that he has dispelled some of the anger by showing that he has not forgotten about a significant number of active supporters and that he is willing to listen and respond. The manner in which the Obama campaign handled the frustrations of its online supporters is very munch in line with something the New Politics Institute (NPI) and NDN have long recommended to organizations and political leaders, engage.
In NPI's New Tools memo "Engage the Blogs" written by Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com, the advice given is to not be afraid of the Netroots but to reach out, interact, and fully engage. That's what Obama did here and his use of the strategy appears to have been a success.
Obama's great advantage in the fall election - his modern campaign
Blogs | Internet | Millennials | Mobile Media | New Politics | Social NetworkingI'm quoted in two pieces today on the momentum events of the last few days. One, by the ever-sharp Susan Milligan in today's Boston Globe, talks about why Senator Clinton lost:
More damaging, critics say, is that the veteran staff was operating from an old playbook, misreading the mood of the country and the new makeup of a 21st-century Democratic electorate.
With her promises to wage war on the enemy - be it Republicans, pharmaceutical companies, or oil interests - Clinton made a textbook appeal to the Democratic Party of old: working-class white Americans, union members, and senior citizens. Obama, however, picked up on the physical and emotional exhaustion many Americans felt after the bitterly partisan Bush and Clinton years, and built a new Democratic coalition among young, educated, and independent voters.
Obama had been to 30 states to campaign for fellow Democrats in 2006, and developed a keen sense of the country's mood, analysts said. Clinton, who was obliged to concentrate on her own reelection in New York, traveled to only 14 states to campaign for fellow Democrats in 2006, and did not pick up on the direction the country was headed politically, they said.
"They didn't understand how much politics has changed since the 1990s. They were slow to use the Internet and the new media. Their understanding of the new coalition was imperfect," said Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democratic Network and a veteran of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign.
The other, in Wired, talks about why Obama won:
Ever since the internet propelled Howard Dean's campaign to national importance in 2004, observers have expected the web would soon play a pivotal role in electing a president. As Obama makes history by becoming the first African-American presumptive presidential nominee, his campaign is also the first to fulfill that long-anticipated internet promise. With an enormous internet-driven donor base of 1.5 million people, more than 500,000 of whom have accounts on Obama's social networking website, Obama is the first internet candidate to win mainstream success. His online supporters have created more than 30,000 events to promote his candidacy, some of which are still underway in the last primary states of Montana and South Dakota.
"It's impossible to imagine Barack Obama's rise without the modern methods that his campaign used to organize itself, particularly around the internet," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the non-profit think tank the New Democratic Network. "This really was the most successful campaign of the 21st century."
"This is what happens is when you have a charismatic candidate, and you organize on a scale not seen before," he adds. "Literally, the size and scale of this is unprecedented in American political history, and it wouldn't have been possible without the money, and passion, and support of millions of American people."
The campaign came up with a number of innovations on the internet. It used wikis -- online collaborative software -- to coordinate and churn out precinct captains in both California and Texas. And it created a counter-viral e-mail campaign to combat the anonymous e-mail smears that question his religious faith and patriotism. It set up policy pages that solicited ideas from supporters, and at one point, the campaign solicited letters from supporters over the internet to lobby the undecided superdelegates.
And Obama's campaign constantly updated its YouTube channel to keep its supporters around the country up to speed on his latest speeches.
Obama's campaign spent significant resources on physical offices in battleground states. But those efforts often came to follow the informal infrastructure that his supporters built ahead of time by finding each other through my.barackobama.com and coordinating off-line to campaign for their candidate.
The most obvious area in which it led was online fund-raising. Just under half its record-level of $265 million raised so far came from donations of $200 or less, much of which flowed to the campaign through the internet. The Clinton campaign ended up tweaking its fund-raising approach after Obama's initial successes and began asking supporters for smaller amounts of money in online fund-raising drives following each primary victory.
In contrast to Obama's campaign, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has raised only $90.5 million during the same 2007 and 2008 period. Just over a third of his donations came from the $200-and-under crowd. Forty-two percent of it came through contributions at the maximum $2,000 level. For Obama, just under a quarter of his donations came from $2,000-level donations.
Obama's record fund raising enabled him to out-blast his chief rival through traditional television ads in battleground states during the Democratic primaries, as well as build out the physical infrastructure needed to organize volunteers.
But it was also savvy off-line campaigning that boosted the size of his online cadre of supporters, notes Rosenberg.
"One of the reasons that they have so many donors is that they were able to collect millions and millions of names through their rallies," he says, referring to Obama's stadium-sized political events, one of which took place tonight at the Xcel Energy Center, where the Republican National Convention is scheduled to take place this summer. "It was all part of an ecosystem where they made it clear that they wanted supporters to be at the center of the campaign."
Each of these interesting articles visit themes we've been talking about here for years - the emergence of a new politics of the 21st century. I end this post with a long repost of an essay I wrote in early February right before Super Tuesday which offers a way of thinking about what this new people based model of politics Dean pioneered and Obama took to another level means. To me what we are seeing is the emergence of a virtuous cycle of participation, which I guess could be described as a political version of the network effect. But the key here is that what Obama, David Plouffe, Steve Hildebrand and others have done is to create a new and better model for how we organize our politics and advocacy, one that brings together on and off-line, and that is,simply, a much better model than the old 20th century tv-based broadcast model we all used for so long:
A Virtuous Cycle of Participation - Finally, Obama has one very powerful advantage in these final days that is hard to see and evaluate - the power of his virtual community across the country. We saw the power of this community with the truly extraordinary amount of money it raised for him in January. But equally important in these final days will be the virtual door knocking these millions of people will be doing - emails to their address books, actions on MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites, text messages sent to friends, viral videos linked too, and comments left on blogs, newspapers and call in radio shows. It is no exaggeration to say that this million or so impassioned Obama supporters will reach tens of millions of voters in highly personal ways in the next few days, providing a messaging and personal validation of Obama that may be equal in weight to the final round of TV ads, free media and traditional grassroots methods.
All the way back in 2003, I wrote an essay about this new era of participation in politics that argued the new Dean campaign model was changing the way we had to imagine what a Presidential campaign was all about. In the 20th century, a Presidential campaign was about 30 second spots, tarmac hits and 200 kids in a headquarters. In the 21st century, the race for the Presidency would be about ten million people going to work each day, wired into the campaign through the campaign's site, through email, sms, social networking sites etc acting as full partners in the fight not just passive couch potatoes to be persuaded.
This is a very different model of politics. One begun by Dean but being taken to a whole other level by Obama. It puts people and their passion for a better nation at the core of politics. When used correctly, it creates a virtuous cycle of participation, where more and more people engage, take an action and bring others in, creating a self-perpetuating and dynamic network of support. It is also why the endorsements of entities with large, active virtual communities - Kerry.org, MoveOn - is so meaningful for Obama. He has created an on-line ecosystem that can quickly take advantage of the support of the millions of people now doing politics in this new 21st century way and exponentially grow his dynamic community of change.
The Democratic Party is one entire Presidential cycle ahead of the Republicans in adopting this new model, and I will argue it is simply not possible for the Republican nominee to catch up this year. Too much experimentation, too much trial and error goes into inventing this new model for it to be easily and quickly adapted. It has to be invented, not adapted. I'm sure the GOP will catch up over time, but this year year the only GOP candidate who has taken this new model seriously has been Ron Paul - and they have paid the price. Obama raised almost as much money in January of this year as John McCain raised in all of 2007. Democrats are raising much more money across the board, seeing historic levels of voter turnout, increased Party registrations and millions more working along side with the campaigns - all of which is creating an extraordinary virtuous cycle of participation that continues to grow the number getting engaged in politics as never before. While there can be little doubt that anger towards Bush and disapointment with his government is a driving force behind this, the key takeaway is that the adoption of this new politics by Democrats allowed the Party to take advantage of this tidal wave in unprecedented ways, and will be one of the Democratic Party's most significant advantages going into the fall elections.
Much attention has been given to the money raised by this Obama network. Much more needs to be given to the power of it to deliver message, provide personal validation to friends, neighbors, colleagues and peers in ways so powerful, and ways never seen before in American history. I have no doubt that it has been the campaign's ability to foster and channel the passion of his supporters - creating a vrituous cycle of particpation - into an unprecedented national network - helping amplify and reinforce the power of Obama's argument - that is playing a critical role in Obama's closing the gap with Clinton in these final exciting and dramatic days before Super Tuesday.
The challenge for McCain of course is that he has yet to even begins experimenting with this people based model, and is, at this point, not in a position to catch up. As one begins to handicap the fall election this yawning gap in models between the two campaigns will emerge as one of the greatest differences between the a new and dynamic 21st century politics and what I think will be seen as a last gasp of an old - and failed - 20th century politics.
Political Online Advertising: Still Nascent
New PoliticsIn the first four months of 2008 the Obama campaign spent around 3 million dollars on online advertising. Kate Kaye, from techPresident, waded into FEC filings to produce this estimate and given that this campaign is often cited as one of the most tech savvy, this all just goes to show that there is a lot of room for growth in political online advertising.
NDN and the New Politics Institute have long been encouraging organizations to Advertise Online as a part of our New Tools Campaign. In fact, just under a month ago we held a major forum in DC which brought in new experts to give a fresh perspective on the tools. Here's Peter Greenberg, Google's Director of Elections and Issue Advocacy, giving some actionable advice on how to start advertising online:
Obama Now Takes California in a Landslide over Clinton
New PoliticsEver since the Feb 5th Super Tuesday primary, I have spent a lot of time explaining why Clinton won California by 9 points when many other indicators at the time seemed to be pointing towards an Obama victory. One simple factor was time.
California has the size and complexity to be a nation into itself. Its economy alone consistently rates in the top half dozen or so in the world. So big sea-changes in public opinion take longer to get carried out than in a small state like Iowa or New Hampshire or almost any other state, for that matter.
To the average voter, Obama appeared on the national scene in the blink of an eye compared to the institutional name-brand Clinton. His national prominence after his Iowa caucus win in early January left about a month for the 36 million Californians to figure him out. In that month the trends lines between Clinton and Obama support kept converging, hers sinking and his rising, but on the day of the election, a gap remained. He lost by 9 points. The nation turned to other state contests.
But those support trend lines did not stop their trajectory. Now, four months later, Californian Democrats overwhelmingly support Obama over Clinton by a landslide margin of 51 percent to 38 percent, according to the non-partisan Field Poll, the gold standard of California polls. Here are some other findings from the San Fransico Chronicle report:
In a head-to-head contest with presumed GOP nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Obama does as well as Clinton, both of them beating the Republican by 17 points among a cross section of voters likely to cast ballots in November. Obama also leads McCain 59 to 24 percent among critical decline-to-state or independent voters, who make up 20 percent of the California electorate, the poll showed….
The poll shows that while Clinton still leads Obama among three categories of voters - those over 65, those with a high school education or less and those earning less than $40,000 a year - Obama now bests the former first lady in all other age, educational groups and income levels…
In breakdowns among voters by ethnicity, Clinton leads only among Latinos - by more than 2-1 - though Obama is ahead among white non-Hispanics by a whopping 56-34 percent, among African Americans by a huge 76-13 percent and favored by Asians by 56-33.
Even women, who formed a critical base for Clinton in this state, now back Obama 49 to 41 percent, the poll shows.
It looks like California, like the nation as a whole, has had time to absorb this newcomer Obama and adjust to the new politics around him. The result does not bode well for Clinton, and certainly not for McCain.
Connecting the Dots of the Obama Phenomenon
New Politics | Social NetworkingNo offense intended, but I do not normally look to Roger Cohen, the older New York Times/ Herald Tribune columnist in Paris, to give insights about the power of social networks and connectivity. Yet his recent column on “The Obama Connection” did just that. In fact, it starts:
It’s the networks, stupid.
More than any other factor, it has been Barack Obama’s grasp of the central place of Internet-driven social networking that has propelled his campaign for the Democratic nomination into a seemingly unassailable lead over Hillary Clinton. Her campaign has been so 20th-century. His has been of the century we’re in.
Cohen goes on to make more analytical points based on the flow of history, and how the world is shifting from the paradigm of the divisive Cold War that defined the last century to the new paradigm of hyper-connectivity and sociability. His own insights stay on that historical geo-political plane, rather than at any tactical, or certainly technical level.
Along the way he cites the work of others who have helped him understand this meta-shift going on – starting with Joshua Green in the most recent Atlantic Monthly. Josh did do a fantastic job in explaining the fundraising phenom behind Obama, by going to Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area in general and reporting on that untold story. I helped Josh with that story and highly recommend it to anyone. Check it out here.
Cohen also references a new book by David Singh Grewal called, “Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization” that describes the core tension in the world as: “Everything is being globalized except politics.” I have not read the book yet, but I have been talking about similar themes for awhile. In the tech, business, private sector world where I came from before getting involved with the New Politics Institute three years ago, the globalization of everything is the key phenomenon reworking everything. Yet from what I can see, our politics is only barely beginning to adapt to this. Perhaps, as Cohen says, Obama can help change that in a big way.
There is one other book that I would also highly recommend to anyone trying to come to terms with the new world of social networks: Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.” Clay does a terrific job of explaining in plain language the power of social networking in its broadest sense. Too many people think “social networking’ simply means Facebook and MySpace. That is an extremely narrow way to understand what’s happening – one that Clay will help correct. The better way to think about all this is as a wide range of social tools or social media that acts very differently than media as we have known it. It’s about communications and content and media and all things that get passed around and are collectively worked on and commented on and recommended or just viewed from afar.
I’ve been telling journalist friends of mine to read Chapter 3, “Everyone is a Media Outlet” to really understand what is happening around them in the big picture. Clay makes the best explanation about what is happening to the journalism and news business that I have ever seen. For that and many other reasons, check it out.
Super Tuesday Aftermath: Handicapping the Campaigns according to the Four Drivers of the New Politics
Blogs | Hispanics | Internet | Millennials | Mobile Media | New PoliticsThere are four drivers of the New Politics that Simon and I have been talking about for the last several years, best laid out in our recent magazine piece “The 50 Year Strategy.” These are four disrupters of the old politics that are restructuring how politics is carried out and will continue to be played in the coming decade. They are the new tools, the young Millennial Generation, the rise of Hispanics, and the emergence of a new 21st century agenda. What’s been incredible about this primary season is how fully realized and important they all have become.
One way to look at the success of the Obama and Clinton campaigns, and their relative strengths and weaknesses, is through the lens of their use of this New Politics. This perspective helps explain the results of Super Tuesday, including what happened in California. The boiled down essence is that Obama is ahead in the tools and Millennial categories, but Clinton is way ahead on Hispanics. As for the agenda, Obama is talking more transformation, while Clinton is talking change, though both are close to each other in specific policies they are not yet keeping up to their rhetoric with truly 21st century policy shifts. Let me explain a bit more:
Tools: Obama has done a phenomenal job in the new tools category, while Clinton has been solid and at least kept up. The most dramatic measure is in the online money category. Obama raised an unprecedented $32 million in January, $28 million of it online, and most of it based on 275,000 people who had given $100 or less. Clinton only raised $13.5 million in January, though she has raised $7.5 million since Feb. 1st , mostly online. However, Obama has raised another $7 million in just the 36 hours since Super Tuesday.
The other side of the tools is the online organizing and coordinating. Again, Obama has come out ahead, as I have talked about in other posts. He has an extremely active and virally growing network of people actively campaigning for him. This has been boosted in the last week with the endorsement of the 3.2 million member online organization MoveOn. Then there’s new media, such as the use of video. Obama had been masterful in reworking his campaign speeches via video, something again we have posted on. And his user-generated Yes We Can YouTube video is in a league by itself, now with close to 2.5 million views.
One of the best analyses comparing the two campaigns on this front is Micah Sifry’s recent post at techPresident. He frames Obama as the first in a long line of reform candidates like Ted Kennedy and Bill Bradley to have the staying power precisely because of the new tools. It changed the game.
Millennials: Much has been said about the Millennials in other posts, but it’s worth pointing out that turnout of young people under age 30 was much bigger than in the past years. For example, Of the eight states that were also part of Super Tuesday in 2000, seven saw increases in youth turnout, and in some of these states, youth turnout tripled or quadrupled. The Millennials share of all primary voters was in the teens, and even high teens, in all but three states. They played a significant role.
Obama took the youth vote in 10 of the states, with margins in the high 50s, 60s, and even 75 percent. The three states where Clinton took the youth vote were because of the high numbers of Hispanics in those states: Arizona, California, and one percent more than Obama in Massachusetts. A good overview of all these numbers can be found in this PDF at CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
Hispanics: This is the category that Clinton dominates and her campaign has to be credited with foresight on seeing how important this constituency is. The Obama campaign, meanwhile, seems to have grossly underestimated their importance and is playing desperate catch-up, though making good strides, particularly among young Latinos.
The Hispanic vote almost alone can explain what happened in California. As discussed elsewhere, Clinton overwhelmingly took the Hispanic vote in California, 69 to 29. In normal states, that margin could be offset by other factors, but in California, Hispanics made up a full 29 percent of the turnout, compared to 16 percent in 2004. In some calculations we made at NPI based on CNN exit polls, we found that if you took out the Latino vote in California, Clinton and Obama would have been in a dead heat. When you put them back in, Clinton takes almost every age group, including young people. One thing we all learned here: Hispanics really matter.
Agenda: Change has become the mantra of the race, and implied is not just a change in leadership but a change in agenda. My sense is that craving for a new national agenda is more a part of the equation than the media or the campaigns even recognize. Because if you look closely at the specific policy agendas of Obama and Clinton, they are not representing as dramatic a change as their rhetoric suggests. Nor, in my opinion, are they transformational enough for what the country and the world needs to see. That may well be a function of the primary season. Perhaps we will see more ambitious plans once the nominee is settled and the campaign against the Republicans takes place. Or maybe it will have to wait til after the election.
This final piece of the New Politics equation is the least developed right now. It’s the agenda that boldly takes on the array of 21st century challenges and helps transform America and the world. With that in mind, NDN and the New Politics Institute are putting on a special one-day free event on March 12th in DC to explore whether we might be in a transformational moment. We have a great lineup of people who will be taking about the need for change on that plain. Anyone who is interested is invited to come.
Digesting the Numbers
Blogs | Hispanics | New PoliticsOne of the most remarkable things that is happening in the Democratic primary contests this year is the voter participation producing record turnouts in every contest. Even in Florida where there was virtually no competition between the candidates, more than one million voters cast ballots in 2008 versus 2004. It is important to understand this context because we are witnessing record participation among Latinos in a record setting election cycle.
I am able to identify at least four states that have exit poll data available for Latino voters for both the 2004 and 2008 primaries. These states are Arizona, California, Florida and New York. In three of these states California, Florida and New York each of these had more than one million voters participate in 2008 compared to 2004. Arizona had more than 100,000 voters participate in 2008 compared to 2004. With the exception of New York, all these states posted a higher percentage of participation among the Latinor electorate in 2008 compared to 2004, but even New York had an increase in the number of Latino voters who participated even if they had a lower percentage.
What this means is that in these four states alone there was an increase of almost one million Latinos voters in 2008 compared to 2004. This doesn't include the increase in participation from Latinos in other states such as Nevada, New Mexico and Illinois, nor does this account for the participation of Latinos in the upcoming contest in Texas.
We are truly witnessing something phenomenal occurring in the Latino electorate and in the Democratic Party. NDN has been talking about the Latino electorate playing a decisive role in this year's elections, and there is no one who can argue against that point with these results. Candidates will have to include the Latino electorate in their overall strategy from now on if they choose to succeed in a national election. I am sure that this is only the beginning of a strategic transformation that will reshape American politics.
I am including some charts for you to look at so that you can see the numbers firsthand. Keep checking in on the blog as I will add data as it becomes available. Feel free to let me know if you have any data that you want me to include that I may have overlooked.
