Can the Internets make me president?

From GrassrootsPedia

By Zack Exley
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Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Your people love you. Why not write them a letter? 1.2 Your mass base of supporters is as important as Adam Nagourney 2 Technology has changed the structure of The People 2.1 If only organizers had mental telepathy 2.2 Practical applications 3 2004 Re-cap: The Hype vs. What really happened 4 Don't hire an Internet Guy 5 The Pre-Primary: get me some of that Net Roots! 6 Laying the groundwork for a new kind of national field operation 7 The Money 8 Winning Iowa (& Nevada?) 9 Winning New Hampshire 10 Winning Super Tuesday 11 Making the most of a primary victory 12 Preparing for the General

Introduction

A long time ago in America, politicians stopped being leaders. Let's not blame them, it was a long string of historical factors that forced politicians to become what they are today: packaged, advertised, distributed products. For a long time, the rules of the game have favored simply "the guy you'd most like to have a beer with," taking no stands riskier than "cut taxes" and "love families", and mechanistic deal-making with constituency groups.

While all of that still holds, the Internet, other technologies and new media patterns are beginning to reward politicians who can find it in themselves be leaders again.

The power flows from the new political principle of "Direct Connection." Suddenly you have a communications channel available that runs directly and exclusively to your supporters: fans, activists, donors, campaign workers and staff. While the Internet has a lot to do with it (mass email, blogs, podcasting), this phenomenon is also driven by changes in targeted traditional media (direct mail, local radio advertising, specialized print publications).

Howard Dean raised tens of millions of dollars online because he lead, however imperfectly, on issues that other Democrats were afraid to touch. John Kerry raised more than 100 million dollars online and mobilized a quarter million first-time ground volunteers by leading, however imperfectly, the charge against George W. Bush. Ned Lamont pulled off a primary victory that would have been impossible without the massive number of campaign workers recruited and organized effectively online.

For many federal and local races, these new tools will have little impact. Presidential primaries, however, were made for the Internet:

• The intense national attention generated by the prolonged presidential primary can be captured by your website, stored in your email list, and mobilized when needed using mass outbound email tied to web tools.
• A relatively small number of supporters can make a huge difference in a primary -- and that's where your email list comes in.
• Visible and independently verifiable demonstrations of support are key to impressing the pundits, and the Internet provides many opportunities for this: blog and other online community activity, online listings of grassroots events, email list growth, etc,....
• Presidential primaries are particularly suited to online fundraising. In 2008, expect multiple candidates to raise tens of millions of dollars.
• Online mechanisms can improve the productivity and accountability of your intensive ground operations in the early primary and caucus states.
• Online organizing techniques allow you to build and coordinate a huge ground operation in the Super Tuesday states even before you have money and staff to invest in them.

As a man or woman who can credibly hope to become the president of the United States, you have the power to attract millions of Americans to join your campaign online, even before Super Tuesday, and then to give them what they need to do effective work to win the primary -- no, not on the Internet, but in the real world where it counts.

Your people love you. Why not write them a letter?

It all starts with you doing something that should be easy, but is interestingly the most difficult thing for modern politicians to do: sit down and write a sincere, impassioned letter to those who can make you president.

A letter to who? The guy who will drag his friends and neighbors into your corner at his Iowa caucus; the woman who will turnout an overflow crowd for a meetup that just happens to be on the way home for three national reporters in DC; and the thousands who will donate five times in a week to give the pundits a big surprise in your Q2 FEC reports.

Why a letter? Well, actually, an email of course. And not one, but a lasting conversation with your base. (Not "the base," your base.) Not an email newsletter. Not a list of your positions. Not your campaign message. But a real letter about why the hell you're running. Do you have a best friend left over from high school who is not involved professionally in politics? Write a letter to her about what you hope to accomplish, what you feel is at stake for the country -- then just use that. Why her? Because she's not part of that "voter" demographic that your pollsters and consultants have brainwashed you into loathing. If you've got voters in your head when you're writing this letter, then it is doomed to come out hollow and patronizing. That won't work here.

To date, no national candidate has been able to muster the patience to do this. But here's a great example from a Texas Democratic state representative named Mark Strama who defeated a well-funded incumbent in a majority Republican district. This is the first email of his campaign -- he sent it out to his initial list of family, friends, and pretty much anyone he had ever met in his life:

Just the "Hello" at the beginning of a conversation that took place over a year up to the election, and which Mark has continued as an elected Representative. Here's an email I got from Mark as he was ramping up his first re-election campaign -- the conversation with supporters continues:

I'm not saying these emails are works of art. But they are personal and real. They come from the true heart of the candidate and campaign and the reader can feel that. By carrying on a sincere conversation with his supporters, he has their attention when he really needs it. Mark partly credits an email he sent in the last days of his 2004 bid, which asked supporters to help neutralize a last-minute smear campaign, with winning the election.

In a presidential campaign, you have the opportunity to be a bit more dramatic. After all, your campaign is about the fate of the country and the world. When you're running for president, it's nearly impossible to take yourself too seriously. Though no national candidate has written his or her own personal emails to supporters, Howard Dean's infamous campaign manager, Joe Trippi, did it. It was one of the required ingredients for the success of Dean's Internet campaign in raising tens of millions of dollars online. (I'll cover the path from heartfelt letter writing to oceans of cash in a later chapter.)

Ask yourself whether you would let your campaign manager send out an email as raw and "off message" as this one:

You'd freak out wouldn't you? And so would all your communications consultants and other senior staff. They'd say the guy had lost his mind -- especially if you read the rest of the email not reprinted here.

You'd all freak out because that email doesn't parrot the campaign slogan, doesn't hit on the primary talking points of the primary campaign, and is instead all about process, the Internet, and even gets kind of philosophical.

What you have to keep in mind is that this medium reaches supporters, almost exclusively. So that's who you're writing to. The good instincts of communications staff will be to cry out, "But there are reporters on that email list too!" So there are. And so of course you shouldn't say anything stupid or false -- but that goes with out saying for all settings, doesn't it?

Your mass base of supporters is as important as Adam Nagourney

Or the Teamsters. Or the NRA.

Think of how much time and care you will pour into national reporters, local outlets in Iowa and New Hampshire, interest groups and leaders of various constituencies. You will spend countless hours shamelessly kissing asses in all those categories. Nearly every senior staff meeting and consultant gathering will be devoted to winning over those elements, or smoothing over problems or concerns that they have. At key moments, some of them will throw fits, or dangle the possibility of damaging articles. You'll drop everything to address those crises.

As you should. Now there's just a new addition to that list of intensely important entities: your mass supporter base.

It used to be that you could justifiably ignore them because: 1) you knew these people would never and could never do you any harm; 2) there wasn't anything they could do to help your campaign except allow themselves to be effectively organized by your talented field lieutenants in Iowa and New Hampshire; and 3) there wasn't anything you could do as the candidate to make them more or less effective as campaign workers -- for example, you knew that a lot of your politically necessary stands were going to piss them off, but there was nothing you could do about that.

That's all changed now because of the new reality of Direct Connection. Direct Connection gives your base a number of ways to totally transform your chances of winning the nomination. The one I'll have the easiest time convincing you of is the tens of millions of dollars they could make available to you (see Chapters 7 & 11). But their new-found organizing capacity is just as important if you use it right (Chapters 6, 8, 9 & 10). Can $30 million (or $50 million? $100 million??) make the difference? Can having thousands of disciplined, trained workers in Iowa by March '07? How about effective organizing committees in virtually every county in America by Summer '07? Instant throngs of thousands anywhere you show up as early as...tomorrow?

But this isn't something that can be delegated to an "Internet guy" (Chapter 4). Like it or not, it's up to you to somehow, miraculously, overcome one hundred years of cynicism in American politics and develop a sincere love and deep respect for these people who call themselves your supporters. For a long time this has been the domain of extremists -- on both sides of the political spectrum. Or of people (Joe Trippi again comes to mind) who are way too driven by emotion and raw romanticism to be in charge of a serious project such as your campaign. But it's time for serious politicians like yourself to understand that there is nothing wrong with, or silly about, loving one's supporters.

Let me try to make the case for loving and respecting your mass base.

For loving them: They love you, why not love them back? I know why you're afraid. Because what if you disappoint them? I know, you already have your family mad at you, all those folks from your State Senate days, the 100 people you've fired over the years, and those young idealistic staffers whose hearts broke when you made those first politically necessary compromises in the 80's. You don't need a million more shattered dreams on your conscience.

Stop projecting! These people are regular, mature, rational people -- nothing at all like your kids, career politicians or young activists. They know exactly what they're getting into, and exactly what you have to do to win. As my first union organizer boss taught me, "Workers aren't made of glass!" And neither are party activists.

What's funny is that if you eventually lose your campaign, you'll be overwhelmed with love for these people. You can hear it in every concession speech. John Kerry's was the best. I was driving across Ohio back to DC that morning when he said,

It was a privilege and a gift to spend two years traveling this country, coming to know so many of you. I wish that I could just wrap you in my arms and embrace each and every one of you individually all across this nation. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Audience member: We still got your back!

Thank you, man. And I assure you – you watch – I'll still have yours.

I could hear every volunteer, campaign worker and HQ staffer bawling. You could really hear that he felt each word of what he was saying. If only we could bottle up the emotion that occurs for politicians in the moment of crushing defeat and feed it to them during the campaign.

Now on to deeply respecting your base. This just means understanding that a lot of people out there are capable of doing amazing work for your campaign. This may be hard for you to swallow because you worked alongside local volunteers way back at the beginning of your career and most of those people were nut cases, or just plain annoying. Two responses to that. First, at the time, and over the years as you've remembered those experiences, the worst people have tended to stand out more and more in your mind. But consider the possibility that there were plenty of quiet, focused, effective people all around you, but who did not leave a lasting impression because...well, because they were quiet and focused. Just trust me, they far out numbered the nuts.

Second, the new patterns of grassroots organizing that have emerged over the last several years have overthrown the "Tyranny of the Annoying" that's reigned over local politics since perhaps the beginning of time. (Unfortunately there are no signs of weakness of said tyranny at the national level.) The Tyranny of the Annoying stems from the fact that, except in times of extreme crisis, it is just not worth it for mature, serious people to put up with all the indignities that go along with taking and maintaining leadership of any political entity. This principle guarantees that every Elks Club, Union Local, DAR Chapter or Democratic town committee will tend toward being controlled by annoying people -- they are the ones with egos desperate to be fed by winning petty little power plays and plenty of time on their hands to play them. The Tyranny of the Annoying is being circumvented by new organizing models -- for example, the online-organized house parties. The simple mechanism at work is that anyone on your email list can respond to an organizing request from you. They don't need to go to Springfield County Headquarters and be approved by one of Mayor Quimby's insufferable cronies. Nope, they just fill out the form on your website, hit submit, and boom: they've become a neighborhood leader for your campaign as dozens of others sign up to attend their event.

The decline of the Tyranny of the Annoying means that all those quiet, focused people who you never even noticed can now rise easily into leadership roles that you need them to be in if you're going to become president.

Once you love and respect your base supporters, then you'll find it much easier to devote whole staff meetings to their care and feeding -- just as you do now to the likes of Adam Nagourney and Jimmy Hoffa Junior.

More importantly, if this love and respect is true, not forced, then you'll stand a chance of actually coming out of those meetings with positive decisions that will take you places. It's about taking responsibility yourselves (you, your campaign manager and other senior staff) for building and mobilizing the base, just the same way you do for the TV ads, the speeches, the meetings with union or industry heads. Sure you need helpers who are good at facilitating the relationship with the base. But you'll end up with total incompetent bullshit artists filling those roles if you don't take personal responsibility for their success. Don't you watch your TV ads before they go up on the air? Yeah, and you might not be able to make great ads yourself, but you sure know a rotten tomato when you see one. Same holds for communications with your mass supporter base.

Technology has changed the structure of The People

In this chapter, I'm going to step back and get philosophical about the changes in society that underlie the rise of Internet politics -- i.e. what's really going here? If you're impatient to get to the nuts and bolts of using the Internet to make yourself president then feel free to jump ahead.

"The People" (as in "We, the...") is a political substance with a structure. That structure determines, among other things, lines of communications between individuals. In any society or group, some individuals are directly connected to others, some people being more connected than others. Connections can be one-way or two-way, and they can be one-to-one or one-to-many. The structure of the people has changed constantly everywhere throughout human history. For example, when we lived only in small hunter-gather groups, people were mostly limited to connections with people in their groups. Today, many people are connected to thousands, millions, or even billions -- of others through various mediums.

Today, the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies are driving what is probably the most dramatic transformation ever in the structure of the people -- one that I'll call the Human Network Revolution. This revolution is just the latest chapter in a continuing story. Railroads and the telegraph directly and immediately networked cities and towns, and allowed for a new kind of frequent and direct postal connection between individuals.(For example, the story of the rise of the Sears catalog 100 year ago is strikingly similar to the rise of Amazon.com. Only because of the railroad could millions of copies of the catalog be distributed, and products be delivered efficiently.) The invention of writing (approx. 6,000 years ago) allowed empires, global religions and international intellectual cultures. The invention of agriculture (approx. 12,000 years ago) enlarged human groups and laid the groundwork for states and the first one-to-many and one-way connections. The development of language itself (2,000,000-40,000 years ago) should be seen as the first big change in the structure of the people the made all others possible -- because up until then, the structure was fixed in place by biology.

All aspects of life, not just politics, are effected by these changes. And none if it is receiving the study it deserves. For example, there should be one hundred people writing their PhDs on how school life is being altered by email, IM, mobile phones and MySpace. Probably, those changes are even more dramatic than those taking place in political organizing.

In politics, the Human Network Revolution has had earthshaking results. Now, likeminded people can come together and work productively toward shared goals with little or no central, organizational overhead -- even in the millions. There is no longer a relationship between the number of paid organizing staff and the number of people who they can organize. The rest of this chapter is an elaboration of how that is true. Already countless people have taken advantage of this potential -- MeetUp.com, one of the best examples, has two million members who belong to thousands of different new community networks. But traditional organizations and campaigns are still mostly missing this opportunity -- your presidential campaign may be among them!

If only organizers had mental telepathy

I got started in politics as a union organizer. Every campaign started with a call from some workers who wanted a union. I'd tell them they could run a successful campaign if -- and only if -- they got all the other workplace leaders on board. If their bosses were to hear talk of a union they'd isolate or fire the leaders and call in a union busting firm immediately. The anti-union campaigns were powerful but could be withstood if all the workplace leaders made a collective commitment to form a union. So the trick was: how do you get to that collective decision if discussing the union at work gets leaders fired and squashes the embryonic union? The solution: we helped leaders visit each other, one by one, in their homes where they could speak freely. If everyone tentatively agreed about the union in those discussions, then we'd get everyone together for an official face-to-face, all-at-once decision. After that, the leaders were basically unstoppable. My organizing program won every campaign it ever ran using this method. Organizing committees stayed solid in the face of incredibly brutal anti-union campaigns run by professional "union avoidance" consulting firms, a.k.a. union busters. The problem was that the process took months. We were only able to organize a couple thousand workers in the year that I was free to organize using that method. (The other years, when I wasn't free to be that meticulous and I only saw losing campaigns.)

"Mental telepathy," I remember daydreaming one day, while driving to some worker's far-flung rural home, "if only organizers just had mental telepathy!" Campaigns would be done in a day: "Hey, everyone -- want a union?" "Yeah!" "Then come down to the UFW hall tonight and we'll kick it off."

So, the Internet is like mental-telepathy. Imagine hearing WAY BACK in 1990 that some day you'd be able to have conversations with people in other cities in real time -- without opening your mouth. In other words: IM. Imagine hearing you'd be able to communicate with all of your supporters anytime you wanted, for free. That's email. Imagine hearing that all those supporters, without leaving their homes, or picking up the phone and using up your campaign staff resources, could instantly know the schedule all the volunteer opportunities happening around them.

That's how the Internet has altered the structure of the people: It's almost as though we've developed a bit of mental telepathy. It's makes all kinds of new political organizing possible.

Practical applications

My first experience with this came when, about a month before the 2000 presidential election, I spent about an hour putting up a Website proposing nationwide protests if Al Gore were to win the popular vote but lose the electoral college. The site listed some suggested protest locations in a few big cities for the Saturday following the election and asked people to nominate spots for their own cities. E-mailing everyone in my address book drew a few hundred visits to the site and a handful of e-mails essentially saying, "Why are you wasting your time?"

The day after the election, I watched the news all morning. My fears, it seemed, had come true. I finally checked my e-mail around noon. Hundreds of messages had come in that morning suggesting more protest locations. People who had seen the site a month ago were now forwarding it to friends -- yes, it had gone viral.

A lot of people emailed asking for evidence that the protest would really take place in their town: "Who is organizing this? Can I call them?" I replied to as many as I could: "These are spontaneous protests, no one is organizing them -- just show up! People will be there!" I tried to make a list of people willing to be local contacts, but it turned out to be too much to coordinate. By Thursday morning I had received more than a thousand e-mails and the Website had received almost 100,000 visitors.

Before the Internet, this would have required enough staff and lead time to organize outreach committees in every city to get the word out by posting fliers, and doing other publicity. But thanks to the Internet, I could coordinate the whole thing just by updating the site throughout the day as people sent in new locations. If I had been up to speed as a web programmer then, I could have built a simple form to let people submit and vote on new locations without my intervention.

To get out from under the speeding avalanche of e-mail, I used a free, Web-based service, called e-Groups (now Yahoo groups), to create an Internet group to allow people to connect with each other directly. I linked the Website to the group and sent an e-mail out telling everyone who was already involved to join. Within an hour, there were more than a hundred messages posted to the message board.

Here's a typical exchange: A woman named Julie wrote asking, "Is the DC protest definitely happening? I live in Chapel Hill ... before I drive five hours I want to know this is real." Someone responded immediately saying: "We definitely need more info regarding DC. I live here, and have heard next to nothing." At first I thought exchanges like that would bring an abrupt end to this mini-movement, which had been based on a bluff (my empty assertion that people would really show). But plenty of determined optimists posted replies that saved the day: "WE'RE COMING! And I don't care if my husband and I are the only ones on the Capitol steps!" wrote one.

By midday Friday a thousand people had subscribed to the group, and ABC News, Slate, the Boston Globe, NPR, and a Belgian radio station all wanted to know who was in charge. I encouraged the local participants to contact the press, generating coverage in several major outlets.

The e-Group was a totally unsatisfactory organizing tool. Later, at MoveOn, Dean and Kerry, I'd experience how custom tools could make all the difference in the world. Almost immediately, so many people were emailing into the e-Group that it became totally unmanageable. The typical pattern was that someone would subscribe, see their inbox fill will messages from other participants almost immediately, and unsubscribe. Nevertheless, the e-Group allowed people to get the message: this was real.

Activity on the e-Group reached a fever pitch on the eve of our protests. Graphic designers stayed late at their jobs making fliers, which people downloaded and used to make signs. In kitchens across the country people were making signs and banners using slogans that others had posted to the message board. Employees at PR firms faxed out press releases which local activists had written and posted to the group. Using the Internet, hundreds of local organizers, who didn't even know each other, were coordinating their activities and lending each other support.

The protests were set for 1 p.m., local times. My friend Michael, who had been helping me manage the e-Group for the two days that I was pinned to my computer, came with me to the Boston rally at the Statehouse.

"How many people do you think will show?" I asked.

"Maybe 50," he said.

"Fifty? Not a chance!" I said. After all, an iron law of organizing is that most of the people who say they're coming never do. I predicted a turnout of 10.

But when we got to the Statehouse at 1 p.m., there were already hundreds of people, standing there in the cold, holding the signs from the site.

I asked someone how they had heard about the protest.

"I got an e-mail."

"Ah ..." I said, and crept out the back of the crowd.

By the time I got home, reports had already come in from the other protests sites. New York: 500; Philadelphia: 200; DC: 300. Two friends in Los Angeles called in to say there were a couple of thousand people out at their site.

Before the demonstrations had even ended, people were uploading photos from their digital cameras and making up web pages of their own. A volunteer compiled it all onto a new page for the site: accounts of protests in 42 cities, including places like Fayetteville, Arkansas and Asheville, North Carolina.

I created new e-Groups for each city and state where organizing had taken place and asked people to continue organizing to repeat the event the next Saturday. Again, the tool was totally unsuited for these purposes: it took me hours to create all the groups, invite members and install moderators. Nevertheless, this kind of reconfiguration would have taken weeks or months in a traditional organization.

Organizers used the e-Groups boards to divide tasks among themselves, and to schedule planning meetings, where people who had been talking via e-mail met in person for the first time. After the second round of protests, a few of us formed a steering committee, to which I turned over the national mailing list and the Website. A national organization, with chapters in dozens of cities, was born. At the time, I still didn't understand the potential for online organizing. I realize now that failing to exercise continued leadership was a huge missed opportunity. Eventually, the groups faded away.

Those protests had little impact on the outcome of the election. (As usual, the Republicans were better at targeting, and held their protests outside the vote count in Miami.) But this was an introduction for myself and many others to the fundamental changes taking place in the structure of the people -- and to what was becoming newly possible in politics. We began to see the new power emerging from this new ability of any individual to communicate -- for free and anonymously, if necessary -- with any other individual regardless of geography.

Whether organizing a union, a revolution, or a company softball league, there's always a Catch-22 involved: People are leery of acting before a consensus has been reached to act; but forming that consensus requires action, like going to a meeting. Normally, the pump-priming to get things started requires enormous effort. In the case of our protests, the Internet allowed thousands of grassroots leaders to reach a consensus to act. Thousands of people talked via e-mail during their coffee breaks at work, or their time between classes. They were not sacrificing hours in planning meetings, they never had to risk going to a meeting where they might be the only ones, or where they'd find that those organizing the meeting were crazy or incompetent. This represents a radical breakthrough for grassroots organizing.

I say "it's like mental telepathy" because (1) people can coordinate with each other, make that collective commitment ("I'll go if you go") without contacting each other physically or even verbally; and (2) they can do it in parallel rather than in serial. (e.g. an organizer can send a change of venue notice to everyone at once at the last minute, instead of having to call everyone one by one.)

These same fundamental principles underlie all online organizing. The examples have gotten more and more impressive:

• MoveOn.org has lead the way, pioneering almost every form of political online organizing. Their lead is mostly due to their ability to develop tools on the fly without long lead times. Perhaps their most impressive organizing campaigns have been their lobbying days, in which hundreds of groups, complete with structured leadership roles, execute a plan to set up and complete a lobbying visit to their local Congressional office. In each nationwide campaign, only one or two MoveOn staff have coordinated more than 400 meetings. The vast majority of the meetings were carried out by the local volunteers with an incredibly high level of professionalism.
• The Dean campaign used its email list and a online event tool to turn help turn out enormous crowds during a Summer 2003 "Sleepless Summer" tour that demonstrated early support.
• The Bush and Kerry campaigns both used event tools to help recruit and direct new volunteers to campaign worksites.
• The Kerry campaign used a "distributed phone banking" web tool that allowed volunteers in safe states to make volunteer recruitment calls to known supporters in swing states.

And of course, online fundraising is just another form of this. Though not the biggest fundraiser, the Dean campaign gave us the classic example of how to do it right. Before the critical 2003 second quarter FEC reporting deadline, Joe Trippi took the unprecedented step of heightening expectations by announcing exactly how much money the campaign had raised. It was less than Kerry and Edwards, the two front runners. Trippi told Dean supporters: put us ahead of "the big money candidates" and we'll make history. That appeal was sent to hundreds of thousands via the email list. The website posted a progress indicator (a baseball bat), that showed supporters exactly how much further they had to go. Supporters responded in droves, putting Dean ahead of Kerry and Edwards by more than two million dollars.

In that example, the same "mental telepathy" was what made it all possible. The Dean Bat fundraiser was essentially a Jerry Lewis telethon -- with new desperate appeals going out almost by the hour, and thousands of donors following the progress devotedly, giving again and again in order to reach the goal. Jerry Lewis needs an entire television network to create that dynamic. The Dean campaign was the first to do that merely with a website and an email list -- two things your campaign already has.

2004 Re-cap: The Hype vs. What really happened

TK

Don't hire an Internet Guy

TK

The Pre-Primary: get me some of that Net Roots!

TK

Laying the groundwork for a new kind of national field operation

TK

The Money

TK

Winning Iowa (& Nevada?)

TK

Winning New Hampshire

TK

Winning Super Tuesday

TK

Making the most of a primary victory

TK

Preparing for the General

TK