Fisch Can't Swim

I wanted to touch on two uses of the internet in our elections that didn’t explicitly come up in conversation today.

Howard Dean, in his 2004 presidential campaign, was the first candidate for president to really utilize the internet, most notably as a fundraising tool. Just twelve years later in our 2016 cycle, almost all campaign fundraising plays out over the internet, but the Dean campaign was the first to utilize this tactic back in ’04. I love this anecdote from Dean about using the internet both to mobilize donors and also to fundraise by allowing grassroots supporters to easily contribute small dollar amounts:

“Dick Cheney was holding a $2,000-a-plate fundraising lunch, so we asked Americans all over the country to join me the same day for a lunch in front of their computers. It sparked a huge response, and, amazingly, the online contributions from that day matched what Cheney made from his fundraiser. It showed that our campaign, and that of other Democrats, could remain competitive thanks to a growing base of people donating small amounts. A lot of people talked about how our campaign revolutionized the use of the Internet to raise money. But the Internet isn’t magic, it’s just a tool that can be used to do things differently. We treated it as a community, and we grew the community into something that has lasted long after the campaign ended. The Internet let us build that community in real time, on a massive scale, and that lunch helped us do that. The turkey sandwich wasn’t bad either.” (source: https://www.wired.com/2005/08/2003/)

His campaign set up a video feed of Dean eating a sandwich and broadcast it over the internet, allowing his supporters to tune in and give money to this “fundraising lunch” using online donation tools – a clever, low-budget, internet-based response to Cheney’s fundraiser. I also like Dean’s comment on how the internet is a community. The internet can be used to connect voters from all across the country and to enhance a feeling of togetherness amongst supporters, and today our candidates’ Facebook pages act to bring together many supporters from all over.

Also, switching gears to think about paid vs. earned media and how the internet affects these forms of media. Paid media is when a campaign buys ads (TV/Print/Online etc.) to reach potential voters whereas earned media is when a candidate does something or says something that gets reported on (by the press or otherwise) and reaches potential voters. An interesting form of earned media from this election cycle in particular is the “political selfie,” featuring you posing with a candidate. If a person goes to a rally and takes a selfie with a candidate after the event, that selfie will probably get posted to social media – and will be seen by hundreds of that person’s friends/followers and may even be shared, further expanding its reach. If a candidate makes an unexpected stop at your local restaurant or in a retail store in your town, selfies are often a primary form of documentation. The internet helps to spread political-selfies to hundreds of possible supporters (and seeing a friend posing with a candidate may make people even more likely to consider voting for him/her.) Thinking also about more traditional earned media (a candidate makes a surprise stop at a nationally known fast-food chain, for example) – Twitter and the immediacy of other internet sites allow for not only the sharing of such media but also for interacting with this news. Hearing about this same surprise stop-by on a news show on TV may have a more passive effect, and paid media appears to perhaps be even more passive than watching earned media on TV or hearing about it on the radio.