We’ve been arguing for a while here on techPresident that the candidate who best used the internet to enable his supporters to join in co-creating the campaign would have a big edge come November. Now we’re seeing what Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, called the rise of the “long tail of politics”: tremendous metrics as the Obama get-out-the-vote operation goes into the final stretch.
Some examples:
-In just the last three weeks, reports Amy Hamblin, Obama supporters using myBO created 50,000 new campaign events, on top of the 150,000 they had initiated in the previous 18 months.
-The campaign now counts 27,000 groups formed on myBO.
-More than 13.3 million individual voter contacts so far, according to a conference call last night with 20,000 neighborhood team leaders.
-The campaign claims 1.9 million newly registered voters as a product of these efforts.
These numbers are from the campaign, and thus don’t reflect what other groups are doing on their own. And those are happening in droves too, both by veteran organizers and newcomers to politics. Again and again you see stories like this one from Jodi Kantor in today’s New York Times, about a volunteer in a Republican dominated part of Florida who dug into her own pocket to set up an Obama office and now has several hundred people working with her:
For Tuesday’s election, the Obama campaign has created a vast, technologically sophisticated get-out-the-vote machine in Florida, with nearly 500 paid staff members and mountains of finely sifted voter data. The work of Ms. Skolfield and her hundreds of troops would not be possible without this infrastructure. Many met on the campaign’s social-networking site, and they coordinate with a paid Obama field organizer, who provides literature and tells them where to drop it. But what is most striking is just how much Ms. Skolfield and her office of volunteers are doing, even beyond the crucial campaign-dictated tasks of door knocking and cold calling.
This is the “long tail” in practice. I’m not going to argue that all of this is solely because of how well the Obama campaign has used the internet. The investments the campaign made in recruiting and training campaign organizers–the Camp Obama intensive workshops–have been equally important. I suspect that when the election is over, it will be the story of how the Obama team married the two–old-fashioned community organizing and new-media powered internet organizing–that we’ll all be talking about.
As best as I can tell, there’s little sign of an equivalent field operation on the GOP side, compared to the last few cycles when the RNC drove a very effective “72-hour” campaign into the field. If anything, the McCain campaign has supposedly cut back on its field operations to put more money into a bigger last-minute media buy. Of course, if McCain wins, we’ll be wondering if there was more movement on the ground than anyone was aware of.
November 02, 2008