Archive for January 7th, 2008
Longtime friendly-rival-of-e.politics Jason Z passes on a story that has been picked up with some glee by several lefty blogs as well: RedState.com got stuck with website technology that doesn’t quite work as planned and would like its readers to help. Jason notes:
It’s hard to tell, but it sounds like a consultant sold them a custom-built do-dad as the solution to the dearth of technical resource that makes it hard for them to run the existing software platforms. It’s easier to see how that’s going to help the consultant than RedState, but that’s their business and we wish them well of it.
Now, of course this happens to companies and organizations across the political spectrum, and some of us have made a living at times helping to clean up the resulting nasty mess. But what’s particularly funny is the partisan angle the RedState folks manage to find:
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January 7th, 2008
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Cross-posted on techPresident
John Hlinko with Grassroots Enterprises sent over this excellent find today: besides dominating Google and YouTube since the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are now winning the all-important CafePress primary.
As noted in these pages a couple of weeks ago, CafePress, an online retailer that sells consumer-created t-shirts and other items, has has been pushing itself as a political promotion tool this season. They’ve also launched an Election Meter that displays sales by candidate, and it shows that sales for shirts for Huckabee and Obama have shot up dramatically in the last week. John notes in Daily Kos that t-shirt sales for the candidates may be an effective leading indicator for their popularity, since as supporters are getting excited, they may want to show it to the world. Conversely, as supporters waver, they may be less likely to take concrete actions on behalf of the candidate, in this case spending money for gear. Other interesting finds from the Election Meter: Ron Paul’s still relatively high but dropping, and Romney, Thompson and Rudy are waaaaay down in Biden-Richardson-Kucinich territory.
Genius! Let the CafePress primary take its place along the other metrics that online politics geeks use as a crystal ball.
– cpd
January 7th, 2008
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A couple of good presidential campaign site reviews have popped up today: first, Todd Zeigler at the Bivings Report looks at Obama’s somewhat ghostly new site and finds that the redesign is a big improvement. In a very nice touch that shows the advantage of looking at these things over time, he displays screen shots of the candidate’s site at different stages of its evolution over the past year. I’ll agree with him in particular about the file-size question — feature-heavy sites look cool and meet a lot of needs, but not everybody’s on broadband all the time, and keeping a dial-up connection in the office for testing wouldn’t hurt. Even if you’re only cutting out 20% of possible supporters by making them wait too long for a page too load (or on database-heavy sites, for a page to be useful at all), they might just be a 20% you need.
Next, living up to the promise of her last name, Zephyr Teachout grades the Republican candidates’ sites from the point of view of undecided voters. Huckabee and Paul get top marks, with sites that work hard to persuade the the uncommitted, while McCain lags a bit behind but still gets a passing grade. Romney and Guiliani clearly need remedial classes, with cluttered, over-busy sites that seem determined to get your support but don’t quite tell you why. My questions? First, why doesn’t Rudy Giuliani own his own name? Second, why is Mitt Romney running from his supporters? The collage from the bottom right of his site’s splash screen looks more like a promo for a zombie film than a campaign image. Slow zombies or fast? You be the judge.
– cpd
January 7th, 2008
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Two recent stories by The Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas illuminate the vital connection between online and offline organizing. The first, written last week with Peter Slevin, focuses on voter turnout operations in Iowa and opens with this nugget about the Obama campaign:
In Sen. Barack Obama’s Iowa headquarters, young staff members sit at computers, analyzing online voter data and targeting potential backers. They zip one e-mail to an undecided voter and zap a different message to a firm supporter.
Depending on the voter, they follow with Facebook reminders, telephone calls, text messages and, most important, house visits.
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January 7th, 2008
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Mike Allen’s Politico Playbook contained this little gem today:
The Edwards campaign has raised $1 million since Iowa, the fastest it has raised $1 million online during the campaign.
He didn’t give a link to a source, and Mr. Google didn’t turn one up either, so I’ve emailed Mike to see where it came from (perhaps straight from the campaign). In any case, it shows us yet another example of how the ‘net can help keep candidates alive even in an accelerated primary season. Online donations can flood in overnight and (most critically) are available immediately. I read recently, I believe in Garrett Graff’s book, that Gary Hart got a wave of checks after his 1984 New Hampshire primary victory, but they took so long to arrive and be processed that he couldn’t take advantage of the money influx in time for it to make a difference in the next round of primary states. Online donations change that dynamic — not only do they help niche candidates jump to prominence, they can also allow campaign to take sudden advantage of an overnight swing in their favor.
And, by extension, online donations give small donors a much larger voice than they’ve had in the past, since a distributed army of excited activists can yield as much money as quite a few $1000-per-plate dinner donors. And since they don’t give as much at any one time, a campaign can keep going back to them over and over without running into the per-donor money cap.
– cpd
January 7th, 2008
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