Online politics a progressive monopoly? Not in California, at least judging from the battle waged over the internet to pass Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that banned gay marriage in that state: The ProtectMarriage.com coalition used the...
This in from friend and e.politics contributor Burt Edwards a few days back: OK, so it’s a slow Sunday morning and I’m doing my version of reading the morning paper (which for me is checking my regular papers online as well as a couple...
Cross-posted on techPresident A week or two ago, I happened to catch the C-Span broadcast of a fascinating discussion at Harvard’s Kennedy School — PBS’s Gwen Ifill moderated a panel including David Axelrod and David Plouffe from...
In politics, what’s important isn’t always what you can see. And compared with television ads and campaign events, field organizing is invisible — reporters on the campaign bus can only see the end result, which is the crowd that...
File this under creepy sales follow-up: a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a company that sells client/contact management software for public affairs firms. I’d participated in a couple of events for one of their competitors, and...
Cross-posted on K Street Cafe A tough question came up in a conversation with a visiting group of Danish communications professionals last week — how do you actually measure the effectiveness of social media outreach? At that moment, the...
Here’s a tip from Ed Kohler at Technology Evangelist: YouTube statistics can be your friend, if you’re doing online political work or just trying to get a video to take off virally. For instance, clicking the Statistics & Data tab...
Here’s an interesting approach to contacting voters by email, via Charles Lenchner of DemocracyInAction, who thought of it while doing volunteer work for a city council candidate in NYC. Several companies will take a database of voter names...
Don’t miss today’s front-page Washington Post article profiling Virginia as a battleground state (now with working link — thanks, Dad). The discussion of demographics and voting patterns is political-junkielicious in itself, but...
Updated January, 2011 Political databases generally don’t get a whole lot of attention in the press or in public, but they underlie much of the technology of modern politics. Email advocacy and fundraising systems are really just specialized...