Small change, big change
I don’t usually get sentimental about money. Here’s an exception…
Frankly, I thought they were nuts when the Dean campaign gave itself the very public goal of raising $5M in ten days, mainly over the Internet. And it looked like I was right as the thermometers on the Dean site slowly edged up.
But last night, they made it and came damn close to the absurd goal of raising $15M in a quarter, breaking the previous record of $10.4M set by Bill Clinton when he was president and not competing for funds with 9 other candidates.
Ah, but you point out that W has raised multiples of that. True. But here’s the point that truly matters: The average donation to the Dean campaign was something like $77. That’s the sound of the grassroots rooting.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
So does this just mean that the winning candidate is the one who buys the election for the most money?
In the past, say, 40 years, what’s the correlation between candidates’ campaign coffers and election success?
It means at least that a grassroots movement is going to be able to afford to run a candidate. It means the candidate won’t be entirely beholden to a handful of big contributors. And it means that a huge grassroots organization that’s willing to support a candidate financially is going to do a lot more than just contribute money to the candidate.
Blogroots Campaigns
You can usually tell a politician, but you usually can’t tell them much and lord knows I tried to tell several about what was happening out in Deanspace … Frankly, I thought…
The grassroots aspects of the Dean campaign is the most heartening thing going on in politics today. It really is the first indication that the Internet may be a force for true democritization of the political process. I hope this is part of a trend, although I fear that in the next election cycle political operatives of all stripes will be on this bandwagon. It’s got to net out as a progressive development, but only time will tell.
I wouldn’t worry too much about political ops figuring this out. I would however worry about the Internet’s disconcerting tendency to concentrate power. I’m more worried about MoveOn.org or DailyKos.com becoming powerdrunk leviathans than your average political op figuring out how to profiteer off Internet campaigning.