Politics in the internet age

[brynndragon]

Were you upset about Kucinich having no chance at all? Here's a race where the left-leaning geek can make a difference and you can help. His positions can be found here (individual issues are clickable on the right side of that page).

Comments

[glenmarshall.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post! I've donated.

This is the year to overthrow established right-wing assholes via Internet volunteers and funding. The PACs will figure out how to [ab]use the net by 2010, so we gotta hit 'em hard now.

[starphire.livejournal.com]

That's awesome! I have to wonder if anyone has done this before, using the internet to appeal to an audience of non-constituents for the bulk of their campaign funds.

Imagine a network of such campaigns, where you donate to a candidate in Kansas while someone in California donates to your favorite candidate in MA. Oh wait, ha ha, that would never work because it could mess with the power of the lobbyists, or at least make their job harder.

[cos]

Yes, certainly, though it's a relatively new thing. The "netroots" blogs have been able to nationalize a number of campaigns in the past few years, for Congress or smaller, and bring in a lot of money. ActBlue has recently created tools to make it much easier. Before ActBlue, though, MoveOn was already occasionally doing mass appeals and raising millions in small donations from their national network. A number of the lefty-leaning blogs have formed networks to explicitly coordinate fundraising appeals (for example, this year's "Orange to Blue campaign).

Sean Tevis came up at a workshop at Netroots Nation this past week on how to use Internet social media to promote your campaign. Actually, I brought him up :) Panelists had talked about Digg and reddit a lot already (and also some others like stumbleupon and buzzflash), and one piece of advice they gave was to get to know each site's community and learn what issues/topics people there tend to like.

Someone in the room had also asked about promoting state rep level campaigns on the big social bookmarking sites, and the answer was that even though you usually can't get a lot of interest, you can still drive some traffic that could be significant for a small race. I raised my hand and said that just the day before, a state rep candidate from Kansas had made the front page of reddit, even though reddit generally isn't very interested in state rep races, and doesn't have a lot of people from Kansas... and immediately the panelists knew who I meant, and put up this page on the projector for the room :) Anyway, my point was, one thing that reddit really loves is xkcd, so this candidate had created content on his site that specifically matched a top interest of reddit's, and that got him on the front page. And let him break the record for number of contributions to a state rep candidate in Kansas, ever.

P.S. This recent appeal for Darcy Burner (running for Congress in Washington's 8th district, near Seattle, including Bellevue) raised something like $60K for her in about week.