4. Understanding the Past
THE HISTORY OF ONLINE CAMPAIGNING
AMID ALL THE EXCITEMENT AND AWE that surrounded this revolutionary campaign, people sometimes overlook the fact that Obama’s achievements were made possible by the initiative, resourcefulness, and experiences of those who came before him. Innovation happens gradually, and is often punctuated by bursts of disruptive technology that level the playing field, create new markets, and change the way people interact.
While this book focuses on new media strategy, it is important to understand the political and technological contexts surrounding the 2008 election to accurately evaluate the campaign’s success. The strategic decisions made by Obama and his team created conditions that fostered an agile and flexible social media plan. They validated the importance of new media by making it a stand-alone department instead of an add-on to the communications team. This campaign was run differently from the start and new media’s innovative spirit is a natural extension of that mindset.
The success of the Obama campaign comes down to refinement—not invention. The team improved upon existing new media tools to build a scalable organization with national reach that allowed the Democrats to compete in areas they had been unable to penetrate before. The campaign’s ability to deliver customized messaging to supporters (see Chapter 9) was built on statistical techniques initially pioneered by George Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. The social network strategy that guided the development of the Obama social network (see Chapter 6, My.BarackObama.com) was built on the foresight of people like Howard Dean who saw the internet’s potential for effective organizing.
In this chapter, we’ll look at some of the important technological innovations that made many aspects of the campaign possible and examine the political decisions that allowed the Obama team to be innovative with their social media strategy.
CREATING CUSTOMIZED MESSAGING— George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign introduced microtargeting as a statistical tool to identify voter demographics and craft a communications strategy.
ONLINE ORGANIZING— Howard Dean saw the potential in using the internet to organize his supporters, but could not translate online enthusiasm into offline action.
EMERGENCE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES— MoveOn.org fused microtargeting with online phonebanking to create a new campaign tool.
THE INNOVATION CONTEXT— The Obama campaign adopted the Fifty-State Strategy, targeted the disaffected center of the Democratic Party, and focused on small donors; these decisions led to the creation of an integrated new media strategy.
Creating Customized Messaging: The 2004 George Bush Re-election Campaign
In 2002, the Bush Administration was considering strategies for the upcoming 2004 reelection. Republican Senior Strategist Karl Rove received an interesting pitch by a research consultant named Alexander Gage, who wanted to apply the same microtargeting techniques used to segment consumers for corporations to Bush’s reelection campaign. Microtargeting uses a statistical technique called predictive market segmentation to identify groups of similar individuals and extrapolate their patterns of behavior. By examining trends in income, family status, occupation, and other data, the Bush campaign could discover segments of overlooked voters and create a tailored communication strategy to address their needs.
Pioneered by Gage’s firm, TargetPoint Consulting, microtargeting had never before been used in a national political campaign. Rove was intrigued, but wanted proof. Gage was asked to predict how different population segments would vote in several Pennsylvania judicial races, a task he completed with 90 percent accuracy. Satisfied, the Bush campaign enlisted Gage to analyze and microtarget battleground states and used his findings to craft their strategy. It was a highly successful tactic that provided the Bush campaign with new population segments of likely Bush voters. For example, they were able to contact 92 percent of eventual Bush voters in Iowa and 84 percent of Bush voters in Florida, compared with 50 percent in each state during the 2000 election. The Obama campaign would apply these techniques to their email strategy and create hypersegmented emails that provided readers with customized messaging.
Online Organizing: The 2004 Howard Dean Campaign
While the Republicans were revolutionizing the application of statistics in politics, the Democrats were tackling the issue of voter outreach from a different angle: online organizing. Leading the pack was Howard Dean, whose approach would lay the foundation for Obama’s unprecedented online grassroots movement. Dean supporters used Meetup, a website that connects members who share similar interests, to plan rallies and meetings. To manage the logistics of using this tool, Dean staff were forced to establish regular meetings with online group organizers, creating the beginnings of online organizing infrastructure. Dean’s campaign also frequented online forums to share talking points, generate new ideas, and solicit feedback. Dean was one of the earliest political candidates to use the web to fundraise, collecting more than $50 million over the course of his campaign. Unfortunately, Dean was unable to convert online infrastructure into actual votes. Despite his community’s enthusiasm, the campaign faltered when it came to offline action due to a lack of ground support.
When it was time for the Obama camp to build their online grassroots movement, they made sure to learn from Dean’s experiences. The Obama site’s strategy could be summed up in one sentence: online organizing equals offline action. “One of the lessons, obviously for us, is making sure that the grassroots enthusiasm translates into votes,” Obama said in a New York Times interview. “And that’s something obviously that we’re going to be paying a lot of attention to.”
Emergence of New Technologies: MoveOn.org and the 2006 Call for Change Campaign
Despite advances in online organizing strategy, Democrats didn’t develop microtargeting capabilities until 2006, when organizations such as MoveOn fused data mining techniques with online phone-banking tools to challenge the Republican Party.
Founded in 1998 to involve people in the political process, MoveOn.org has grown into a national powerhouse with over four million members in February 2009. They have been pioneers in online grassroots strategy and were the first to tackle online phonebanking during the 2006 Congressional elections. “We were facing a “turnout” rather than a persuasion election,” they wrote in their 2006 report. They also recognized that successfully using this tool would significantly change the playing field in the approaching presidential elections.
They created the “liquid phonebank,” named because voters could “pour in calls” from anywhere, allowing MoveOn members to collectively focus on a particular district no matter where they lived. The online tool guided callers to the district where their efforts were most needed, giving MoveOn the agility to quickly shift priorities as races unfolded and conditions changed. In addition, callers met once a week at a phone party, where they could socialize in person while using the online tools to make calls. This strengthened the sense of community, and helped connect people to the political issues. They combined Alex Gage’s microtargeting techniques with Dean’s people-powered online grassroots initiative and turned the tables on the GOP. Over the course of the congressional elections, over seven million calls would be made into sixty-one targeted districts using the online tool.
This would lay the groundwork for the Obama team, who combined and refined online phonebanking, microtargeting, online organizing, and grassroots momentum to create the new model for modern campaigning.
The Innovation Context: The Political Landscape
In the race against the Clintons, the Obama team had developed a finely honed survival instinct that forced them to continuously reevaluate the playing field and identify new ways to connect with voters. This led to several key decisions that spurred innovative uses of social media and the creative application of online tools.
THE FIFTY-STATE STRATEGY
Traditionally, political parties tended to avoid engaging in states that were heavily controlled by their opponents. The Fifty-State Strategy, pioneered in 2004 by Democratic candidate Howard Dean, focused on building a presence for the party in all states, even ones where a victory was unlikely. The idea was to build increased awareness of Democrats who would be elected to local and state positions that would pave the way for future wins. The strategy was risky, since it would require people and financial resources in areas where their opponents had the advantage instead of concentrating on swing states where Democrats needed only a slightly higher number of popular votes to win. Obama was able to successfully execute the Fifty-State Strategy by ensuring that all online tools reinforced offline action and by empowering users to organize for his campaign in all states, including Republican strongholds.
TARGET THE MIDDLE
Unlike the Bush Administration’s strategy of catering to voters who leaned to the right, the Obama team focused on the disaffected center. This allowed the campaign to open up a dialogue with independents as well as Republicans who were unhappy with the Bush Administration. From an online perspective, courting the center directed the tone and language of the blogs and the design of the website to ensure a welcoming and balanced atmosphere.
FOCUS ON SMALLER DONATIONS
The Obama camp also took note of Howard Dean’s fundraising strategy, which raised $50 million over the course of his campaign, largely through small donations made online. Dean’s average donation was $80. This was a sharp detour from the contemporary political strategy of tapping wealthy political donors to finance the campaign. In addition to generating free publicity for Dean, who started out as a “long-shot” candidate and became a front-runner, the technique was also less expensive than traditional telemarketing, direct mail, and hosted events. Finally, by soliciting small contributions the campaign was able to contact a donor multiple times, and donors were more likely to make multiple, small donations without exceeding the legal limit. Overall, John McCain was able to raise an impressive $360 million, but it seems paltry compared to the $750 million raised by the Obama campaign.
ONLINE FUNDRAISING
