Blogging down the money trail: candidates look to Web activists outside their campaign structures

When U.S. Rep. Rob Portman left the House in April to become U.S. trade representative, Democrats were not expected to make much of a race for his seat. After all, the congressman's district in Ohio's rural, southwest 2nd district had been in Republican hands since 1974. More recently, it gave Portman and President George W. Bush respectively 72 percent and 63 percent of the vote in November 2004.

But some liberal activists spied an opportunity. At the blog Daily Kos, a liberal Web site with more than 500,000 daily hits, a law student with the handle DavidNYC posted a short essay titled "OH-02: Let's Take This Open Seat on a Trial Run." Sixteen months earlier, the Daily Kos regular had launched a blog called "SwingStateProject" that monitored Democrats' chances at capturing key states in the 2004 election. After the party's defeat, David kept up the blog and posted prominent commentaries at Daily Kos.

"I think an off-year special election (which will likely take place either in August or November) for a seat we have little chance of capturing is the perfect time to get creative and try out new ideas," David wrote. Readers commenting on the post shared names of possible candidates and other people to talk to about the district.

Four months later, the national media was turning cameras on the second district to report on a down-to-the-wire race. The Democrats' candidate, a marine major and lawyer named Paul Hackett, had raised nearly $1 million and run the party's first congressional TV ads there in decades. The National Republican Congressional Committee swept into the race with a $525,000 ad buy, which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee rushed to counter. On Election Night, Republican Jean Schmidt overcame an early Hackett lead to scrape out a 52 percent victory. Hackett instantly became a guest on cable talk shows and a potential Senate candidate for 2006.

Between the time that the first murmurs surfaced on Daily Kos and the Aug. 2 election, the Hackett campaign went online and built a network of support through political blogs. By campaign's end, he had raised more than $500,000 in Internet-based donations from around 12,000 donors in 50 states. The episode offered a stark lesson about how fast the Internet's political class--called netroots--is growing, and how a campaign can use the Web to build momentum.

The Rise of the Netroots

Political blogs have existed for a little more than four years. Message boards and "me-zines"--journals by professional writers--had begun appearing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the first major liberal blog was MyDD, launched in June 2001 by Jerome Armstrong, a graduate student at Portland State University in Oregon.

"At the time, there was no such thing as a political blog, really," he said. "The personal blog became a way to take what I was posting on other forums and put it together on my own."

He updated and maintained MyDD alone until the following April, when he upgraded the site to let readers to sign in and post comments. One reader, Berkeley, Calif., lawyer and techie Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, launched his own blog, "Daily Kos," in late May. A growing liberal blogosphere devoted itself to discussions and predictions of the 2002 midterm elections and their aftermath. At the end of the year, a little fewer than 1,000 MyDD regulars participated in a poll to name their favorite presidential candidate for 2004. Out of seven possibilities, including John Kerry and John Edwards, 43 percent chose Howard Dean. "So how does Dean translate this nascent support into cold, hard campaign cash?" asked Moulitsas on his blog. "Beats me. If I knew, I would be a highly paid political consultant."

Moulitsas was onto something. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, a MyDD reader, met with Armstrong and Moulitsas in January 2003 to discuss how the candidate could build his own community online. In March, another MyDD poster named Mathew Gross showed up at Dean's office in Burlington, Vt., to become the campaign's Internet communications manager. Trippi and his Internet advisors did not want to create a site simply advertising Howard Dean, so they launched the ambitious Blog for America.

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"The vision was, let's tell the story of why Howard Dean should be the nominee, then the story of why he should be president," Gross said.

The Dean campaign's use of the Internet--the blog, the use of the event-planning site Meetup.com to stage Dean get-togethers--was heavily reported in 2003. But the campaign's massive fund-raising and organizing successes were a combination of the Internet community-building and old-fashioned campaigning tactics re-appropriated for the Web.

"I'd say we got 30 percent of our donations from people reading the blog," Gross said. "The rest was from the e-mail list that we built. We sent out letters that continued the narrative of the campaign." Some letters utilized comments posted by Blog for America readers; when one commenter marked his donation by saying "the tea is in the harbor," Trippi used the Boston Tea Party imagery in his next appeal.

When the Dean campaign collapsed in March 2004, the population of liberal blog readers at BFA, Daily Kos and other sites had swelled to more than 100,000. In July Moulitsas introduced a list of the dKos8, his choices of poorly-funded challengers in swing states. Eventually he expanded his list to 12 candidates, then 15. At the same time, Dean reorganized his campaign's infrastructure in Democracy For America. The new group, which kept the Dean blog and e-mail list, began releasing regular lists of candidates--12 at a time, the "Dean Dozens"--whose campaigns readers were encouraged to help fund.

Programmers Matt DeBergalis and Benjamin Rahn speeded along the transformation of liberal blogs from discussion sites to donation vehicles. On June 28, they launched the ActBlue Web site, which listed every Democratic candidate for federal office and allowed bloggers to make pages of their own endorsements. Each page had a link to donate money via ActBlue, which bundled it and sent it along to the campaigns.

"It gave every blog the ability to become a PAC," DeBergalis recalled. "We would do all the boring stuff, like reporting to the FEC. They got to do the fun part."

With the help of online donations, Richard Morrison raised more than twice as much as the last Democrat who faced U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay in the race for the 22nd district of Texas. The challenger raised enough of a threat to bring the majority leader back home for his first candidate debate in memory.

In July, a Republican response to the liberal netroots finally arrived. An activist named Mike Krempasky, who had worked for the conservative Leadership Institute training organization and direct mail icon Richard Viguerie, helped launch a conservative group blog named Red State. It looked a lot like Daily Kos, and as Krempasky admitted, "we started it in response to the fact that the left had built a really effective infrastructure with the blogs." The site's bloggers quickly endorsed a set of Republican House and Senate candidates, encouraging readers to donate to them directly.

When Election Night came, the netroots got their first assessment of their influence. All of the Daily Kos candidates lost their races. Democracy For America had eventually endorsed more than 600 candidates, and half of them won. The small candidate list endorsed by Red State, including John Thune in South Dakota and Tom Coburn in Oklahoma, got around $17,000 only from the Web site's readers, but still managed to claim victories in each race.

The liberal netroots, having spent so much money for such losses, spent little time looking back. Very soon, bloggers such as DavidNYC started sizing up new House races.

The Ohio Example

When the Ohio congressional seat opened up, neither party settled on a candidate immediately. On the Republican side, 11 candidates eventually entered the contest for the seat, which because of incumbent redistricting would likely be safe for years to come.

Many Ohio Democrats thought a special election in August was winnable, but only if the party tried a new approach. They were wary about nominating Charles Sanders, a former mayor who had been buried under three Portman landslides. But they liked Paul Hackett, a major in the Marine Corps reserves who had just returned from duty in Iraq. Mike Brautigam, one of Hackett's close friends, had met him at the airport in Kentucky and told him Portman was retiring. "He made up his mind to run before he crossed the state line," Brautigam recalled.

At the same time, Republican activist Joe Braun was convincing Jean Schmidt to enter the primary. Schmidt had held offices in the district for 15 years, and Braun had worked on most of her campaigns. Anticipating a crowded primary, Braun proposed a strategy he called "Clermont Plus." Schmidt would campaign everywhere, but run up the vote count in her home county of Clermont, which contained 191 of the district's 753 precincts.

Schmidt and Hackett swept their primaries. Schmidt engineered her Clermont landslide and defeated the Republican field with 31.4 percent of 46,511 total votes. Hackett dominated Sanders and four other Democrats with 57 percent, but only 13,927 Democrats had voted in the primary. Looking ahead at the general election, with a bigger Republican base to work with, Braun planned on using the Clermont Plus strategy to overwhelm Hackett.

As the primary vote reflected, Hackett's base was smaller and more difficult to turn out. His manager, David Woodruff, a veteran of the 2004 Gephardt presidential campaign and local and statewide campaigns in Missouri, combated this problem by expanding his target lists. In addition to every voter who had turned out in three of the last four elections, they would target independents who voted in all of the last four elections.

The next issue was money. Schmidt was raising more than Hackett locally and among PACs. Brautigam said that Hackett had been rebuffed when he appealed to the DCCC for early help.

"They said, 'Go raise $100,000 and then we'll see,'" Brautigam said. "We raised $100,000, and they didn't move."

Woodruff had been monitoring Web sites that were commenting on the campaign. There was buzz on Daily Kos, MyDD and Swing State Project, and some local blogs had sprung up to discuss the race. A pivotal site was "Grow Ohio," launched in June by U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio's 13th District. In 2004 that site's chief blogger, Tim Tagaris, had worked for a Daily Kos-endorsed candidate named Jeff Seemann in Ohio's 16th district, who had lost the race but earned more than $100,000 from online donations. Tagaris, also a blogger at Swing State Project and Daily Kos, had learned how to direct the eyes of media and bloggers to a campaign.

On July 13, the Hackett campaign sent a press release to bloggers and reporters called "Choose Your Seat Wisely," which dramatized what Hackett and Schmidt were doing on Oct. 24, 2004. While Schmidt appeared at a Republican fund-raiser and a football game, Hackett was in a chopper being transported from Ramadi to Fallujah. Tagaris posted a version of the release on Grow Ohio titled "What a Difference a Day Makes." The campaign's visibility was dramatically increased, and donations through Hackett's Web site and ActBlue spiked.

Six days later the campaign experienced another surge. A large number of liberal blogs had dubbed July 19 "Blogosphere Day." A year earlier, bloggers at Daily Kos had "adopted" Ginny Schrader, a nominally funded candidate in Pennsylvania's 8th district, and given her $25,000 in one day. As blogs were commemorating the day by coordinating donations to Hackett, Democracy For America sent out an email to its list asking members to support him. Thanks to this combination, the Hackett campaign raised more than $80,000 in 24 hours--the best-ever day of online donations for a non-presidential campaign.

With the candidate's name and biography now known nationally across the blogs, the campaign was able to attract hundreds of volunteers. Bob Brigham, Tagaris's co-blogger on Swing State Project, got plugged into the campaign and started using the blog as a rapid response tool. Brigham's first test came on July 28, when a USA Today story on the race quoted Hackett saying, "I've said I don't like that son of a bitch that lives in the White House. But I'd put my life on the line for him." The next day, the NRCC announced two ad buys in the 2nd district totaling $525,000. Committee spokesman Carl Forti said it had reacted to Hackett's comments and "decided to bury him."

Even after the DCCC leapt into the race with its own ad buy, the blogs got mileage off Hackett and Forti's comments. The USA Today quote was spun as more straight talk from Hackett, and Forti's comment was spun as a faux pas. Donations spiked again.

On Aug. 1, the campaign told bloggers that it needed $30,000 to fund GOTV. They raised $50,000. On Election Night, Tagaris and Brigham had Internet access at campaign headquarters, where they posted updates and rumors. For around 30 minutes, when it looked like the race might come down to a few hundred votes in late-returning Clermont County, MyDD and Swing State Project asked readers to dig up information on Ohio election law.

In the end, both campaigns had executed their strategies. Woodruff had targeted 49,000 Democratic and independent households with 67,000 voters, and they turned out 55,091 of them. Of the seven counties in the district, all of which backed Bush in 2004, Hackett won four. But Braun's Clermont Plus plan paid off. Schmidt carried her home county by 4,881 votes--with a district-wide victory margin of 3,979 that made the difference.

The closeness of the race inspired both parties to do a victory lap, and liberal blogs held some very public celebrations. At the same time, Republicans pondered the way blogs had helped shape the race in the final month. The Schmidt Web site had no online donation mechanism, and when some conservative blogs spotlighted the race in the last week, potential donors had to send checks through the mail.

"Congresswoman Schmidt had never looked at a blog before this election," Braun said. "We made a decision early on that we would not pay the transaction costs that come with going online.... We've already put in motion a way of collecting donations on the Web site."

Blogs and the Future of Internet Fund-raising

Republicans and Democrats agree on one thing about the Ohio race: It won't happen again.

"Hackett was the beneficiary of being the only game in town, so the blogs had a greater impact than they normally do," said Forti. "And you saw that in the aftermath, the fall-out between the DCCC and the blogs about targeting, who to target, and how early to get involved."

"We nationalized this special election, but the key in 2006 will be localization," Brigham said. "Campaigns that work with local bloggers will have real-time capability that will prove invaluable when things break. Candidates need to stop calling me and asking for a million dollars, and start calling their local bloggers and asking for 15 minutes to talk about the race."

Some general lessons can be gleaned.

Know the landscape. For all the millions of blogs, a campaign only needs to reach some of them to start winning readers over. Along with whatever blogs exist in the campaign's district, Democrats should reach out to MyDD, Daily Kos and Eschaton; Republicans should look at Red State, Powerline and Polipundit. The generally high-earning, politically active readers of these blogs will check the sites in any given week.

Democratic and Republican blog readers have common traits that draw them online. Few trust the mainstream media, instead believing they can get real news in the blogs. Both are critical of their party's moderate wings and leadership, and can be persuaded to dish out if they find a candidate who fights what they believe.

Create a narrative. The most successful online fund-raisers to date, Dean For America and Hackett For Congress, crafted ongoing story lines based on a few simple themes formed early on. The Hackett campaign's story was of a straight-talking veteran who returned from Iraq and did not like the way his country was going, and an opponent who represented the "culture of corruption" (Brautigam's phrase that was wedged into the Hackett stump speech) in the Republican Party. All of this appealed to donors in the netroots.

Create a community, but do not try to control it. The Hackett campaign used Ohio bloggers to stoke enough interest in the campaign to take it national. After mid-July, tens of thousands of blog readers were following the Hackett campaign, debating strategy online, asking how to help, and sending donations. In the last week, the netroots could be stoked by any buzz a blogger posted about the campaign.

Make donors feel appreciated. Every successful use of the netroots has involved some kind of encouragement for donors. The Dean campaign had a visual tool, a cartoon of a baseball player whose bat would fill up with pixels as more people donated to the campaign. Donations sometimes reached a frenzy as Blog For America commentators punched their credit cards and refreshed the image, watching more and more of the bat turn red. The Hackett campaign used a more conventional encouragement; when they reached a goal or had a good round of financing, they told bloggers who breathlessly reported the news to readers.

Go everywhere. While the Dean and Hackett campaigns didn't need online advertising to build an online network, campaigns with less hype can cheaply purchase ads on leading blogs. For a few thousand dollars, a campaign can post a prominent rectangular ad on a number of blogs for a week, a month, or three months. Ben Chandler, a Kentucky Democrat who won an open Republican U.S. House seat in a 2004 special election, spent $2,000 on blog ads that spurred more than $80,000 in online donations. It will always be easier to draw attention to a presidential campaign or special election, but any campaign can use a clever hook to reach into the growing netroots.

While Democrats currently have a huge advantage in online activism and donations--Daily Kos is the most popular blog, period--the Republican netroots are primed for growth. Patrick Ruffini, the Web master of the 2004 Bush campaign, maintains a blog where more than 12,000 readers participate in polls about the GOP's best races and candidates. Meanwhile, Red State is becoming a hub of conservative Web activism. Krempasky has launched Web sites supporting White House confirmation battles (ConfirmThem.com, ConfirmBolton.com) and is laying the groundwork to make Red State a PAC so it's easier and more attractive for conservatives to donate to their candidates.

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Whichever party's candidates manage to get the biggest benefit from blogs, the one certainty is that they will be there to be used. Political activists are not going offline. The number of people that can be activated for donations, spin, or volunteer work is only going to increase, and the beneficiaries will be campaigns that can guide them through the doors.

David Weigel is a journalist based in Fairfax, Va. He can be reached at daveweigel@gmail.com.

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