February 9, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY
REVIEW) -- With an increasing power to rally and coordinate support,
the Internet has taken on an important role in national political
campaigns in the United States.
Democratic candidates vying for their
party's 2004 presidential nomination have used the Internet for the
first time to organize grassroots supporters into massive armies of
volunteers while constantly communicating ideas and platforms to voters
via emails and voluminous Web pages. Pundits are even given free space
on sites to sound off with their own views through a multitude of Web
logs, or blogs.
The complex organism that Internet
politics has become has also effectively addressed the element that
drives US presidential races - money. The power and capabilities of the
Internet virtually have brought fundraising as close as a mouse click.
The Internet saw its first real political
deployments during the 2000 elections, but the significance of that
precursor to today's digital campaigns was minimal by comparison.
"Campaigns in prior years were warm-ups
to what we're seeing now: the first Internet election," says Paul
Sagan, president of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Akamai Technologies,
Inc. (akamai.com), which is
providing scalable site delivery and streaming media for Democratic
hopeful Howard Dean's DeanForAmerica campaign, the most savvy
Internet-driven political machine of 2004.
"Just as radio and television were
finally accepted as crucial to the process, the Internet is now just as
vital, because candidates such as Governor Dean have learned to harness
the Web's power to martial grassroots support, raise significant funds,
and organize central campaign themes. I believe we're seeing only the
beginning of the Internet's impact on the 2004 race," Sagan says.
Garrett Graff, a spokesman for the Dean
campaign in Burlington, Vermont, says the Internet was a huge part of
Dean's emergence from a regionally known former governor of Vermont to
a presidential contender.
"It has allowed us to engage our
supporters, build a very significant grassroots network and marry 21st
century technologies to extremely traditional organizing efforts," he
says.
By engaging supporters online, the Dean
camp has built the "greatest grassroots campaign that presidential
politics has ever seen," he says. Supporters have built an
organizational network in 1,071 cities and towns through the campaign's
Dean Meetup link on its main Web site, and set a phenomenally high
standard in fundraising.
"Over the course of 2003 we raised $40
million, with nearly $20 million of that online. We are able to have
the equivalent of large successful fundraisers on the Internet almost
every day," Graff says.
From incumbent President George Bush to
the entire field of his would-be Democratic opponents and political
parties, the Internet has become the main means of communicating with
voters.
A poll taken by the Des Moines Register
in mid January showed that 39 percent of the people who had planned to
participate in the Iowa caucuses had turned to the Internet beforehand
for information about the candidates and political organizations.
David Swanson, campaign press secretary for US Representative Dennis Kucinich's (kucinich.us)
presidential bid, says the Internet "enables us to educate more people
about Congressman Kucinich's issues and to maintain material for
distribution that is always up to date... Educating all voters, as well
as supporters, on the candidate's platform has never been easier.
"There can be no doubt that the Internet
makes grassroots campaigns much more effective more quickly and at less
expense than was previously possible," Swanson says.
Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat, has raised
roughly half of the $5.2 million in his presidential campaign war chest
over the Internet.
Swanson says the Internet has simplified
a great deal of event planning and organizing of traditional outreaches
such as doorbell ringing and canvassing. "Participation in forums
unrelated to the campaign, such as newsgroups, message boards and
listservs," he says, "also allows supporters to do 'canvassing' from
home as well as the streets."
The performance the candidates and parties sites has been of immense interest to San Mateo, California-based Keynote Systems (keynote.com), a leading Web performance measurement and management services company.
Since this is the first election in which
the Internet is seen "as part of the mainstream, part of the everyday
fabric of everybody's lives," Keynote began measuring how the sites
performed, says Roopak Patel, senior Internet analyst in Keynote's
public services division.
Keynote tracks the sites' performance
over the top Tier 1 backbones from the 25 most populated geographical
areas of the United States, using computers acting much like end users.
"These computers fire off and make the calls to the sites just like
Explorer browser would and return back a performance time" to load an
http page, Patel says.
Keynote's measurements in the immediate
week leading up to the Iowa caucuses rated the performance times of
candidates Web sites as ranging from two to nine seconds. In ascending
order: Dean, 2.273 seconds; Wesley Clark, 2.324; Al Sharpton, 2.933;
Bush, 2.983; Joe Liberman, 3.487; John Kerry, 3.928; John Edwards,
4.902; Kucinich, 5.813; and Dick Gephardt, 9.502.
Since money drives US presidential
politics, Keynote also measured the contribution transactions times for
the sites of Bush, Dean, and the Republican and Democratic parties. The
measurements showed: Democratic Party, 4.478 seconds; Republican Party,
6.15; Bush, 7.255; and Dean, 8.743.
The speed and intricacies of the
presidential campaign have given technology companies opportunities to
exhibit the power of their solutions. One such example is Convio, Inc. (convio.com), an Austin, Texas-based application service provider that specializes in online constituent relationship management.
Convio began working with DeanForAmerica
about 10 months ago when the campaign had nine staffers in Burlington,
today there are 300, says David Crook, co-founder and Chief Technology
Officer of Convio.
Convio's constituent relationship
database and tightly integrated applications are employed by the Dean
campaign. The main site is hosted by Akamai, "but if you click on one
of the contribute links you will find it takes you over to our system
and you will find the site there has the same navigation and branding
as the main site, but it's running our product," Crook says.
An email tool also integrates with Convio's database to provide easy segmentation for targeted emails.
"We collect a tremendous amount of data
behind the scenes every time someone opens or clicks through on an
email. The campaign is quite data driven. They have two or three data
experts on staff who mine a lot of information out of our data base,"
he says.
According to Crook, the Internet has
become a mainstream medium, and has grown to be an essential element of
the political process.
