Soon after the announcement for his US presidential candidacy, in a CNN/AP article “Obama: It’s not all in the name” on Wednesday, January 24, 2007, Obama said:
“When your name is Barack Obama, you’re always an underdog in political races.”
Obama is a minority, running for President in one of the nation’s most turbulent periods. He has built a movement reminiscent of Robert Kennedy– in that those who support him do so knowing that support comes out of an emotional bond to what this man represents.
Regardless of the outcome, one could say the same of Republican Mike Huckabee, who recently consceded to Sen. John McCain. His campaign was using the power of the social networking strategy (and accomplished a lot with very little money) — friends talking to friends about voting. Huckabee focused on well-defined social clusters, like Christian evangelicals, that tend to be very insular and somewhat limited in size.
The Obama campaign is also following a grassroots, bottom-up, friends-talking-to-friends (F2F) strategy as described in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine. To get the vote out, they are using both the Internet AND Obama’s experience with F2F organizing. They get the technology. They get the sociology.
In a blog on techPresident, Valdis Krebs recently wrote:
The Obama folks seem to have learned the lesson of the Howard Dean campaign which focused mostly on technology, but were clueless about sociology. Howard Dean’s staff organized the Deaniacs over the WWW, but then resorted to the strangers-talking-to-strangers strategy. To accentuate their mistake, they made their activists wear bright orange hats which just emphasized them being “not one of us” as they canvassed Iowa neighborhoods. Obama knows that in organizing, locals need to interact with locals.
The staggering outreach through channels like iTunes, YouTube, or podcasting websites, indicates that technology could play a critical role in the upcoming elections. Technology could be the deciding factor in the 2008 US Presidential race, and while distribution has never before been as accessible as it is to today’s politicians and political candidates, politicians have far less control over the news and media than their counterparts in previous years.
Some quick numbers from Patrick Quinn of PQMedia on how candidates are expected to spend their money online in 2008 is a great indicator of this trend. First, online spending should total roughly $73 million at all levels in the ’08 elections. Second, email marketing dominates expenditures, taking up 62% of campaigns’ online spending. Web development is next on the list at 27%, with display, search and video ads taking up the remaining 11% of online budgets. By comparison, the 2004 numbers were 74% for email, 19% for web development and 7% for ads.
The Obama campaign is distributed and bottom-up in a way that is the clearest example of what a post-broadcast, distributed and participatory democracy is going to look like. The evolution in campaign tactics happening right now closely parallels what’s happening in the military, corporations, government and other large organizations. The increasing reliability and flexibility of information technology is having profound effects on how these organizations make things happen. Through the tools that the Obama campaign has deployed and the choices they have made, they are deliberately and methodically building out this next version of our democracy.
For example, the social networking tool on my.barackobama.com let people self-organize and opened up some strategic opportunities for the campaign.
Technology appeals to a specific demographic: the educated, and the young. Does technology have the power to change the face of politics?
I am no political analyst, but as the younger generation will age, it’s only a matter of time before technology plays a critical role in elections. And leaders whose visions can reach out to this audience by converging technology with traditional politics will ultimately not only lead the country but create new world for the knowledge and information driven economy and society!
