Whether it was liberal, T-shirt-wearing twentysomethings blogging away on their laptops in Starbucks or sinister Republican strategists targeting swing voters through high-tech databases, last year’s US election was seen as a watershed for technology in electoral campaigning. But as the secrecy, rhetoric and bravado surrounding the two campaign teams begins to fall away, the conventional assessments of the campaign are beginning to be questioned.
Immediately after the election, the Republican campaign team, led by Karl Rove, emerged resplendent, their methods vindicated. Their victory, so the theory goes, was achieved by using a deadly efficient database programme called Voter Vault – which the Tories have bought. Its new geo-location mapping software provided Republican campaigners with highly targeted lists of potential swing voters, with whom they could then spend valuable face-time in order to convince them to vote Republican instead of Democrat.
On the other side of town, the Democrats woke up to the realisation that the trendy web-based campaigning communities pioneered by Howard Dean and adopted by Kerry’s team proved to be nothing more than technological talking-shops, unable to bridge the gap between the already converted and the vital swing voter. Both teams had run technology-driven campaigns, but only one of these was successful.
But were the Republicans really as technologically savvy as everyone says? Chuck DeFeo, the party’s online campaign manager, thinks they were. He believes their database software turned the election into a ‘highly individualised’ campaign where thousands could be targeted with tailored messages to match their concerns. The key is efficiency. DeFeo sees his team as having a more qualitative approach; the Democrats, he believes, simply flooded swing states with canvassers.
The evidence, however, doesn’t appear to match up. The technological marriage of internet databases and geo-political mapping may have had little effect on the overall vote. Kerry campaign insiders now believe the whizzy technology probably only translated into 1,000 or so actual local walks where Bush campaigners went out and met with their internet-sourced swing-voting neighbours.
On the Democrat front, those progressive bloggers who have been so maligned post-election perhaps need not be so sad. While their niche blogs couldn’t swing the election, they did help bring out massive numbers to campaign for Kerry. Indeed, according to some within the Democratic campaign, it was only the power of the internet to fire people up and bring them out for Kerry that saved the campaign from unmitigated disaster.
So, how did the Republicans win? James Crabtree, a Fulbright Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, believes one of the key factors was simply that the Republicans got off the blocks faster, setting the agenda and not letting the Kerry team define the election issues. And, while the Democrats may have had success in getting core supporters out to campaign, the Republicans found it easier to affect swing voters directly through the media, having more channels through which to feed stories – remember the influence of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign? On the internet, the vast majority of internet traffic is directed towards the major news sites – MSNBC.com (24.2 million unique users), CNN.com (22.7 million), and so on – while blogs remain on the periphery. So, as a tool for affecting swing voters, the mainstream media still trumps blogs, handing the advantage to the Republicans.
There is also no denying that while the Republicans were overstating the value of their campaign technology, their decision to persevere with highly individualised messages paid off. There seems to have been a miscalculation by the Democrats of how important it was to get the big cities to turn out. The project was highly successful, with every city over a million bar one going to the Democrats. However, the vast majority of town and country votes still went to the Republicans, cancelling out the Democrat’s hard work.
The lesson for Labour? Technology is good, but don’t forget old-fashioned campaigning on the ground.