Politics, Policy, and Technology

Small donors are having a significant impact on the amount of money that the Republican and Democratic candidates for president are raising. The Internet, providing the tools for grassroots activists to self-organize and conduct "p-commerce" by giving political money online, has clearly contributed to this.

The interesting story after six months of presidential fund-raising is that some candidates, notably Barack Obama, are doing much better at reaching small donors than others.

In a July 3 CNET post on what the Internet has done for presidential campaign fund-raising, I wrote, "the story technophiles should celebrate and fear how the Internet has enabled such an extraordinary, incredible, surprising increase in dollars (raised by candidates running for president). The Internet has created a new paradigm, connecting once-dormant activists to politics and telling them how important money is to victory."

An even deeper look, comparing the leading presidential candidates from both parties, shows that some have mastered the art of the small donor ($200 or less) better than others. Obama is the leader here, just as he is winning the overall nomination fund-raising fight for both the Democrats and Republicans.

The Campaign Finance Institute, which reviews the legally required raising and spending reports for each candidate, has crunched lots of numbers. Here's a bit of what the numbers reveal:

First, Obama has benefited much more than fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton from smaller donors. This probably shows a breadth of voter support among Democratic activists that Clinton either does not have or has not yet tapped into. This also means that Obama has a larger base of small givers to whom he can return for another installment (that means more cash), and it might mean that he has a grassroots movement that is larger and even more energized than Clinton's.

Obama has received more than $16 million in donations of $200 or less (29 percent of his total), while Clinton has received only $4 million in similar-size donations (10 percent of her total). Even John Edwards has beaten her with $5 million in small donations (24 percent of this total).

The leading Republicans (Romney and Giuliani) did far worse than the leading Democrats in raising smaller donations. Romney's small-donor percentage was 9 percent, and Giuliani's was 6 percent. Not coincidentally, they have raised less money, partly because they have appeared to focus fund-raising only from big donors. The Cadillac market must just be more their style than the Chevrolet set.

Second, despite the huge numbers of small-dollar donors, most money still comes from larger donors ($1,000 to the legal limit of $2,300). Even Obama's phenomenal "grassroots" fund-raising ($200 and less) has not cut too much into his reliance on larger donors. He has gathered 71 percent of his money from the larger donors. But compared to Giuliani, Romney and Clinton--who got 80 percent to 90 percent of their money from the larger donors--Obama is downright dirty in the grassroots fund-raising realm.

What conclusions can be drawn from these small-dollar versus big-dollar comparisons? There is a lot of money to be made by having an energized group of supporters who are willing to give smaller dollars. Any candidate who doesn't have a grassroots base of activists or who chooses not to approach them for contributions puts herself or himself at a serious disadvantage over time.

Further, technology, including the ability to self-organize over the Internet and to contribute online, has clearly factored in the rise in donations, especially the ones less than $200.

Finally, contributors represent one subset of overall voter support. Perhaps Obama's ability to get so many people to write small checks tells a different story from the one believed by the national political press corps and many weavers of conventional wisdom --that Clinton is the inevitable nominee for the Democrats. We'll know for sure in about seven months, when the first nominating elections begin happening.

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Campaign Finance Institute
Daily Kos: Small Dollars and Max Donors, Part II

Personal and public civility matters everywhere. It's why you don't burp at the dinner table or take showers in public. It's why you say "please" and "thank you" and, if you're Southern-born like I am, you say "yes, sir" and "yes, ma'am" when spoken to by your elders.

The blogosphere is still the wild, wild west, and sometimes personal and public civility don't seem to be part of the new culture. But it's increasingly becoming a part of the self-policing that bloggers are getting better and better at.

Take Lisa Stone of Palo Alto based "BlogHer". She has a mission to establish some basic standards of behavior in the same way that webmasters developed privacy standards as the world wide web began growing by leaps and bounds in the late 90s. Lisa is a journalist and media strategist who has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Oakland Tribune, Publisher's Weekly and Frommer's, among other publications. She spends a lot of time advocating for users.

In a Tuesday (July 10) interview on San Francisco's KQED public radio, Lisa spoke about her desire to see the entire blogosphere, especially the often raucous political segment, agree to a little civility. What does she say on her own site?

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o Violates any obligation of confidentiality

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As the Republican & Democratic presidential candidates report their fundraising numbers after two quarters, there are lots of stories to tell.

What's one of the really amazing stories? It's not that Clinton the Democratic "frontrunner" raised about $10 million less than Obama the "challenger" in the last three months or that McCain the Republican "frontrunner" is in third place in fundraising for his party. (Well, those are pretty neat.)

The story technophiles should celebrate and fear is how the Internet has enabled such an extraordinary, incredible, surprising increase in dollars collected compared to the outrageously expensive 2000 and 2004 nominating cycles. The Internet has created a new paradigm, connecting once dormant activists to politics and telling them how important money is to victory. Campaigns have mastered the Internet to reach these otherwise hard to reach small givers (those who pay $10, $25, $150). Before John McCain in 2000 and Howard Dean in 2004 showed that the information highway was paved with gold, Republicans and Democrats relied almost entirely on direct mail to reach these smaller donors. The big rubber chicken fundraising events with Barbara Streisand and Clint Black were only for those could pay $1,000 or more.

There were no cheap seats. But now, just about anyone can get in. On the one hand, there are more people voting with their pocketbook AND their ballot. On the other, it's just more money in a process already full of it.

The details are below, but take this one point as proof of the huge gap that the Internet has created between 2000 & 2004 and the beginning of this 2008 election cycle:

• Al Gore raised a TOTAL of $43 million to oust former Senator Bill Bradley (starting in 1999 and going through the Democratic National Convention in August 2000)
• John Kerry raised a TOTAL of $31 million to get rid or Dean, Clark, Gephardt, & Sharpton (from the beginning of 2003 through February 2004)
• Now in only two quarters in the year before the election Clinton has banked $63 million while Obama has collected $58.3 million and Republican leader Mitt Romney has deposited $43.9 million.

Let me restate that for those of you keeping score at home:
Gore 2000: $43 million in 6 quarters
Kerry 2004: $31 million in 5 quarters
Clinton 2008: $63 million in 2 quarters
Obama '08: $58.3 million in 2 quarters
Romney '08: 43.9 million in 2 quarters

Here are even more details for you junkies ...
2000 Nomination Season (1999 Q1 - 2000 National Convention)
Bush $ 94 million
Gore $ 43 million

2004 Nomination Season (2003 Q1 - 2004 National Convention)
Bush $ 257 million
Kerry $ 215 million ($24 million thru 1/31/04, $31 million thru 2/28/04, $74.7 million thru 3/31/04, and so on)
Dean $ 53 million
Edwards $ 33.6 million
Clark $ 29.5 million
Gephardt $ 21.5 million

2008 Season (2007 Q1 + 2007 Q2)
Clinton $ 63 million
Obama $ 58.3 million
Edwards $ 23 million
*
Romney $ 43.9 million
Giulani $ 33.6 million
McCain $ 24.2 million

To make a little more sense of these numbers and why I focused only on the nomination season, here is a primer on raising money to run for president. Candidates begin raising in January of the year before the general election. So Bush and Gore started in January of 1999 for the 2000 general election; Kerry and Bush started in January of 2003 for 2004; and all the candidates now running started only six months ago for 2008. Traditionally, candidates quit raising money at their national convention in the summer of the general election year . That's because the federal government has always paid the Democratic and Republican nominee a lump sum to run their general election campaign as long as he agrees not to raise any additional cash. (This year, however, it looks like the nominees will decline that subsidy because they believe they can raise more than the government would otherwise give them.)

* SOURCES: Federal Election Commission, OpenSecrets.org, and ABC's "The Note" (7/3/08)

To hear them tell it, they are the base of the political parties who have the power to elevate and destroy. To hear their detractors talk about it, they are know-nothing brats with a keyboard. The political blogosphere has come a long way, baby. But it's still the new kid on the block, wanting desperately to fit in but being shut out by all the self-styled cool kids that were on the playground first.

Just ask a political blogger, probably a white guy, over-educated, higher-than-average income, and in his late 30s. Fueled by technology-enhanced testosterone, these folks see themselves as enforcers of a sometimes moving ideological purity and as fighters for a cause that they, and only they, are allowed to define. Sometimes more interested in being against something (John McCain, Hillary Clinton, the "establishment," weak-kneed moderates) than being for something, many of these folks are just as likely to hit one of their own party loyalists as they are to take it out on the other side. They blame others when things don't go well and take credit when they weren't the only ones to deliver success.

For their nasty bark, though, the bloggers so far have not really shown good enough teeth for a real dogfight. The Democratic blogroll, for example, is not impressive, even in Democratic primaries where it's mostly Democrats who vote -- Howard Dean for President, Wesley Clark for President, Paul Hackett for Senate (OH), Marcy Winograd for Congress (CA). Oh, yes, and there's that guy from Connecticut. Declaring their own jihad against Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman in 2006 with comments like Matt Stoller's of MyDD, "Lieberman has no principle, no vision, and no ability to lead this country," the lefty bloggers convinced themselves that only George W. Bush himself could be worse than a moderate Democrat. Yep. Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to a wealthy venture capitalist who (shhhh!!) was really not all that liberal. But very, very few Connecticut primary voters read the blogs, even though every national political reporter did. Besides, Senator Lieberman's seeds of destruction were planted long before the digital stork delivered Web 2.0 to the pajama-clad masses. And, Lieberman won the general election, the real prize. Still a senator. And despite the guarantees by many bloggers that he would personally keep the Senate red by switching parties, he's still a Democrat. That's pretty important where a single senator switching parties would take power away from the blue team. So why should the blogs get accolades for a victory that, in the end, mattered as much as parsley?

Stop right there. You technological Luddites, you short-sighted "establishment" operatives, you blogo-phobes. Before you pat yourself on your analog back, take note. The political blogs and their readers are actually here to stay (at least until something else like mobile YouTube captures the attention of the political class). Any candidate or political party who ignores them is making a mistake that can cost them support and even do irreparable damage. The recent grassroots uprising that killed the U.S. Senate's and President Bush's immigration legislation came from conservative (and a few lefty) activists who organized using the Internet.

So blogs do matter after all? Why? First of all, the leading blog writers do not fully speak for their entire readership and, more importantly, cannot deliver their votes in a bloc. So even if the leading bloggers don't like you, Mr. and Mrs. Candidate, you might still get their readers to give you votes and (pretty please!) dollars be engaging with them in their own political arena of choice.

Second, the blogosphere -- or as one leading blogger said, "the highly engaged avant-garde of American politics" -- does represent one of many important constituencies in both the Republican and Democratic Parties. (Avante-garde? Really?) Just because a Republican candidate is not the darling of conservative Christian leaders like Pat Robertson or James Dobson, no Republican is going to ignore church-going voters. Just because a Democratic candidate is not the favorite of labor presidents or is not the darling of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, that candidate is still going to visit labor halls and talk to African-Americans.

The lesson of the way the political blogosphere has developed: just because some of the blog writers and even many blog readers do not support your candidate or cause, ignoring this vital constituency and new technology in your political endeavors would be short-sighted. Really, it would make you about as significant as that little green plant limply laying next to your steak and potatoes.

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