Using the Internet to Win the Election

On Monday, the 173,593th article on the Obama-McCain online gap appeared in the Politico.  (Blame the Northern Virginia electric monopoly for my just getting to this today.) Jon and Soren are quoted in it.

This one inches closer to the truth than most by looking at online success as a function of the candidate, the culture of the campaign, and the environment. These anecdotes are revelatory:

When John McCain, 71, wanted Barack Obama, 46, to join him at a series of town hall meetings, he dispatched a messenger to hand-deliver the invitation. "You know, you could have just e-mailed this," Obama press secretary Bill Burton told the messenger.

And: 

"Every time Obama had seven seconds when we spent the day together in South Carolina, he whipped out his Blackberry," recalled Noble. Contrast that to McCain's response when Politico's Mike Allen asked him whether he used a Mac or a PC: "Neither. I'm an illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get."

A number of good friends of mine work on the McCain online campaign. With these stories, there's a tendency to malign or dismiss the campaign staff as "not getting it." I know these people and can say definitively that this isn't the problem. This is a very talented group of people, albeit under-staffed compared to Obama's double digit online staff and not always integrated into the campaign at the highest levels. When the McCain campaign has decided to own a space -- whether it's been search advertising (Eric Frenchman), blogger outreach (Patrick Hynes) and actually good campaign blogging (Michael Goldfarb), they have dominated it.

The question I'd like to focus on is one of campaign culture. McCain himself does not use the Internet avidly. This in itself is not a deal-breaker (Howard Dean didn't either, and McCain was successful in a simpler time, 2000). But more crucially, the campaign at a 30,000 foot level is analog not digital.  When the chips are down, I'm betting that Rick Davis, Charlie Black and Mark Salter are thinking that McCain's offline charm with old media is going to be what gets them across the finish line, not tripping up Obama in a "YouTube moment" or anything they do online. They may recognize the potential for this to happen, but as strategists, they focus on the things they are most directly familiar with.

These kinds of fundamental assumptions inflect the campaign's operations from the top down. On a tactical level, the fundraising operation is more comfortable with relying on the cocktail party circuit to generate the big bucks, and what online initiatives there are range from old school (repeatedly sending bad email, though this has improved greatly of late) to tone-deaf (selling golf gear on the homepage). Fresher tactics that are also proven to generate more revenue -- like true fundraising transparency -- aren't tried because they are alien to a campaign culture that errs on the side of keeping secrets.

The environment is also critical to this as well. It's easy to forget that John McCain was the first Internet candidate. Yet he wasn't necessarily more tech savvy than he is now, and much of the same team from 2000 is still there. What changed? The environment. McCain 2000 was the insurgent candidate in the out-party. Just like Howard Dean. And just like Barack Obama. If we'd had a well developed Internet in the '80s and '90s, Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and Pat Buchanan would have been the "Internet candidate" irregardless of what their campaign did. Today, McCain is an establishment candidate of the in-party, and that makes all the difference in the world online.

Returning to the point about culture, perhaps the key element of online success is that the campaign must have a strategy to use the Internet to win the election. Not influence bloggers. Not raise money. But win the election. Obama clearly believed he could use it to win, and Dean had no choice but to believe it. I have to think McCain 2000 believed this, even in the Internet's early days. Some of the tools on the McCain 2000 website, like downloadable spreadsheets of primary voters and the McCain Interactive action center, are more open than what exists on the McCain website today. The culture of the campaign influences these types of decisions. 

If you can't articulate a credible strategy to position the Net as the difference-maker in the election, your Internet strategy will be subsumed into a sub-optimal analog strategy. The best you'll hope for is "integration" -- sending an Internet "ambassador" to the offline meetings where the real decisions are made, forcing the Internet square peg into the round hole of fundraising opaqueness and centralized control of all volunteer activity.

McCain's online people have this vision, but I'm afraid it won't make a difference until a new guard assumes the positions of campaign manager, chief strategist, and principal media consultant. There has to be complete buy-in, because these ideas represent a somewhat radical departure from the campaigns of the past.

We saw in the primaries how Hillary's people -- though they were Democrats advantaged by a favorable environment -- were not able to make this jump. The Democratic establishment is in many ways more hostile to the Internet than the Republican establishment because they're the ones who've felt its wrath most directly.

Though David Plouffe is a traditional media guy and there's a great anecdote about Obama himself questioning the polished corporate marketing behind his campaign, they understood at a gut level early on that the Internet would make or break them. The old gatekeepers were still going to be important, but much less important than in previous years.

Until Republican campaigns are in a position to make that leap of faith, they'll be stuck in neutral at best, and we'll be left looking to the Ron Pauls and the Mike Huckabees of the world for online inspiration.