North Carolina ripe for online campaigning

More than momentum and a handful of delegates will be at stake when the 2004 presidential race kicks into high gear eight days from now with the Iowa caucuses. The action in Iowa also represents an important test of Howard Dean’s Internet campaign strategy, which has implications far beyond his run for the White House.

Among those paying attention to Iowa should be candidates for statewide office in North Carolina. With 100 counties, a diverse and dispersed population, and a history of expensive, tightly-contested races, this should be a proving ground for Internet campaigning at the state level.

So far Dean has used the Internet to raise lots of money, bring supporters face to face at thousands of local meetings, and create a community with its own alternative media that allows the candidate, staffers, and volunteers communicate with each other at will. Capitalizing on the power of cheap, easy-to-use online tools, and organizing his campaign around them, has been a key to Dean’s emergence as the early Democratic front-runner.

Now comes a field trial of his online organizing prowess, a bold attempt at human networking branded “The Iowa Perfect Storm” by the Dean campaign. The plan is to have 5,000 volunteers travel to Iowa in order to canvass for the candidate, as the culmination of several weeks of intense volunteer activity. The pilgrimage is being coordinated by online software and publicized by weblogs run by the campaign and supporters.

The impact of several thousand volunteers could be substantial in a state with a population of about three million people, some 61,000 of which turned out for the previous Democratic presidential caucuses. Each campaign worker can speak to about 100 people per day, half on the phone and half in person, according to a Dean website. That means 1,000 volunteers could have conversations with 100,000 Iowans in a single day; if 5,000 volunteers show up and work both days next weekend, that’s a million potential conversations.

If personal contact and word of mouth make for effective marketing, then using the Internet to activate volunteers at the grassroots should give Dean a big lift. Meanwhile, the cost to the campaign of this effort is extremely low. Simple Web forms let volunteers sign up, figure out where they are needed, find a place to stay, even specify a need for vegetarian meals.

The Internet alone will not make Dean a winner, and not every candidate can or will use technology in the same ways he has. But the technology is non-partisan, available to any candidate, and adaptable to local conditions. Any campaign that fails to recognize the potential of online campaigning in the upcoming election deserves what it gets.

In North Carolina, early versions of  websites for Senate and gubernatorial candidates are as yet little more than placeholders, offering mostly boilerplate campaign literature and none of the social networking applications and multi-party communication of the Dean sites. Governor Mike Easley doesn’t even have a site up yet.

One candidate who seems serious about the Internet is Erskine Bowles, the likely Democratic nominee for the Senate seat relinquished by John Edwards. Bowles, a Greensboro native, tells me that he would be interested in writing on a campaign weblog. [Full disclosure: I have spoken with Bowles and his staffers and volunteers about online campaign strategy, but pretty much everything I know about the subject has been published in Baseline magazine,  my weblog, and/or this newspaper.]

“When it comes to online campaigning, Erskine Bowles is a true believer,” says Susan Lagana, a spokesperson for the Bowles campaign. “We will definitely be using the Internet to more directly engage supporters in our campaign because this election really is about them. We see how online campaigning breaks down a lot of the barriers that money and television have put between campaigns and grassroots. We want to combine high-tech with old-fashioned grassroots.”

One unresolved question about Internet campaigns is the extent to which they can empower a candidate’s supporters. Social software and weblogs allow volunteers to act with some autonomy, discuss issues and strategy with the candidate, staff, and each other, and publish their own plans and opinions. Yet nobody wants a candidate who blows with the focus-group breeze. Dean and John Edwards have focused on specific issues raised by readers of their campaign weblogs. Perhaps the more intimate setting of a statewide election will help define the role of Web-enabled volunteers.

In the meantime, Dean’s performance in Iowa will tell us more about this new-model campaign structure. His success at getting volunteers to Iowa, and their success at convincing Iowans to support Dean, will be the next big story about online politics. Soon, that story may have an important North Carolina angle to it.