New Technology Helps Grassroots Efforts

Matt Stoller has an article up on the Nation magazine website about how new technology is helping improve the effectiveness of grassroots campaigning. This is a quote from the article about why television is losing influence as a campaign medium:

Since the 1960s, television has been the primary conduit for political information, with campaigns spending about 80 percent of their budget on media. But while broadcast television can reach millions of voters, it is, as Podhorzer notes, a dying medium. "The main thing that has changed is the heading to collapse of broadcast TV and heading to dominance of systematic, organized word of mouth and more targeted communication," he says. What's most promising about the shift from broadcast campaigns to those centered on "systematic, organized word of mouth" is the possibility of activating new voters, something TV has never been capable of doing. Political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green, experts on election turnout, conducted an experiment in 1998 with voters in New Haven, Connecticut, showing that person-to-person canvassing when the canvassers are ethnically and demographically matched to voters can increase turnout by 10 percent with a single contact and a nonpartisan message.

The article goes on to talk about the new database system that the DNC has put together under Howard Dean. This effort by Dean is being matched by an effort of the Ohio Democratic Party under Chair Chris Redfern called Votebuilder. Votebuilder is designed to compete with the Republican database program called Voter Vault. Both rely on using databases with a lot of information about potential voters so that when volunteers go out to canvass voters, they can be more effective in their presentation.

Of course, all of this technology depends on having volunteers and paid canvassers and a party leadership dedicated to making the technology work. It is up to local Democratic Party leaders, particularly county chairs, to make sure that their local parties are using the technology being provided by the DNC and the ODP.

Bill Richardson on Iraq is Not Ambiguous

According to this article on Huffington Post, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said yesterday on CNN's Late Edition, that he would pull all the troops out of Iraq. He claims that his position is different from all the other Democratic candidates who, according to him, are proposing that some American troops stay in Iraq for an indefinite period.

We are not sure about his claim, since Congressman Dennis Kucinich seems to be advocating that all American troops be removed from Iraq, but the one advantage that his proposal has is that it is very simple to understand. Ambiguity in politics can be fatal since it clouds the message a candidate is trying to deliver. Hillary Clinton, for example, appears to be trying to have it both ways as she calls for a deadline for American military involvement in Iraq but also seems to favor keeping troops in Iraq for an indefinite period of time.

One thing about Richardson is that he isn't serving in Washington. Unlike Clinton and Obama he is not subject to influence by the Beltway mentality. That mentality seems to believe that the United States can't just pull all its troops out of Iraq because of the "horrible" things that will supposedly happen if it does. Anyone proposing such a pull out is not treated seriously by the Washington pundits.

Interestingly, the same thing happened in 2004. Howard Dean, who repeatedly pointed out that the Iraq War was a huge mistake, was berated by the national press headquartered in Washington. John Kerry, who was ambiguous about the war, was promoted by the press over Dean. The Dean position, though, would have given Bush more of a problem in the general election, especially as compared to Kerry's "I voted for the bill before I voted against it."