Page 202 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Campaigns for Office in 2000
had paid for itself. 210 Buchanan’s organization also made some use of
information technology for communicating with the press, but made
little use of the Internet to turn out supporters or persuade undecided
voters. Instead, the Buchanan organization relied much more heavily
on using electronic mail to organize staff and volunteers. According to
the campaign manager, “[M]ore than anything, we used [information
technology] for keeping the troops in the field informed.” 211
There is little evidence that these efforts by minor party candidate or-
ganizations to exploit new information infrastructure are having much
bearing on their viability. To be sure, the number of minor-party can-
didates running for President shows signs of growing, but information
technology is hardly the cause of this trend. Between 1900 and 1960, an
averageofaroundfiveminorpartycandidatesranforPresidentnationally
every four years. By the election of 1980, the figure was up to ten, and it
averaged thirteen in the 1990s. 212 So the trend is an old one. In the early
days of the Internet, major party candidates were actually more likely
than minor party candidates to use the Internet. In 1996 and again in
1998,forinstance,onlyaboutathirdofminorpartycandidatesforHouse
and Senate had web sites, compared with all of the major party Senate
candidates and over half of major party House candidates. 213 Moreover,
the number of minor party candidates receiving more than 5 percent of
the vote for President or winning seats in Congress has not improved
over time, even since the rise of the Internet. While the contemporary
information revolution may help some resource-poor minor parties get
their message out, it has yet to affect vote totals, let alone outcomes.
The greater sophistication of major candidates’ use of new technology
was especially evident in the 2000 campaigns. Front-runners Bush and
Goremountedelaborateweb-ande-mail–basedoperations,althoughfor
both the Internet was at best a complement to the vastly more important
traditional media campaigning. Bush eventually committed substantial
resources to the Internet, including at peak about a dozen staff, but the

210 211
Haley, personal interview. Ibid.
212
Steven J. Rosenstone, Roy Behr, and Edward Lazarus, Third Parties in America: Citizen
Response to Major Party Failure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Foun-
dation for Public Affairs and Congressional Quarterly, Inc., Congressional Quar-
terly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, 3rd ed. (Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Public
Affairs, 1994); Richard M. Scammon, Alice V. McGillivray, and Rhodes Cook, eds.,
America Votes: A Handbook of Contemporary American Election Statistics, 1996, vol. 22
(Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1996).
213
Elaine Kamarck and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Democracy.com: Governance in a Networked
World (Hollis, N.H.: Hollis Publishers, 1999).
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