Page 204 - Information and American Democracy Technology in the Evolution of Political Power

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Campaigns for Office in 2000
web site experiences periodic spikes associated with news events. There
were about a dozen such spikes, associated with news about the cam-
paign’s move to Nashville, the Bradley-Gore debate, the Iowa caucuses
and New Hampshire primary, Super Tuesday, and the conventions. In
some cases, spikes in use of the site came from events in other cam-
paigns, including McCain’s win in Michigan and Bush’s announcement
of his running mate. Even the Columbine school shooting was correlated
with a surge in attention to Gore’s site. The surges tended to bring with
them increases in the flow of campaign funds. The highest of these was
about $150,000 in donations that came through the web site on the day
following Bush’s selection of Dick Cheney as a running mate. About half
of that was in response to an e-mail solicitation, and half unsolicited.
Like the Bush official, Green says that the Internet provides “an op-
portunity you don’t have with television and its fifteen-second sound
bites.” The opportunity is not to attract disengaged or undecided voters,
but to recruit interested supporters on the basis of information-intensive
communication. One technique was to tailor messages seen by citizens
returningtothesite,basedonrecordsfromtheirpreviousvisits.Thecam-
paign solicited information on citizens’ location and interests, and then
customized what the citizen saw on return visits as well as distributing
tailored messages by electronic mail. According to Green, the campaign’s
aim was to permit a citizen visiting the site to say, “I’m from Pennsylvania
and I’m interested in civil rights,” and from then on receive a tailored
political experience accordingly. The campaign amassed a collection of
400,000 electronic mail addresses in this way. Green says for a marginal
cost of essentially nothing, he could send a message “towomeninNew
York who are interested in the environment.” The Gore organization also
experimented with “instant messaging technology,” which permitted cit-
izens who had visited the site to identify and communicate directly with
other citizens who had compatible interests and who might be located
near one another.
Although Gore’s campaign was among the most serious and in-
tensive efforts of any campaign so far in the United States to exploit
new channels for communication, in the end the effort did not come
close to displacing the fundamental importance of traditional media.
In almost every way, the Gore campaign, like Bush’s, McCain’s, and
Bradley’s, employed precisely the same strategies that have dominated
campaigns for several decades. The Internet served as a useful and of-
ten profitable side activity in this strategy, but altered neither strategy or
organizational structure. As Lynn Reed of the Bradley campaign reports,

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