Dean Leads, His Rivals Follow - 2004

This will be the last of my "background" posts before I get into the thick of the debate over whether Dean's campaign really changed everything. Over at Hype for America, they're starting to make the case against us. We'll hit 'em back soon enough.

Below, Johnny described Dean's unprecedented success with online fundraising, social networking via MeetUp, and connecting with people through blogs. Naturally, when Dean's efforts began to pay off, other candidates decided to jump on the bandwagon. In addition to Dean, at least six other candidates created blogs--Bush, Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Bob Graham, and Joe Lieberman. (Some argue that Bush's blog was not really a "blog" in spirit, because it was the only one that did not allow readers to post comments.) Although donation patterns varied significantly by candidate, the trend was a significant increase in online donations.

Aside from Dean, Wesley Clark made the most effective use of the Internet among Democratic primary candidates. The "Draft Clark" movement, largely organized online, provided a solid base of Internet-savvy supporters for Clark's campaign. Clark's Meetup support was second only to Dean's. Clark's campaign also pioneered the use of E-Blocks, which allowed supporters around the country to contact potential voters.

Independent blogs played a role in fundraising and organization during the 2004 season. By 2004, Daily Kos had transformed itself from a mere blog to a full-fledged community of thousands of users. Members of Daily Kos contributed $500,000 to fifteen Democratic candidates whom Markos Moulitsas Zúniga had identified as neglected by traditional sources of funding. Although all of these candidates lost, Moulitsas defends the effort by pointing out that they were chosen because they were underdogs and unlikely to win, and that a few of them came very close to achieving major upsets.

During the primaries, most liberal bloggers supported Dean or Clark. After Kerry won the primary, most of these bloggers transferred their support to Kerry, although some were less than enthusiastic about him. Some members of Daily Kos were irritated with the Kerry campaign for removing the DailyKos.com link from the official Kerry blog in response to some insensitive comments posted by Moulitsas. But Kerry could not shun the site forever; by early 2006, he was posting on Daily Kos, joining Democratic heavyweights such as Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold, Barack Obama, and Jon Corzine by appealing directly to the "netroots." In 2005, Boxer credited the Daily Kos community with helping her question Condoleezza Rice during her Secretary of State confirmation hearings, and with helping to delay the appointment of John Bolton as UN Ambassador.

But I'm getting ahead of myself--back to 2004. Conservative bloggers were almost completely united in their support of Bush, given his lack of a primary opponent. Some blogs (such as Blogs for Bush, created in November 2003 and still updated regularly today) were originally created with the specific goal of helping Bush win reelection. During the general election, a few prominent conservative bloggers--notably Andrew Sullivan and Daniel Drezner--reluctantly defected to Kerry, but they were a tiny minority.

The biggest victory for conservative bloggers during the 2004 election season resulted from the Killian documents controversy. Dan Rather presented a 60 Minutes report regarding documents allegedly from the 1970's that criticized Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard. Only a few hours after the story aired, a member of Free Republic claimed that the documents must be forgeries because the font could not have been produced by a 1970's typewriter. The blog Power Line and others pushed the story aggressively and collected information from readers. CBS was soon forced to admit that it could not prove the memos' authenticity. When Dan Rather retired shortly after the controversy, conservative bloggers took credit. They now had a "scalp" of their own to match Trent Lott. Some liberal bloggers believe that this was a set-up, because the Free Republic member who first questioned the memos was a Republican insider with no apparent expertise in typography who posted shortly after the 60 Minutes story aired. Even if they are correct, however, the incident did demonstrate the ability of bloggers to collect and share technical information rapidly.

The above is not intended to be an exhaustive review of online activity during the 2004 election. Almost no event related to the 2004 campaign escaped scrutiny from bloggers, and the online fundraising and organizing efforts were vast. Cataloguing everything that happened online in 2004 would be nearly impossible. The point I am making is that 2004 represented something largely new in the world of politics. Never before had so much information been exchanged online. Never before had it been so easy for supporters of a candidate to find each other in cyberspace and in the real world. As we will argue in subsequent posts, 2004 marks the beginning of a fundamental change in the nature of campaigning.