Analyzing the California Campaign Stack
BY Nick Judd | Thursday, July 1 2010
If ever a campaign was an example of how bells and whistles do not a victory make, it's Chuck DeVore's campaign for U.S. Senate in California. He lost in the June 8 Republican primaries to Carly Fiorina, the favored Republican establishment candidate. Fiorina now faces Boxer in the run-up to the November general election.
But DeVore's campaign tested out several new technologies during the campaign, launching an iPhone app in January and using the brand-new fundraising software Blue Swarm, for which 2010 is the inaugural election cycle, to offer volunteers the ability to send emails and track pledges from their own lists of fundraising contacts.
The thing is, it doesn't look like the experiments really paid off.
Campaign Stack
Here's a look some of the primary software and online consulting choices from each of the campaigns in the California U.S. Senate race, according to FEC disbursement data:
Barbara Boxer
Software: NGP Software
Web Consultants: Blue State Digital, Trilogy Interactive (and Articulated Man and Blackrock, now part of Trilogy, as separate entities)
Carly Fiorina
Web Consultants: Campaign Solutions,Hynes Communications, Cardinal Communication Strategies, Wilson-Miller Communications
Chuck DeVore
Website: ElectionMall
Fundraising: Blue Swarm, Visteva
New Media Consulting: Raise Digital
Tom Campbell
Fundraising Software: iContribute, Grenville Software
Web Consulting: Engage
"I can say that [the iPhone app] was worth more for the earned media than the actual traffic," Justin Hart, who was the new media consultant for the DeVore campaign, told me in an e-mail on Thursday. He said he didn't have hard statistics immediately available.
The application allowed people to check news from the campaign, see upcoming events, and get other official campaign info.
The campaign released a fundraising widget that put DeVore at the top of a list that also included Florida U.S. Senate hopeful Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, running for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, and Michael Williams, running for U.S. Senate in Texas. The campaign made small in-kind contributions to each campaign in conjunction with that widget, which appeared on RedState and other conservative blogs.
That widget looks to have raised just $12,000, far short of a $250,000 fundraising target.
A look at Federal Elections Commission data shows that's not the only alliance DeVore made in his communications: He also rented contact lists from Human Events, the conservative news site, and received one from Americans in Contact PAC as an in-kind contribution. Interesting aside: Boxer also rented a list — disclosing, according to FEC data, a "fair market value" rate of nearly $29,000 for Hillary Clinton's contact list.
Add these experiments to Carly Fiorina's unintentionally hilarious "Demon Sheep" Internet ads — which spawned a Twitter persona — and the pile of web pratfalls coming out of California this campaign season seems to be pretty sizeable.