Daily Digest: 10/4/07

The Web on the Candidates

• OffTheBus has released a comprehensive wiki, called the OffTheBus Field Guide, listing the names of campaign staffers. Project director Amanda Michel sees it as a tool to help journalists to identify the folks responsible for the day-to-day realities of the campaigns. It’s open to staffers and the public to fill in, but while most of the actual staffers are listed, details like education, work, and the MySpace-y “Current Mood” have yet to be filled in for the majority, and it’s up to staffers and the public to help. Sound familiar? Our StaffWiki also tracks the staffers working on the online end of the campaigns.

• In a long post about the candidates’ presences in Second Life (most of which we’ve been to and covered), OffTheBus’ Kirsten Anderson points out some potential FEC complications arising in the virtual world. While most candidates’ presences are unofficial, Mike Gravel’s is official, and a building at the site sports a corporate logo, potential raising an FEC violation. “Would a virtual campaign that accepted internet services from a corporation be in violation of FEC laws?” Anderson asks. It turns out that free speech and in-kind services that cost very little don’t run afoul of FEC rules. Since the space rented out on the Second Life server translates to very little real-world cash, it’s no big deal. Much virtual-ado about virtual-nothing.

• In our third installment of “What is OffTheBus Up To?” blogger Deanie Mills lists her “top-ten sites for mobilizing Hillary-hatred troops.” The sites have collectively raised millions of dollars to stop Hillary, says Mills, and it’s indeed impressive to see such a collection of activism against a candidate (we’ve noticed that when you Google “Blogs for Hillary” the first hit is a site called “Blogs against Hillary” and the biggest presidential campaign-related group on Facebook is a Stop Hillary group).

The Candidates on the Web

• Although his campaign originally reported raising a little more than $3 million in the third quarter, thanks to an end-of-quarter $1.2 million surge of online donations, Ron Paul now says he raised more than $5 million. That’s $4 million more than Mike Huckabee, and almost the same as John McCain.

• The figure is double Paul’s previous numbers, and, as the Wall Street Journal’s Susan Davis notes, he’s the only Republican to have increased donations in the third quarter (Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani haven’t reported their numbers yet). Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton told Davis that up to 80% of the campaign’s donations are coming in over the Internet.

• The donations better be coming in online, since Paul doesn’t seem to travel much. Marc Ambinder had a sudden realization that “Ron Paul cannot be dismissed as a gadfly,” but while OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers agrees, it’s because, he says, “Ron Paul isn’t even a gadfly. Gadflies do things.” Bowers argues that Ron Paul has been basically “phoning it in,” letting his supporters do the work. As evidence, he points to the number of campaign events held by each candidate; Paul has held only 82 campaign events so far. By contrast, Mitt Romney has held 400, and even Tom Tancredo has held 118. Bowers doesn’t see his supporters as comprising a movement, but rather as an army of emailers. “Movements do things besides send irritating emails, and Ron Paul isn’t going anyway if he continues to barely campaign,” he writes. We guess Bowers hasn’t noticed that Ron Paul has approximately 50K Meetup members, and that his supporters have posted dozens of videos of themselves flyering football rallies and standing on highway overpasses. That’s a lot more legwork than just “emailing”. As Paul continues to get compared to Howard Dean he’ll be treated more and more as a viable candidate.

• Speaking of Howard Dean, the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas asks if Paul is indeed the Howard Dean of 2008. “Just as Dean’s insurgent campaign effectively used the Web to raise money, rally its supporters and create buzz the year before the 2004 elections, Paul’s campaign throughout the year has singularly relied on the Internet to fuel his engine,” Vargas writes. Jerome Armstrong tells Vargas that Paul’s popularity has more to do with the rise of online libertarianism than with Paul himself. I agree; I told Jose that “There’s a void in the Republican party because there are no candidates speaking to the more libertarian financial conservatism that’s been the bedrock of the party. There’s a sense that what passes for the GOP right now isn’t Republican and it isn’t conservative. Ron Paul is filling that void.”

• To capitalize on all this media attention (the 2008 elections section of Digg, which is dominated by Paul supporters, even featured the headline, “Finally a Great article in the Wall Street Journal about Ron Paul!”), Paul has set an ambitious goal for himself, aiming to raise $4 million in the month of October alone; he’s at $140,000 as of this morning; at that rate he has a long way to go…

In Case You Missed It…

We need your help: we’re compiling a list of which candidates political bloggers are endorsing. So, here’s a call to bloggers everywhere: If you’ve decided on your presidential candidate, let us know.

Patrick Ruffini sees Ron Paul’s $5 million haul as a wake-up call to the rest of the Republican party. Will the people making the decisions myopically see the Paul phenomenon as a measure of the Internet’s irrelevance, or see it as a quirky, interim step towards the net playing the key role in future nominating contests?

Spencer Overton notices that campaigns are starting give local staffers the chance to create quality content centering around local people.

Responding to Katherine Seelye’s recent article in the New York Times about women and online politics, Morra Aarons says, “Trust me, we’re out there.”

Despite Howard Dean’s success using Meetup in 2004, Zephyr Teachout asks why the Democratic candidates are de-emphasizing offline events.

We’ve launched a new set of charts, this time showing data from the Hitwise 2008 Election Center detailing which candidates are getting the most traffic relative to their opponents.