The Web on the Candidates
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Republicans are still working hard to develop an answer to ActBlue, the online Democratic fundraising machine (more than $4.3 million raised for John Edwards this year). TechPresident contributor David All has taken a shot with Slatecard, and he reports that the site has just about reached the modest goal of raising $75,000 in its first 41 days (it actually missed its goal by $115.35). Ever the optimist, David is pleased that the site helped pull in folks who hadn’t donated to a campaign before. “In short, the community stepped up to the plate and gave the goal a good run for the money (no pun intended).”
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Slatecard isn’t the only site to struggle to compete with ActBlue. RightRoots.com was able to raise almost $300,000 for Republican Congressional candidates in 2006, but that’s still a far cry from ActBlue’s numbers.
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So what is ActBlue, anyway? Technically, it’s “a Federal PAC that enables anyone -- individuals, local groups, and national organizations -- to fundraise for the Democratic candidates of their choice.” It’s like a partisan escrow account, passing funds along to candidates after taking a small fee. Simple, right? Sure, but its status as a PAC could mean trouble for Edwards, who has decided to accepted federal matching funds. Pending a ruling from the FEC, Edwards may not be able to match funds raised on ActBlue because the FEC bars granting matching funds to contributions "drawn on the account of a committee." Donations of up to $250 are matchable, and since a large amount of contributions ActBlue are small, a large amount of that haul could be matched by federal funds. But if the FEC rules that ActBlue donations can’t be matched, it would be a big blow to the Edwards campaign.
The Candidates on the Web
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In the face of declining poll numbers, Fred Thompson’s campaign is taking a step toward decentralization. The Wall Street Journal’s Amy Schatz reports that the campaign is asking supporters to call Republicans in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida from their homes. This is standard campaign practice but, as Schatz notes, the campaign usually controls the flow of names and numbers, and has a staffer looking over the callers’ shoulders to make sure all is well. But now supporters can simply download all of the names themselves and call voters independently. Not only is this “a bold experiment in decentralization,” but other candidates could download those lists too and have a little fun. Is this a sign of desperation from the Thompson camp or a savvy new experiment?
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Former Virginia governor and former Republican presidential candidate Jim Gilmore has announced he’s running for VA senate. He’ll be facing — paying attention? — former governor and former Democratic presidential candidate Mark Warner. MyDD’s Todd Beeton took a look at the two candidates’ announcement videos and found a stark difference. Essentially, Gilmore’s video is dark and boring and the candidate looks uncomfortable; Warner’s video is more well done and the candidate looks happy, like a winner. But the best (or worst) part of Gilmore’s video is his opening statement: “These are challenging times for our country. We’re threatened by terrorism, concerned about a difficult war, stuck in traffic…” Clearly, a man with his finger on the pulse of our nation.
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A handful of House Republicans have taken a radical step toward transparency and geekdom: they’re Twittering. The National Journal’s Aliya Sternstein writes that Roy Blunt, Eric Cantor, and John Boehner have all taken up electro-micro-updating in order to help get constituents “the information they want in the way they want it.” (Sadly, the article is behind a paywall.) Presidential candidates like Chris Dodd and John Edwards have taken to the tool as well, but if more and more lawmakers took it up it could open new pathways toward engagement. Or at least we’d know at what bar they’re all drinking and what flavor ice cream they’re eating.
In Case You Missed It…
Happy Thanksgiving! The Digest will be taking a couple of days off; we'll be back, refreshed and a couple pounds chubbier, on Monday.
Social networking smarty-pants Fred Stutzman reports that MoveOn has turned its sights on Facebook’s new advertising program, Beacon. The group is asking Facebook users to sign the following: “Facebook must respect my privacy. They should not tell my friends what I buy on other sites—or let companies use my name to endorse their products—without my explicit permission.”
John Locke fan Alan Rosenblatt wonders if we vote with our heads or with our hearts? Do we pick the candidate we agree with the most or the one who makes us feel good? For those who vote with their heads, three new websites should appeal strongly to your desire to understand what you get with your vote, at least in principle.
Who will be America’s first techPresident? It’s time to grade the candidates on their understanding of the power of the internet to transform America’s future. We start with the Democratic field… read on to find out who makes the grade and who’s one step from a big, fat “F.”
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Grassroots vs. processing
As someone involved with one of these efforts (Rightroots), I'd like to break this down a little further.
I think it's helpful to make a distinction between contributions raised by self-starting activists over the Internet, and campaigns that use ActBlue as their primary engine for processing contributions.
The bulk of ActBlue's money comes from committees and institutions that use it as a contribution engine and market to huge email lists. So, Edwards has raised $4.3 million, and likely very much more than that. (Curiously the Edwards number hasn't grown significantly since the end of the first quarter, and they use ActBlue for all their processing.)
ActBlue will also hide the total amount raised by a committee upon request. John Kerry used them to send earmarked donations to candidates in 2006, generating huge numbers off his 3M+ list. Those numbers were hidden from view. There are no stats on the John Kerry "page" that we can examine.
If you go tho their active and archived Pages directory, you'll see that barely half of their total $32M is accounted for. Pages are what is cited by people who write about this as ActBlue's bread and butter: bloggers raising money in $5-10 increments for favorite candidates, or candidates who are transparent about their processing.
Drilling down further, only $4-6 million out of $32 million has been driven through non-campaign, non-PAC entities (it's been a couple of months since I did this analysis, so forgive the roughness) -- about $2M of it through the Kos Dozen in 2004 and the Netroots Candidates in 2006.
When you look at how they raise a majority of their money, it's a mistake to say that a powerhouse "like ActBlue" doesn't exist on the right or elsewhere on the left. Had online fundraising vendors like Campaign Solutions, Aristotle, and NGP Software organized themselves as earmarking PACs like ActBlue does, it's likely that at least one of them could have surpassed ActBlue's $32 million haul.
So who gets credit for "raising" the money? Vendors who process contributions will always claim credit, but the real story is usually more complicated. If a Congressional candidate raises $50,000 from 100 of his closest friends at $500 a pop, does the processing agent really get credit if it's the candidate's network?
Or what if the candidate sends an email, and 1,000 people respond with an average contribution of $50? That's grassroots, but not necessarily ActBlue's.
But if a blogger sets up a page on ActBlue, and drives contributions through that page, I think both can fairly get the credit -- ActBlue for providing the infrastructure and the blogger for pounding the pavement.
For Rightroots' part, over 90% of our fundraising has fallen into this latter category: grassroots bloggers organizing mass donations independent of the campaigns.
These are all issues Andrew and Micah have thoughtfully raised re: the blurring lines between traditional contributions and "Internet" contributions.
Most of what ActBlue does isn't ingenious or new. And I don't fault them for posting their big number -- it's a great PR trick and people in this space would be stupid not to do it. But a true apples-to-apples comparison would be ActBlue vs. a traditional processing agent, or between the $4-6 million ActBlue has raised through blogs vs. what everyone else has raised through blogs.