President Barack Obama’s prospective 2012 Republican rivals are investing heavily in the Internet, looking to cut into what was an overwhelming advantage for Obama in the 2008 campaign.Through the first three months of the year, the political groups started by Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee have spent a total of nearly $600,000 building their web operations, according to reports filed this month with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service.
At The Weekly Standard, Mary Katharine Ham writes of "Techno-GOP," with TX governor Rick Perry as a prime example:
Jim Gimpel made a similar point several weeks ago:On March 2, Perry beat Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison by more than 20 points with a largely paperless campaign that used no direct mail and almost no yard signs (they were available for purchase upon request). The campaign also did no robo-calls and no newspaper editorial board meetings and focused instead on Internet ads, social networking websites, and person-to-person campaigning.
Perry is just the latest Republican to make headway using technology on the campaign trail, as the party out of power finally learns its way around the Internet. Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s campaign was designed with a nod to Barack Obama’s online successes. And Scott Brown’s insurgent campaign for the Senate in Massachusetts showed how potent technology can be for a team that’s low on money but high on energy.
Based on the mounting evidence for the effectiveness of personal contact, they invested in building a field operation of unprecedented size that would eventually situate nearly 40,000 Perry Home Headquarters locations across the state, each charged with mobilizing a targeted number of voters. This was about ten times the number of volunteers they had activated during the 2006 campaign.
Building on what was learned from the 2008 presidential election, their contacts with supporters and prospects were routed entirely through social media, e-mail, and website updates. To be sure, the jury is still out on just how effective some of these new strategies are — anecdotes abound but experimental tests are still in the works — but some of the old strategies that have been proved ineffective are clearly gone.
