Politicians are getting the electronic message. In the rapidly accelerating world of the Internet, e-campaigning has gone from a novelty to a necessity. From Sweden’s Social Democrats to Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), party organizations are using the Web to advertise, organize, proselytize, even raise money. Across cyberspace, voters and politicians are reaching out for–and finding–one another. And though television still has a much bigger impact on the public, the Internet is undeniably changing the way governments interact with their citizens. “What distinguishes wired politicians from those who aren’t is that the wired ones have ideas, they have a vision and they’re boldly trying to attain those goals,” says Phil Noble, president of politicsonline.com, a site that provides Internet help to campaigns all over the world. “They’re more attuned to their constituents than they would be without the Internet.”
No two politicians use the Internet in exactly the same way. American pols, the pioneers of e-campaigning, have begun fund-raising online; Democratic presidential contender Bill Bradley has already raised $500,000 over the Net. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has vowed to open insular Westminster to the public by putting all government services online by 2008. And in vast, sparsely populated Australia, the Internet reaches voters that a campaign bus tour might not: during the federal election last March, the Australian Labor Party’s home page registered 2 million hits in five weeks. “Not bad for a country with just 11 million voters,” says Kate Lundy, the 29-year-old shadow minister for Information Technology. “Cyberdemocracy is a reality politicians can’t ignore.”
But for all the buzz, online politics is still in its infancy. Only 166 of the Bundestag’s 669 parliamentarians have their own home pages (though they all have e-mail accounts). Those with Web sites often don’t seem to know what to do with them; most offer little more than bland bios and self-adulation. Sometimes they provide incongruous “extras”: Germany’s CDU Web site has an online shop where visitors can order coffee mugs, volleyballs and baseball caps with the CDU logo. “Fifty percent of what they’re doing is wrong,” says Noble. “But that’s fabulous, because that means 50 percent of it is right.”
The best political Web sites offer give-and-take between voters and their leaders. In the French town of Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris, residents can tune in to the city council’s live sessions on cable TV–and then interrupt to ask questions via e-mail or phone. German parliamentarian Michael Luther gets a much better response online than in person. “When I invite people to a talk, sometimes no one comes,” he says. “But when you throw out issues on the Internet, you often get a lot more reactions back.” Traffic at such sites tends to rise dramatically as elections approach. “Political sites on the Internet are like tire ads,” says Noble. “You don’t pay any attention to them until it’s time to buy tires.”
No medium is better than the Internet at helping a party reinvent itself–especially if it’s a staid old party seeking to update its image and attract younger voters. Thanks to a strong and snappy Net presence, Germany’s CDU upped its youth vote in Saarland by 17 percent in last month’s state elections, ousting the incumbent SPD after 14 years on top. The Greens used the Net to shed their image as a bunch of granola-chomping hippies who think of a “net” solely as a hazard to dolphins. Green candidates were among the chattiest online, and the party struck a deal with a service provider that offered its members reduced modem and Internet-access prices. Green parliamentarian Cem Ozdemir, 35, was among the first to get a modem. “It fits very well with the Green way,” he says. “It’s very environmental: you don’t have to send a lot of paper.”
While the Internet is clearly useful to mainstream political parties, it is the very lifeblood of their underground counterparts. Zairean exiles who had fled the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko began using the Internet in 1994 to share news from home and criticism of the government. The network of exiles, mostly academics at American universities, grew so well organized that it eventually staged an anti-Mobutu rally in Washington. When Mobutu fell in 1997, four of the movement’s leaders joined the new government of Laurent Kabila. “We were the first [exile] group that actually used the Internet to have an impact on political change,” says Andre Kapanga, who now serves as the U.N. representative of the renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Local rebel movements have used the Internet–for better and for worse–to win international backing. Supporters of Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, who gained control of a slice of Chiapas state in 1994, have built an electronic mass-mailing list. “With the Internet, you get information out a lot faster to a lot more people,” says Tom Hansen, an American activist who was expelled from Chiapas by the Mexican government last year. And a growing number of Chinese dissidents in exile are taking their prodemocracy fight online (sidebar).
Politicking on the Internet does have its risks. For one thing, radical activists have been known to conduct “electronic civil disobedience” campaigns, bombarding politicians’ e-mail accounts with messages. But the biggest threat stems from electronic ignorance. The avowed technophile Tony Blair was deeply embarrassed recently when he needed help ordering flowers over the Internet for his wife, Cherie. And in Germany’s Brandenburg state, Premier Manfred Stolpe of the SPD last month garnered fewer votes than in the 1995 state elections after he neglected to secure his domain name. His CDU opponents bought the address instead–and set up a page for their candidate, Jorg Schonbohm.
Even practiced politicians like U.S. Republican front runner George W. Bush can fall prey to such pranks. Last fall a 29-year-old computer programmer from Boston bought the URL gwbush.com for the standard $70. When Bush staffers rejected his selling price of $350,000, he turned the site into a savage parody of the Texas governor, including a fake picture of the candidate snorting cocaine. Bush learned his lesson: his campaign has since bought up some 60 domain names–including bushsucks.com, bushbites.com and bushblows.com–to keep them out of pranksters’ hands.
Such obstacles are only minor bumps on the road to a totally electronic political future. In America, the Internet’s next great campaign function will be high-stakes fund-raising, predicts Noble: “My guess is in 2000 there may be campaigns where the amount of money raised on the Internet makes the difference between winning and losing.” Britain is working on establishing virtual think tanks, including one to connect policymakers around the European Union. And it won’t be long before voters are casting their ballots online. “There are already discussions going on in the U.K. about electronic voting,” says Nic Hopkins, marketing director of the government’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency.
But candidates, beware: there is such a thing as having too much of a Web presence. Jeff Kennett, premier of the Australian state of Victoria, recently lost a great deal of popular support after he launched a fun and flashy site called jeff.com.au. Visitors could download a “Jeff” screen saver and play a silly election game in which contestants tried to convert would-be voters by dropping policy documents on their heads. Now real-life voters hold Kennett’s political life in their hands. And someday they may be able to boot him out of office without ever leaving their laptops.
title: “Pressing The Flesh Online” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-07” author: “Thomas Blackwell”
So the word went forth in an e-mail alert: check your Christmas-card list, your Palm Pilot, your alumni directory. Pass along a message (complete with a hot link to the Forbes Web page) to any Iowa friends or relatives. Urge them to go to Ames and to vote for Steve. The result, Segal concedes, was less a swarm than a dust devil. Perhaps 250 of Forbes’s nearly 5,000 votes in Ames were earned this way. But that was an important 5 percent of Forbes’s respectable second-place finish–and a harbinger of e-campaigning. “It was all done on the Net,” says Segal. “We were across the country, and we didn’t have to set up another headquarters on some Main Street in Iowa. Isn’t it way cool?”
Yes, it is. In the ever-accelerating world of the Internet, e-campaigning has gone from a novelty to a necessity in less than a year. With increasing sophistication and urgency, campaigns are using the Web as a bulletin board, advertising medium and organizing tool. Television–broadcast, cable and satellite–remains the overwhelmingly powerful vehicle for mass-market, “passive,” one-way selling. But the Internet is fast becoming a Virtual New Hampshire: a quirky but pivotal place where campaigns are launched or scuttled, where savvy organizers and voters roam in search of action, answers and influence.
As it grows in importance, the Web is generating its own issues and folkways. Candidates know they have to address Web-based concerns such as privacy, free speech and taxation of Internet sales. The candidates also know they must understand the culture of the Net, which honors voluminous and readily available information, two-way communication and a sense of community knitted together by modem. In a shrewd move last week, George W. Bush made his entire contributor list available online–an attempt not only to blunt criticism of his lavishly funded campaign, but to win points for style.
The Web had its political coming of age last year, in Minnesota, in Jesse Ventura’s successful bid for the governorship. An independent with no party structure or endorsements, all he had was fame, blunt-spoken ideas–and the Net. For months Ventura had no physical “headquarters,” just an ever-growing e-mail list. Two thirds of his fund-raising pledges arrived via the Internet. His final, three-day, get-out-the-vote bus trip was organized by e-mail. Ventura’s site never was fancy. No elaborate graphics. It was a simple, text-based community of Ventura fans. The network generated a surge at the end, especially among young, new voters–an age group, not coincidentally, that grew up online. He won half the under-30 vote in a three-way race. “The Internet didn’t win it for us,” says Ventura Webmaster Phil Madsen, “but we couldn’t have won without it.”
The Y2K presidential campaigns have gone to school on the Ventura story. Unlike “The Body,” they care about appearances. As much to show their Net savvy as to sign up volunteers, the campaigns have sites full of Java-scripted doodads, interactive features and digitized daily photos from the hustings. On Al Gore’s, surfers can enter a “just for kids” area, check out voter-registration requirements by clicking on a map of the United States or download computer wallpaper decorated with the Gore logo. Several campaigns offer versions of their sites in Spanish and links to independent news outlets. The Gore and Forbes sites are perhaps the most elaborately organized; Bush’s the most intent on showing off the candidate himself. “Campaigns tend to reflect the candidate,” says Phil Noble, an online-politics consultant. “And so do the sites.”
It’s important to be convincingly digital because the voters increasingly are. According to a new survey by the University of California, Santa Barbara, half of all adults now have access to the Internet either at home or at work, and more than half of them at one time or another have used the Net to delve into political topics. By the end of last year, more than 36 million Americans were getting news at least once a week from the Internet–more than triple the number of three years earlier. Among the states, New Hampshire is second (behind only Alaska) in the percentage of voters online. The Granite State–where primary rules give independents extraordinary power–seems destined to be the place in which digital and physical campaigning will merge.
The real work online is, therefore, organizational. Gore and Bill Bradley are both using the Net effectively to enlist support. Both have raised sizable credit-card donations online, and Bradley recently won a ruling making such donations “matchable” for federal funds. But no one is making a more elaborate effort than Forbes, whose campaign manager, Bill Dal Col, vowed earlier this year to run “the first Internet-based campaign.” More than any other, the Forbes Web site is geared toward signing up recruits and eliciting information about them. The Forbes database, says Webmaster Segal, has broken down its e-mail list into dozens of categories, and sends each of them targeted messages.
In the try-anything, price-is-no-object Forbes campaign, there’s more. If you stop by the Forbes Web site, you’ll be asked if you want to become an “e-precinct captain.” If you do, you’ll be asked to submit an e-mail list of friends who will comprise your e-precinct. The names on the list then, automatically, get a “personalized” (but pre-written) appeal from you. “Join us,” it says. “I’ve committed to helping Steve Forbes become president… and I’m asking you to help.”
It’s harder to use the Internet for political advertising. TV remains the best way to reach the large mass of undecided voters who settle general elections. “It’s the less-engaged voters in the center who matter most in the end,” says Democratic media consultant Robert Shrum. “And the only way to ensure you reach them is with television. The Internet still requires you to be an active participant, but most voters are passive recipients of political information.” Even so, Forbes is trying to at least go where the voters are on the Web. His campaign will soon begin advertising on many day-trading and investment sites.
The opening of the West transformed American politics, giving rise to a host of new issues, from the extension of slavery to conservation. The domestication of cyberspace is doing the same thing. The most urgent, Net-created concern is privacy. Ironically, campaign organizing itself elevates the issue. Gore, much maligned for his “I founded the Internet” remarks, has nevertheless shown his sensitivity on the matter. So has GOP Sen. John McCain, who chairs a committee that has jurisdiction over the issue. The Gore and McCain sites were recently praised by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonpartisan group, for their elaborate efforts to assure voters that the information they collected would stay private. Others, including the Bush and Forbes sites, didn’t get a gold star on that score.
Other Net-based issues are popping up. Elizabeth Dole has made control of pornography on the Internet a central feature of her campaign. Gore touts the administration’s efforts to require phone companies to subsidize Internet connections for all the schools and libraries in the country. Bush, Forbes and others deride this so-called Gore tax. McCain is no fan of it either, but has begun saying nice things about the “schools and libraries” program, too–since the legislation to create it passed through his committee. Forbes has declared his eternal, undying opposition to any taxation of transactions on the Internet. Other candidates, including Bush, are more equivocal. No candidate favors a new regulatory scheme for the Internet. That’s perhaps not surprising, since many of them are raking in contributions from the new world digital commerce.
But the biggest issue now emerging in the world of online politics is about… online politics. In California (of course) a movement is underway to allow votes to be cast over the Internet. Activist Marc Strassman is filing papers to put the question on the ballot in November 2000. Some analysts argue that people could vote early and often by modem and that it would widen the “digital divide” between rich and poor. But Strassman contends that technical problems are soluble, and “anything that makes it easier for people to vote,” he says, “is a good idea in these days of voter cynicism and apathy.”
Now all he has to do is collect 500,000 signatures. He and his allies must gather them the old-fashioned way–on paper and in person. And Strassman has come up with a novel way to use the Internet to make the process simpler. Voters who want to sign won’t have to go to a shopping-center parking lot to do so. They’ll be able to download a petition form, sign it and send it in. “A petition only has to have one name on it to be valid,” says Strassman. Of course that’s the way it works in the world of politics on the Web: you start with one person and hope for a swarm.
