Short Stories, Long Odds

Snow Day, originally uploaded by jberthume.

It isn’t usually like this in Texas, but here you go.

Me in the Press Room, originally uploaded by jberthume.

Diana wanted me to get someone to take my picture at the debate, and I remembered a whole one times. Picture by Texas Blue publisher Karl Lynch.

In The Waiting Line, originally uploaded by jberthume.

I covered the debate from Austin for the Texas Blue and I’m proud of the work we did down there. My life has taken another one of those bizarre turns in the last few days, and I fear that I’ve been bitten by the campaign coverage bug once again. This picture, in case you were wondering, is of part of the line to get in to see Senator Barack Obama at Reunion Arena on February 20, when 20,000 of his friends and neighbors appeared to wish him well. They did so very loudly.

Democrats have long struggled with communicating their core issues to the base American electorate. New polls and general anecdotal evidence are showing that it has started happening by default. Democrats now control the agenda on issues that are truly important to Americans, and it is due in large part to an unlikely ally – traditional Republican base voters.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Eventually, the entire dynamic of American campaigns will change. Because of the intertubes.

All fretting about interest levels in the Texas campaign aside, I think there’s an interesting trend becoming visible in this election cycle. Ad revenue is still very important for a campaign – the donations must come rolling in, especially for statewide campaigns, so that you can be on TV as much as you need to be. It is obviously helping Chris Bell in Texas, and sudden influxes of cash have helped Democrats in other races around the country.

However, after Ned Lamont’s primary victory in Connecticut proved once and for all that there is literal power to be had by leveraging the internets to your advantage, other smart candidates have taken notice and started stomping on the digital terra. There is no sign that this won’t work.

For instance, a YouTube account is free. A statewide cable ad buy is not, although it is far less expensive than a statewide network TV buy. So, let’s say you’re a relatively small Congressional campaign like Shane Sklar or John Courage. A perfect example of how the new model could work is up at Burnt Orange Report right now.

Basicallty, as a candidate, you pay to create an ad. It gets picked up by BOR (or, in a more competitive federal race, by Kos or MyDD), or failing that, you make an account for your campaign and post it in a journal and then beg until it gets pushed to the front page. Now you’ve guaranteed that the built-in audience for that blog, be it three thousand people or three hundred thousand people, will at least see your name and are likely to watch your ad. That’s way better exposure than you might get with a bargain cable buy. Hell, you don’t even have to pay for hosting or bandwidth anymore – the blog pays the transfer costs and YouTube hosts the video on its server.

So in a model where you become a netroots star and get pushed on major blogs, the cost you pay to get your campaign ad in front of a potentially limitless audience is far less than paying for a media buy that would have a potentially similar effect. Most media buys in campaigns are underfunded so they end up being a huge expense for the campaign with very little return, because it isn’t done right, or to the extent it needs to be done. And there certainly isn’t a mechanism embedded within the commercial to allow the viewer to immediately donate money to the campaign, as there is with a blogpost with an embedded ad.
There are a lot of “ifs” in that model, and of course nothing is certain, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that downloadable content can replace ad buys within the next two years. However, the preponderance of broadband internet’s availability and the shift among the 18-35 demographic to a preference for downloadable entertainment, gradual as it is, signals to me that the cost of advertising to a large audience may drop significantly in the future, even for large campaigns.