Patrick Ruffini, e-campaign director, RNC; founder, myGOP
NEWSWEEK: Can you tell us about the myGOP Web site and how it came about?
Patrick Ruffini: It’s been really fascinating to watch the way people use it and the way it has evolved. It hasn’t always been as we would have expected. Using the Web to recruit volunteers [and] donors is not terribly new. But I think the format is new. MyGOP takes on some of the trappings of a social networking site, or something where it’s not just recruiting but you can post your photos, you can post all manner of things about yourself. And people feel really comfortable with that, more so than with a traditional action center where we tell people to do things and they just dutifully follow orders. With this, people feel comfortable working at their own pace, in their own style and feel real comfortable taking ownership of it.
Ruffini: ‘The technology is simply serving to break down barriers of communication’
Are candidates posting their information on myGOP?
I’ve seen some local candidates do that. I’ve seen college Republicans. I’ve seen local Republican organizations. And again, going back to the unexpected ways people are using it, we’re seeing local Republican groups using this as their Web site of choice, because it has all the functionality that they would normally have and they get a personalized URL. That’s not something we had expected.
It seems e-campaigning is moving beyond blogging, which was the real focus in 2004. Where do you see things going as we move towards the 2008 elections?
The question for us in the online campaigning business has always been: How do you engage people as broadly as you would get through, say, television? How do you reach that mass audience, but with the same level of depth and engagement you see on the Internet these days? I think the answer to that is Web 2.0. It’s people creating their own content. It’s people going onto Web sites, voting [on] the content they like, submitting their own. For someone with a party or with a campaign, it’s very important to try to reach those people. You’re not going to get 50,000 voters in a day coming to your Web site. But you can touch many more millions of people by reaching beyond your Web site.
How do you attract people to the site?
You do it through the emphasis on social networking. It’s allowing people to be creative … [using] online video, for instance, like YouTube. We have a feature on our site, similar to that, where people can vote up their favorite videos, their favorite content. Another way is using these desktop widgets [small, customizable software applications which deliver information to your desktop] to attract people to your Web site, or having widgets posted on blogs, so people can click on them and then click through to your Web site. So it’s really engaging the plethora of blogs, the plethora of social-networking Web sites, where you’re really working with an interactive model.
Is the Republican National Committee looking into any campaigning strategies using cell phones and text messaging?
It’s something we’re certainly looking into closely. But I think it would be foolhardy to predict what the new technology is for 2008. … The way we view ourselves is that we’re just enabling the traditional organization to evolve to do things in a more tech-friendly way. So we’re going to focus on several fundraising areas—via text messaging, via blogs. We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Backing up then, I’m curious how you’re looking at blogs at this point. Are they mainly just a fundraiser?
Well different people get different things out of this. People ask, “Are blogs more journalist or are they more activist?” Well I’d say it’s all of the above. They’re both opinionators and political activists. They’re mashing up for lack of a better term, all these formats, and they’re becoming their own little breed that’s different from anything we’ve seen before. But people have success both ways.
Can you put all this new technology into perspective for us?
The way I see it, people are using new technology, but what they’re doing with that technology is not new. This is the pamphleteers of the [American] revolution all over again. It’s people speaking to each other directly, and the technology is simply serving to break down those barriers of communication. It’s really just the way we’ve always wanted it to be, but the technology just wasn’t there to enable it before.
So 2008 is where this is all coming together?
The Holy Grail for people in online politics is: How do you reach the same masses that you reach on TV, but reach them at a different level and engage them? I think you’re going to see the beginnings of the answer to that in ‘06 and ‘08. I don’t think we’re going to answer it, but I think we could see this moving beyond something that’s just to mobilize a really hard-hard core of activists, into something that could potentially affect the outcome of the election. It’s the first year where you see that as a potential outcome.
Peter Daou, e-campaign manager for Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York
NEWSWEEK: How are the e-campaigns of 2006 and 2008 going to be different from 2004?
Peter Daou: When I was with the Kerry campaign in 2004, we did a lot of thinking about blogs as a means of communication. Since then, my focus has always been to assess the scope of blog and net-roots influence on the political process, and how you integrate bloggers’ voices into that process, both in their interactions with media and with the political establishment. Certainly a focus of my new relationship with Sen. Clinton is to bring some understanding of how those interactions happen. It’s something that I think is increasingly important, and there hasn’t been much thought put into it.
Daou on blogs: ‘This community has a voice, and a seat at the table’
How are Democrats thinking about blogs at this point? It seems like there’s a real tension between wanting to embrace blogs as an ideological weapon, and those who view them more as a fundraising mechanism.
It’s a really good question, and one of the things I try to put a lot of thought into—not just how are blogs looking at the establishment, but how is the establishment looking at blogs. The fundraising aspects of blogging, I’ve argued and some others have argued, are not as potent as the communications aspects—the actual capacity to develop and promote specific messages, and to really be a part of the debate that creates conventional wisdom. There is more of a question as to whether it is a functional fundraising tool. Certainly bloggers don’t like to be seen as an ATM. That was a major complaint after 2004: “We’re not here just so you can raise money off of us.”
So how do established political players see bloggers now?
One thing that has changed dramatically is the acceptance that this community has a voice, and a seat at the table. I don’t know if that’s really in dispute any longer. What you see more of is questioning: What is it all about? How do you interact with it?
How are candidates and bloggers interacting? Do you see a lot of candidates lobbying bloggers?
Now that bloggers have a voice that’s accepted as important, there’s the intent on the parts of many to make sure their message gets out properly [via the blogs]. As a staffer, you want to correct the record, and you want to see favorable comments. But one of the things I tend to shy away from, because I don’t like playing into the typical narratives of what this is all about, is this idea that there’s an incestuous relationship between the left-leaning blogosphere and the Democratic party … You’ve seen a lot of that lately in traditional media coverage. I think that way of thinking oversimplifies what’s happening, and marginalizes the importance of bloggers.
How will blogs influence politics over the next two years?
Well, what’s going on is complicated. There’s a new voice, a new power-base that has arisen, and everybody’s jockeying for position and eyeing each other trying to figure out how to deal with one another. With that come negatives and positives. There is healthy outreach, conference calls with bloggers, and I think that’s a positive. But then you’ve also seen “Astroturf” blogging, which is trying to blog anonymously stuff that’s in favor of a particular candidate.
We’re seeing more and more politically oriented social-networking Web sites popping up, like Essembly and myGOP. Are they likely to be important?
The short answer is yes. The social networking aspect of campaigning, you saw both the Bush and the Kerry campaigns trying to make moves in that direction, in the direction of people coming together and having a bottom-up approach where people can drive the process.
How about cell phones and text messaging? Some people are saying the text-message is the blog of 2008.
It’s funny because text messaging in other elections in other countries has been used more prominently than in the U.S. It hasn’t taken off in the same way, for a number of reasons, here in the U.S. But I try to separate the particular technology from the larger significance of what it is that people are doing, and how they’re relating to one another in a completely new way. So all these various technologies can be seen as different mechanisms of people doing something new: forming communities around particular interests, and creating new power structures and new ways of talking to one another.
