Registering Voters with SMS

August 23, 2006 – 10:22 am

This is finally an application of SMS in American politics that I believe in. Personal Democracy Forum has a post about registering single women to vote over SMS. Here’s a little bit about it:

… text “SMS” to 75444. As you know, most of your friends probably have their cell phone on them when you are speaking to them and sending a text message will only interrupt conversations for a few seconds… the same amount of time it takes to unwrap a stick of gum.

Then they have a little interaction and a they are registered to vote (details here). In general, I think that building lists and IDing supporters is the thing to do with SMS. Hotlineblog reports a good (John Edwards) and bad (Rick Santorum) way to use SMS.

Some friends of mine in Finland are doing this. People can join their organization (the youth wing of one of the Finnish conservative parties) by texting an address. They can even pay their membership dues that way. In general, the US is a little behind the times on using SMS in politics for a variety of reasons (some of them good like cheap phone calls). Here are some great examples of international political use of SMS (H/T Smart Mobs). But a big one is just that most of the people that use SMS are younger and don’t vote anyways.

If I were a College Republican or a College Democrat at a recruiting table this fall, the first thing that I would do is have every person who shows up register to vote in front of you. And then send something similar out to your Facebook group…

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Google Ads, Mormonism, and Mitt Romney

August 23, 2006 – 8:39 am

A couple of months ago, I had an argument with someone about the impact of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism on his campaign for President. In short, I wish it wouldn’t have any, but I think it will. Then I picked up a copy of the WSJ and started reading it and there was a full page article about something outrageous that a Mormon Seminary had done. Now, this is not a shot against Mormons or seminaries — my mother, father, step-father, two grandparents, and 3 uncles all graduated from seminary, and I know that seminaries do outrageous things for breakfast, lunch, and dinner — but rather to point out that Mormonism is going to come under scrutiny.

That’s a preface to my point. I recently put up Google Ads on this site. And next to nearly all the articles that mention Mitt Romney, an ad pops up (and is probably showing up right now along with other ads targeted to Mormon audiences. Click on them and give me money!):

The Book of Mormon:
Is it true? And does it matter?
“The Bible vs. The Book of Mormon”
www.lhvm.org

This takes you to The Living Hope Ministries (describes its purpose as “Educating and equipping Christian Ministry to Mormons”) which has an online movie comparing the Bible and the Book of Mormon. They offer free videos to Mormons that explain why they think the Book of Mormon got it wrong. Now much ink has and will be spilled about various antagonisms between Evangelicals and Mormons, but, again, that’s not my point.

Living Hope Ministries is almost certainly paying money to show up in Mitt Romney searches. Now this is good business because their target audience is Mormons. But they also reach non-Mormons (like me) who are trying to learn more about Mitt Romney. What will the politics of this be? And what will the law be? They are quite entitled to do this as 501(c)3s. This is “public education”. There will probably be, in the end, a huge soft money operation to “inform” people about Mormonism on both sides. (that is Mormons probably will counter)

Indeed, in many ways, this will be an opportunity for Mormons to try to main stream themselves within the country. All in all, this raises the possibility of foregrounding religion even more in the Republican primary. This contest will be important for American politicals, but it will also be important for American religion.

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On McCain being a frontrunner

August 21, 2006 – 10:32 pm

There has been much discussion today of McCain’s frontrunner status. Today’s granddaddy article on McCain has to be the NYT’s piece on all the people that he has recruited. It was mostly a list of Washington Insiders. Other stories have pointed out that he has been lining up people in early states also.

RCP also had an article on the changing GOP after 9-11. That new GOP is then used an an explanation for why McCain and Giuiliani are the front-runners.

What is so interesting about McCain being the frontrunner is that conservatives run around saying “It ain’t so” or “It won’t be so”. So how were they doing that? Well, today Matt Lewis (Human Events) said that McCain is fighting the last campaign:

While this is certainly a major coup, there is always the famous lament that every operative always wants to run the last campaign. The point is that sometimes the outsiders are the ones who are the innovators, while the insiders paint-by-numbers. Still, it’s hard to argue with experience and success.

In essence, he is arguing that there will be a sort of deus ex machina. A similar point was made on Redstate several days earlier in a post entitled “We are the New Deciders”, where they tried to give blogs the credit for pullng this off:

… but all of this navelgazing at McCain’s endorsements strikes me as old school.

McCain is in essence fighting the last war, locking up the endorsements he imagines were denied to him last time. But what McCain forgot is that Bush won the hearts and minds of Republican primary voters while he also won their leaders’ endorsements. Bush was able to be successful because the endorsements/fundraisers/”smart money” were in line with the actual wishes of Republican primary voters.

…

Since 2000, we’ve also seen the growth of a little thing called the blogosphere and YouTube, which will likely alter the playing field dramatically for candidates intent on running the old top-down playbook.

Is the Blogosphere going to make a big difference? Can they outbuzz someone with 100% name ID, great popularity, etc.? Can they pick up on something stupid? Sure. But we aren’t dealing with someone like Allen who just wasn’t read for prime time. So the question is, does McCain have a strategy? And can he actually win?

Our sense is yes.

First, there will be early states. IA, NH, SC, AL, MI, AZ, followed by media. So some guesses on the first states. McCain comes in 2nd in IA, 1st in NH and MI. Probably first in SC. Sure first in AZ. In each of these states (except AL? I just don’t know) McCain has high quality teams on the ground now. The upshot is McCain has a good chance of coming out of these in very good shape.

Second, there will be the money game. To win as Charlie Cook pointed out in his letter to TNR about George Allen, one of the questions is going to be “Can he raise $100m by IA?”. This is because the schedule is going to be very, very compact, as it will be for the Dems. As soon as the early states are over, the campaign will switch to national media. McCain will have the money. His frontrunner status will beget more money. And everyone already knows who he is, saving him time and money on TV. Probably only Romney can compete in the money game from day one. In response to Redstate, it is important to note that the Blogosphere cannot raise this level of money.

Therefore, the real question will be whether McCain will have an opponent after the early states who will be willing and able to fight to the convention — like Reagan did in 1976. That will be the question. And will there be constituencies willing to support that kind of fight. I doubt it.

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Recruiting volunteers online

August 14, 2006 – 3:59 pm

There have been plenty of stories about sexual predators using Facebook and Myspace. However, with this cycle, we are seeing stories about candidates and organizations recruiting volunteers via Facebook. Here’s one from Kentucky (H/T: Truthcaucus):

Becker said he learned of politicians on Facebook from Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., who on Facebook is “friends” with hundreds of students across the country. Bayh, registered with his Indiana University alumni e-mail address, has a personal profile that is updated almost daily, with his status regularly changed from “at work” to “at home” to “sleeping.”

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What really happened in CT Senate and MI-7?

August 10, 2006 – 8:18 pm

The “insurgents” ran very good campaigns. But we learn very different things from them. First, CT Senate.

Ned Lamont, the darling of the lefty blogosphere, had a lot of good campaign ideas. People have talked about all the blog stuff and YouTube stuff (NPR/Slate on this). But, perhaps more to the point, he ran a great ground game. WaPo has the full story (H/T: Matt Lewis). Some tasty bits:

One early move was to launch a primitive Web page seeking 1,000 volunteers in all 169 of the state’s municipalities, building on the strength of local Democratic organizations. They began a voter-history project to track down people who voted in every obscure local primary and referendum — information that was not available in statewide rolls.

And they borrowed Dean/MoveOn strategies:

“Their voting techniques are on the cutting edge of politics,” said Matzzie, whose organization, MoveOn.org, is a pioneer of the house-party model.

In other words, the insurgent ran an incredible grassroots campaign utilizing all the tools of modern campaigning. At the same time Lieberman tried to sleep walk to reelection. Lieberman even sat on $2m. That money might have been able to produce another 10,000 votes.

As for MI-7, Walberg also ran a great campaign. We know less about his campaign, but Hotlineblog gives us a morsel. They used careful (modern) targeting software to identify precincts and voters. And then Walberg, the former minister, got the RTLers, homeschoolers, etc. out to actually ID the voters. At the same time, Schwarz, by all appearances, ran a lousy campaign. He had virtually no ground game. There are news reports that he spent a lot of money upfront on mailers that were not that effective.

At the same time, everyone has to ask a question about Schwarz. Could he have found another 4,000 votes in this district if he had the organization to do it? I cannot imagine that the answer is “no”. But he didn’t.

What is the lesson in this? In CT, a well-armed insurgent was able to defeat a complacent incumbent. In MI, a complacent incumbent never got his campaign off the ground.

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