August 2nd, 2007
Edwards e-campaign: Spin without substance?
After a New York Times article heralded the Edwards campaign as Dean 2.0, online organizer Erik Os writes in The Hill that Edwards’ e-campaign credentials are vastly overstated.
Crunching the numbers, Os finds the Edwards campaign coming up short. Edwards raised only $9 million from all avenues in the second quarter of ‘07, down hugely from $14 million raised in Q1.
Obama, by contrast, raised $32.8 million in the second quarter, nearly four times as much as Dean’s second-quarter 2003 total. About a third of Obama’s cash, $10.3 million, was from online donations, compared with $3.5 million for Edwards. And he beat Edwards in the fundraising race by more than 3-to-1, including more money raised online than Edwards collected from all sources.
While Edwards raised a respectable $3.3 million online in the first quarter, that number was virtually unchanged in the second quarter - $3.5 million.
Want another metric? Online fundraising is supposed to yield a massive number of small donors. The number of Edwards donors increased from 40,000 to 100,000 from Q1 to Q2. But Obama added 154,000 between quarters and boasts a total of 258,000 donors who have made 358,000 individual contributions.
And the reliance on online pros might even be contributing to the campaign missteps. When Edwards hired MoveOn’s Ben Brandzel, he got started by telling online supporters to protest the war on Memorial Day — a move Mrs. Edwards was sent out to fix.
Elizabeth Edwards wisely amended this plan by asking supporters not to protest on the Monday holiday, only the weekend before, because “Memorial Day itself is not supposed to be a day of protest. It’s a day of honor.” Lesson? What works in an advocacy group’s e-mailed action alerts, directed at a narrow group of activists, doesn’t always translate into effective ways to promote a presidential campaign.
So what’s Edwards’ problem? If he’s living and breathing Internet, where’s the online support? Os offers several theories but perhaps most relevant is the idea that the netroots love a new face. Obama is the new face; Edwards has been around the block. Of course, the roots love no one like old-face Gore but since he’s not running, it’s safe to extoll his virtues. And, of course, Gore is a living symbol of antipathy for Bush.
As the Times noted, the mainstream media - reflecting the realities of fundraising and poll numbers - make this a Clinton-Obama race. And in all likelihood, no amount of Twittering, MySpace pages and YouTube video, is going to change that momentum.
