David All is an unusual animal: a Republican Web 2.0 communications consultant in Washington, D.C.
A former communications director for Republican Congressman Jack Kingston, All is one of a coterie of young conservatives who are trying to both goad and help his party catch up to the Democrats' online organizing and fundraising efforts. Call them the next-generation Karl Roves.
"Both Karl Rove and Lee Atwater were going around college campuses in their car training the grass-roots activists (in the 1970s)," the 28-year-old political internet strategist says. "In some ways there's a modern crop of young Republicans trying to do the same for the tools that we use and understand."
Most recently, All was part of a group of young Republicans who circulated an online petition to the 2008 presidential candidates imploring them not to withdraw from the CNN/YouTube debate. But All is also engaged in a number of educational and strategic efforts outside his consulting work. He co-hosts a YouTube show about politicians' use of communications technologies with progressive blogger Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.
And All is organizing a "modern media strategies" training workshop for the end of August, hosted by Google and The Heritage Foundation (a think tank that churns out young Republicans who go on to take key government positions). More than 160 Beltway insiders will hear speakers such as YouTube's news and politics editor Steve Grove, the Republican National Committee's former e-campaign director Patrick Ruffini and the Heritage Foundation's director of media and public policy, Robert Bluey.
"The key thing about All and Ruffini is their age," notes Micah Sifry, the executive editor at Personal Democracy Forum, a New York City group that covers the interaction between political campaigns and emerging communications technologies. "They've seen the potential of the read-write web as opposed to the top-down communications model, and they're trying to harness it in service of their ideology." (All and Ruffini occasionally contribute to the Forum's techPresident blog.)
Discarding the broadcast model of direct mail, traditional television and phone banking, this emerging group embraces the community tools commonly used by the web generation: blogs, social networking sites, online video and payment mechanisms that will enable modest financial donations from a deep pool of the population.
To be sure, the political marketing community still relies heavily on the traditional implements of its trade. TNS Media Intelligence estimates that all the presidential candidates and issue groups will have spent $800 million on television advertising alone by the time the election is over next year.
But even political veterans are experimenting with these web tools, and trying to figure out how to measure their effectiveness, says Karen Jagoda, president and founder of the E-Voter Institute, even though skepticism abounds. "They still don't have any evidence that any of these tools will get their candidate elected," she says.
All's latest two-man effort to build an online political-action committee exemplifies how this emerging group is bringing traditional political marketing ideas to bear on the web. The consultant wants to import the offline narrowcast marketing that traditionally has worked well for Republicans into cyberspace. To that end, he and his web developer colleague Sendhil Panchadsaram are turning to Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory to expand the donor base for political campaigns on the web.
Anderson posits that in an online digital environment where the cost of shelf space and distribution isn't an issue, businesses expand their markets by selling a wider range of specialized products, rather than sticking to a narrower product line designed to appeal to as many people as possible.
Putting an electioneering twist on the Long Tail, All will allow his online PAC donors to tag their favored candidates with issues of specific interest to them, but which the candidate may not advertise. (Tags describing a web page's content enable people to more easily find relevant information.)
"We'll have a tag such as 'illegal immigration,' and when you click on it, you'd be able to see all of the voters who are supporting candidates based on that issue," All explains. More specifically, voters would ideally be able to look up candidates based on more obscure issues such as net neutrality. "So it's going to be a very powerful tool to find candidates based on issues rather than geography, which is your standard protocol for finding a candidate to support." The PAC, modeled on the Democratic ActBlue PAC in Boston, is called Slatecard and will likely launch this fall.
All says Virginia Sen. George Allen's "macaca moment" a year ago illustrates the disconnect between the last generation's understanding of political marketing and the dynamics of today's always-on web. Allen hurled a racially charged insult at a volunteer from his Democratic opponent's campaign and called him "macaca" during a speech in Southwest Virginia.
"The crazy thing about the macaca video (is that) if you listen to the background noise, the audience is hooting and hollering," All says. "If you watch the video and only listen to the audience -- the message was spot-on for that audience." In other words, that moment would have boosted Allen's profile with those constituents in a world without cameras and viral video distribution. "But out of that locality, it was totally inappropriate -- you have to realize you're in a flat world."
All isn't the only one frustrated by his party's reluctance to adapt to the decentralized world of internet communications and organization. Another effort to catch up to the Democrats' harnessing of the party rank-and-file energy was recently launched by Ryan Gravatt and Brad Jackson of The Patriot Group, a lobbying shop in Austin, Texas. Their online PAC, Big Red Tent, was launched about a month ago.
Both Slatecard and Big Red Tent aim to funnel Republican blogging energy into cash to help candidates at all levels of government. And they want to hand decision-making authority to the sites' community, letting participants decide where the money goes.
Both Slatecard and Big Red Tent will allow bloggers and other social-media users to embed code in third-party applications that would publicize their favorite candidates. The impetus behind these two projects is a sense that the Republicans' ideologically driven, big-ticket-broadcast mindset ignores the emerging generation of politicians and voters.
"What Republicans have traditionally done is flown a candidate into a city and get them to meet with $2,500-and-up donors," says Gravatt. "Well, a lot of people don't have those resources.... This is a way to reach out to younger, hyperactive segment voters who dedicate a lot of time to offline political involvement as well as online discussions."
Both Gravatt and All hope to imitate the Democrats' success at soliciting smaller donations, and to reach out to friends of their own age who might donate small amounts over time. All mentions a hometown friend who recently donated $15 to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. It was the first time his friend had given money to a campaign, but having spent money, he'll feel a stake in the candidate and the party -- and may become a lifetime donor.
"He's evangelizing to everyone he knows about contributing to Barack Obama, and he gets 10 of his friends to contribute, and now they're all on the $15 plan," says All. "That's what we're trying to do with Slatecard."
Notwithstanding the efforts of the GOP 2.0, Sifry and others predict that grass-roots organizing from the right won't take off until the party's rank-and-file are energized by the same discontent that fueled grass-roots Democrats.
"The Republicans have had complete power until 2006 -- they've had their own infrastructure of think tanks ... and talk radio and Fox," Sifry says. "This is the system that they built, and it worked very well for them. It was the grass-roots Democrats feeling betrayed by their own party and Bush that strongly felt a need to organize themselves in a new way."
But online activism among Republicans is likely to grow if enough GOP voters start feeling similarly betrayed, Sifry predicts.
The online strategists "are going to pick up a lot of support because you've got a lot of frustration from grass-roots Republicans," Sifry says. "They feel like their party has lost its way, and they think this (online activism) is their salvation."
