In light of yesterday's Senate condemnation of the progressive netroots via MoveOn.org, I think it is more appropriate than ever to see rigorous, well-researched work documenting the impact of the progressive blogosphere and progressive netroots on the American political scene. This is why I am happy that Professor Matthew Kerbel of Villanova University has agreed to share some of his preliminary research on that very subject here on Open Left. Professor Kerbel is a friend of mine with whom I have frequently discussed this topic, ever since we worked together on a book project more than two years ago: Let's Get This Party Started. His current work seeks to be one of the first, full-length studies of the impact of the progressive blogosphere on American politics, and its rigorous, quantitative basis will serve as a useful counter to the frequent anecdotal, elitist dismissals we often receive from the political and media establishment. He has modified a section of a paper he recently presented at the American Political Science Association for Open Left, which you can read here:
I have also reproduced this piece in the extended entry, though without the charts and table. This section focuses on the success rate of "netroots funded" candidates at the federal level in the 2006 midterm elections. Here is a key graph:
Within each tier save for two online-funded toss-up races, recipients of online funding kept pace with or marginally outperformed traditionally-funded campaigns in terms of overall won-loss records. Perhaps more importantly, online-funded races were overwhelmingly competitive, suggesting that there is value in netroots funding to candidates who accept it. Most long-shot candidates receiving online money were able to finish within four points of their opponents. Seven of eight Democrats in "Lean
Republican" districts ran competitive races, while all three "Likely Republican" districts and five of ten "Safe Republican" districts were competitive. Apart from the value to the individual campaign, competitive races increase the costs of competition overall, forcing opponents to expend resources to contest seats that otherwise would not be endangered.
These figures attest to the value of online funding methods, particularly as they apply to underdog campaigns. But, fundraising is only one portion of hybrid campaigning, which includes message dissemination and grassroots mobilization. In my next post, I'll address how well hybrid campaigns exploited the two-way communication potential of the Internet by engaging supporters with interactive features and hyperlinks from their campaign sites to other Internet websites such as blogs like this.
How Effective Is the Progressive Blogosphere? (Part I)
Matthew Kerbel
How effective have progressive bloggers been at influencing electoral outcomes, driving the media narrative and mobilizing people to political action? How likely is it that progressive bloggers will be able to bring about a transformation in the political process, moving the Democratic Party away from a big-money, consultant-based, television-centered model toward a grassroots-oriented small-d democratic model, while in the process moving the national political agenda to the left?
These are among the questions I'll be addressing in my research over the next year, as I prepare a book manuscript for Paradigm Press with the working title, "The Internet, Progressive Politics, and Civic Engagement" (my editor and I will come up with something more catchy as we get closer to publication). As a point of departure, I employ an historical frame of reference to understand how the emergence of past technologies - mass printing capability, the telegraph, radio and television - have altered the political process, as a way of assessing the potential for the Internet to again change the way politics is done. What I'm finding is that revolutions in technology have been associated with changes in governance - eventually. Throughout American history, new media have helped usher in lasting shifts in previously stable governing coalitions. But these changes have always lagged behind the introduction of new technology, sometimes by decades, and have been predicated on the ability of political figures to understand how best to apply technological advances to their purposes. There is good reason to believe the Internet will fit this pattern, and good reason to believe the progressive blogosphere is best structured to take advantage of the Internet's potential to engage people at the grassroots. Indeed, there is evidence that - at least at the margins - this is already happening.
History suggests that the Internet will not put an end to television-centered politics, but it can transform the role television plays in the process and may one day become the dominant political medium. As this transformation takes place, groups that rely on the new medium should begin to achieve real-world political success. I've examined several measures of the political effectiveness of the progressive blogosphere during the 2006 election cycle, and through an occasional series of posts over the next several months I'll be sharing some of my findings on Open Left.
One of the things I'm looking at is the prevalence of what I call "hybrid" campaigning. If the Internet is going to influence political outcomes at a time when television is still the primary political medium, a reasonable measure of the effectiveness of Internet politics is whether some national candidates are beginning to employ a mix of old and new campaign techniques, combining television and Internet politics, and whether these hybrid campaigns are meeting with any success. As the Internet grows in reach and effectiveness, the number of candidates employing hybrid campaign tactics should increase and their rates of political competitiveness should be high. In particular, hybrid campaigns engage in non-traditional funding efforts by seeking and receiving campaign funds through progressive Internet-based organizations, extensively employing interactive web features (websites with interactive capability, regular online news updates, campaign blogs, and hyperlinks to other websites), and engaging the netroots through discussions in progressive diary and front page entries on sites such as this. I'll address the online funding component of hybrid campaigning today, and in future posts I'll talk about the use of interactive web features, blog discussions, and the level of convergence of these characteristics among a set of highly prominent netroots candidates.
Netroots campaign involvement ranged from nonexistent to all-consuming depending on the inclination of the candidate, so hybrid campaigns varied in the extent to which they utilized the Internet to organize, fund and promote themselves. The critical distinction is between campaigns that were Internet-friendly (beyond routine activities like maintaining a website) and campaigns that did not engage in Internet-driven grassroots activities. In this regard, some hybrid campaigns accepted money from Washington-based groups like the DCCC, spent heavily on television advertising and direct mail, and received large-dollar special interest contributions, whereas others, like the upstart congressional campaign of Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire's first congressional district, could not have been competitive without using the Internet to raise funds, advertise, and build grassroots support. What they hold in common is willingness to relinquish a degree of control over their communication environment to realize the bottom-up benefits of Internet politics. This sets hybrid campaigns apart from traditional campaigns that are notoriously reluctant to relinquish such control.
In order to relate hybrid campaign activities to political outcomes, I examined a set of 2006 House and Senate seats ranked by three well-known congressional election observers and purveyors of conventional wisdom (Charlie Cook, Larry Sabato, and Stu Rothenberg) according to their level of competitiveness at two points in the election cycle: Spring 2006 and just before Election Day. Each contest was placed into one of five tiers based on the aggregate spring rankings: Democrats Favored (Tier 1); Toss-up (Tier 2); Lean Republican (Tier 3); Likely Republican (Tier 4); Safe Republican (Tier 5). I refer to these as "targeted" races because collectively they represented the best chances for Democratic victories, even if in many cases the opportunities were slim.
Typically, contests considered "likely" or "safe" for one party are effectively noncompetitive, but of course rankings change over the course of a campaign, and by Election Day there had been a lot of movement in the rankings to reflect the coming Democratic wave. The vast majority of the 91 ranked House races initially leaned toward Republicans, making them unlikely to attract significant early money or attention from the DCCC. By Election Day, 34 of 58 third-, fourth- and fifth-tier races leaned Democratic or were considered toss-ups. But when early decisions about candidate recruitment and financial support had to be made, the conventional wisdom was not yet as favorable to Democrats as it would be later.
TABLES ONE AND TWO
How many of these less competitive contests benefited from netroots attention? I wanted to see if there was evidence that hybrid campaigning would appeal to candidates fighting an uphill battle. Long-shot Democrats might be expected to be more likely to turn to the netroots and employ hybrid campaign methods out of the necessity created by having less chance of attracting significant resources through conventional means. Likewise, individuals engaged in Internet-based political activity might be more drawn to candidates that demonstrate a propensity to listen to them.
There is evidence that this happened in the 2006 cycle. Candidates were deemed to have engaged in online funding activity if they were endorsed by Moveon or Democracy for America, maintained an ActBlue link on their website, or were targeted by Daily Kos, Swing State Project, and MyDD as netroots candidates worthy of funding. Twenty-five of the 91 targeted House races and all eleven Senate races fell into this category. For both sets of contests, involvement in online fundraising skews toward the less competitive races. This dynamic is most apparent among House races because of the contrast between online funded races and all targeted races. Twenty-one of twenty-five online funded contests (84%) were in the three least competitive tiers of House races, with the least competitive Tier 5 races constituting the modal group. This compares with 64% of House contests overall.
TABLE THREE
Within each tier save for two online-funded toss-up races, recipients of online funding kept pace with or marginally outperformed traditionally-funded campaigns in terms of overall won-loss records. Perhaps more importantly, online-funded races were overwhelmingly competitive, suggesting that there is value in netroots funding to candidates who accept it. Most long-shot candidates receiving online money were able to finish within four points of their opponents. Seven of eight Democrats in "Lean Republican" districts ran competitive races, while all three "Likely Republican" districts and five of ten "Safe Republican" districts were competitive. Apart from the value to the individual campaign, competitive races increase the costs of competition overall, forcing opponents to expend resources to contest seats that otherwise would not be endangered.
These figures attest to the value of online funding methods, particularly as they apply to underdog campaigns. But, fundraising is only one portion of hybrid campaigning, which includes message dissemination and grassroots mobilization. In my next post, I'll address how well hybrid campaigns exploited the two-way communication potential of the Internet by engaging supporters with interactive features and hyperlinks from their campaign sites to other Internet websites such as blogs like this.
STATE BLOGS
