Presidential race goes offline

As Howard Dean fails to make good on his early promise in the primaries, his new-media campaign tactics are quickly losing their lustre. Jim McClellan reports
Howard Dean has indicated his campaign to be the Democratic candidate for president will end if he doesn't win the Wisconsin primary on Tuesday.

Many feel his challenge ended last weekend in Washington State. In theory, voters there should have been receptive to his use of social software and blogs. Washington State has a thriving net culture centred around Seattle and Dean had been pushing hard. But he came second to John Kerry. So barring a miracle in Wisconsin, his campaign seems at an end.

On the net, Dean has been declared "over" ever since the Iowa caucuses, when his poll lead suddenly vanished and he came a disappointing third. Oddly enough, many of the people leading the postmortem are the same big-name bloggers who a month ago were saying his use of the net to involve ordinary people, raise money and generate new ideas, had changed the political game for ever.

Bloggers are celebrated for attacking old-media hype, so it's ironic to see them criticising their own failings and "fact-checking their own asses". That said, when compared to old-media pundits, their willingness to analyse their mistaken assumptions about Dean is refreshing.

You can see why some blog critics compare the Dean campaign to a dotcom. There was the same over-focus on the net, the same lack of attention to the real world. Once again, people have acted as if new technological ideas replace old practices, rather than complementing them.

However, many of the postmortem analyses continue to ignore Dean (and his strengths and weaknesses), focusing instead on what the campaign tells us about social software. It's as if they see the candidate as a vehicle for the technology. If you see the net as a tool Dean used, it's clear he achieved a lot in the short term, using social software to revive the Democrats and encourage them to attack President Bush.

But what will the campaign's long-term achievements be? On Monday, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Diego hosted a session on digital democracy and the lessons of the Dean campaign, blogged in detail by writer David Weinberger. One assumption seems to be that, with other candidates using blogs and tools such as Meetup to organise support, all politicians will work this way in the future.

That may be, although it's not clear whether such activity actually delivers votes, according to writer Steven Johnson and social software guru Clay Shirky. The latter suggests that Dean's innovations may prove less successful because they won't seem so new.

In Exiting Deanspace, a penetrating essay on the Many-to-Many blog, Shirky argues that many who donated online were giving their money to the idea that the net can make a difference in politics,as opposed to backing Howard Dean. He also points out that in the past, getting 400 people to a meeting was hard, so it meant something. Now, Meetup makes it easier to get people together, so a similar meeting doesn't carry the same significance.

Finally, Shirky suggests that social software contributed to the sense that the Deaniacs were a cultish movement, not a standard political campaign. Worse, the thrill of connecting with like minds perhaps made Deaniacs feel the job was done, without having to go out and persuade others to vote for Dean.

Those looking at ways the net can revitalise the UK political scene agree. "The Dean campaign achieved something phenomenal," says James Crabtree, director of iSociety, the Work Foundation's research project into the impact of ICT. "Lots of enthusiastic people turned up when they wanted and did give a lot of money. Traditionally, that's part of what it takes to win an American presidential campaign. But, clearly, self-organisation only gets you so far."

William Davies, author of the iSociety report on social capital and social software, agrees. "Social software ought to be able to channel bottom-up political energies into the mainstream political process. Everyone thought that was happening with the Dean campaign. But obviously that gap there is bigger than people thought."

Social software's "consumerist" nature may be the problem, Davies suggests. Democracy is about creating structures, which enable people with different attitudes and beliefs to co-exist. In contrast, social software brings together people who identify with each other (and leave/log off if things don't go their way).

Tom Steinberg, of mySociety - a project to encourage net ideas that deliver real-world benefits cheaply), says the Dean campaign shows that "creating the dichotomy between ossified 'old politics' and vibrant new 'internet politics' is a bit false. Single-message politics seems old-fashioned and unfriendly."

"But it has developed in that way because there's so much evidence that it works very well," he adds. What's needed now, Steinberg argues, is an analysis of the inroads Dean's campaign actually made into old-style media politics. For example, until just before the first primary in Iowa, Dean was ahead in the polls, but then his lead evaporated. "What if something about internet campaigning means that polls no longer have the connection with real voting patterns that we thought they did? That could be a significant lesson."

Will the techniques of the Dean campaign be used here? "Everyone I've spoken to is less hopeful about it having a significant impact, because of the nature of citizen politics here," says Steinberg. "People are less willing to go to meetings or email five friends telling them to vote for their candidate."

Some politicians are experimenting with blogs, but politics here is more centralised, more dominated by the London media, says Crabtree. He suggests politicians won't use the net to try to "mimic mass movements which you can't really kick-start anyway", Instead, they'll try small campaigns aimed at delivering a definite number of votes - for example, using Meetup to organise voters abroad to do a postal vote.

But the technologies that will make a difference next election will be less trendy, says Crabtree, such as databases and mass canvassing via telephones. "That's not to say next time around the web won't play a part. With the advent of social software, it now looks like a fun place to go and do politics. I don't expect that to stop."

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