I was sitting in the middle of a discussion about broadband policy earlier this week when my phone buzzed. Yet another email with yet another link to yet another article on why 2008 is the year of the Internet in presidential elections.

Facebook!

The article said.

Twitter! YouTube! MySpace! Websites! Flickr! Blogs! Widgets!

Thing have changed, the article said. This year is different. This year is the year of the Internet election.

At that exact offline moment, in the middle of that discussion on broadband policy, Blair Levin, managing director of Stifel Nicolas, said “technology can’t solve policy problems. It can make them easier to solve.” And all the shiny-shiny, new-new-new, gotta-have-it sites that compel so many analysts to claim 2008 is the year of the Internet election seemed a little less, well, sparkly.

I’m tired of the headline “2008 is the year of the Internet election” because at the end of the day, despite all the cool new things campaigns are doing online, I don’t believe it. We’re evolving, transitioning, adapting. But we are not there yet.

Instead of listening to the rest of Levin’s presentation, I begin scribbling a list of my reasons why 2008 is not the year of the Internet Election.

Frankly, I think we’re blinded by the shiny-shiny.

Many of us within the political consulting/blogging/online community jump on the latest, newest buzz-inducing tool or site. These things give us something to talk about, and of course they are fun and cool. But we are so obsessed with jumping on the latest thing that we confuse tactics with strategy.

The real determinate of whether or not any of this online stuff actually works depends on its ability to accomplish practical campaign goals: fundraising, volunteer recruitment, media earning, and mostly important, turning out votes. (Someday, I hope that listening to voters will make it on a list of campaign goals. However, as with the theme of this post, when it comes to convincing campaigns and candidates that listening is just as important as talking, we’re not there yet.)

If, for example, a campaign wants to increase earned (mainstream) media about a candidate it may, deploy a number of web tactics, including producing web videos that get played on TV or showing that the campaign and its supporters know how to use the Internet in a novel and record breaking way to fundraise, organize, or produce content.

The tactics that have excited me most this year are those that enable supporters and voters to accomplish some of those goals. I think the fact that Ron Paul supporters are using dozens of different channels (such as PledgeBank) to fundraise for their candidate is fantastic. But what would really excite me is a scenario in which those supporters put their enthusiasm and tech skills to work self-organizing get-out-the-vote efforts.

Sure, I like these sites. I’ve joined the Facebook-Twitter-YouTube-MySpace-Websites-Flickr-Blogs-Widget chorus on many an occasion. They are interesting (to the extent that they enable regular people to engage in the political process) and shiny (to the extent that they give us something new to play with at work), but we have no evidence to suggest that they alone win elections.

On the other hand, strategy is often unseen and unshowy. The real online genius is most likely the person who designs the backend system of the winning campaign, and the real tech-campaign probably isn’t the most vocal about adopting the latest widget.

At the end of the day, winning elections is the end goal. Winning just doesn’t feel warm or innovative, but it’s the purpose of the game.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under 2008 Election. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.