Trusting Politics 2.0 Can be Difficult in Local Elections
March 6th, 2008By Julie
This post was guest blogged by Jesse Greenberg.
Kudos to all the organizers of the Politics Online Conference for putting together an excellent program. And special thanks to Julie Germany who invited me as a guest on IPDI’s blog.
I was fortunate to win Golden Dot Awards in the categories of Best Website for State/Local Candidate and Best e-Blog for my role as a communications advisor to Daniel Biss, Candidate for State Representative in Illinois’ 17th district. I was fortunate because working for the Biss campaign afforded me the opportunity to implement new political strategies needed to build relationships with voters, raise funds and construct the campaign brand. Winning the Golden Dots affirmed that we’re on the right track.
The candidate, however, did not see the value of attending the conference or receiving the awards in person and would not assist in supporting my trip to DC. My argument for going was that this earned public relations was testament to the campaign running on a new model that utilizes technology to involve district voters in having a greater say in their politics than ever before. We could build on this momentum, I argued, to achieve definitive, measurable results for the minor investment in going to DC. Alas, my argument did not win this time.
I’m not sharing this because I have an axe to grind. On the contrary, I wish the candidate only success. Rather, I’m sharing this to demonstrate how difficult putting faith in politics 2.0 can be, especially on the state or local level where resources are often tight. In that environment it is comfortable to fall back on the traditional ways of campaigning—canvassing, direct mail, etc.—that are often not as a good an investment (confirmed by Sara Parker, Edelman VP in the workshop, “Developing Mobile Social Software Applications”) but at least are more of a known quantity. And despite having embraced new campaign strategies, this campaign found it difficult to let go of old campaign models. This demonstrates it is going to take another election or two to really transform American politics down to the local level.
My sense from the beginning was that politics 2.0 is applicable at the local level. In fact, I argue new campaign marketing strategies can be more effective at the local level simply because the scale is so much smaller. It is therefore easier to manage relationships and maintain relevancy to voters that is impossible to do in the same way in presidential or congressional campaigns.
I’ll use this as an opportunity to challenge candidates running at the local level to use new campaign methods and bring down the barriers between candidate and voter. We are in a climate today that demands a greater level of political transparency. We must allow greater involvement from voters, many of whom a candidate does not know personally—and that’s ok.
Lastly, local candidates need to trust new faces (Millennials especially) who bring new ideas to politics. We’re the vanguard of change and despite our age, our perspective is fresh and helping bring about a new age of campaigning occurring most notably at higher levels of politics. Thanks to the Golden Dots though, we’ve got a place that recognizes and rewards new thinking in political campaigns.
