Betty Castor, Florida Democrat
Candidate for US Senate
Two of Betty Castor's campaign staffers hunch over a computer in their humid Tampa office, waiting for a new Internet ad to load. Janet Reno appears on the monitor. She deadpans: "The only thing cooler than my red truck is Betty Castor - BettyNet.com." Cheesy graphics of red trucks scoot across the image of Reno while a canned jazz riff bebops in the background.
Deborah Reed, Castor's campaign manager, covers her eyes in a mixture of horror and delight. After a long pause she says, "OK, play it again."
Her verdict? "This is the new hotness," she says matter-of-factly, "and the old way is old and busted. Larry is bringing the new hotness, and I understand it's not like anything I've done before."
She's talking about Larry Biddle, the deputy campaign manager. At 63, he's old enough to be Reed's father, but around the Castor office he is indeed the arbiter of the new hotness. Biddle was deputy national finance director for Howard Dean's presidential campaign. He was responsible for Internet giving, direct mail, and telemarketing; he came up with the now-famous (and lucrative) idea of using a baseball bat as a metric for fundraising on the Dean site.
Castor is the star among a crowd of Democrats competing in an August 31 primary for the Senate seat vacated by the popular Bob Graham. As an ex-president of the University of South Florida, she has the best name recognition, election watchers say, but she started with no money. (Peter Deutsch, another Democratic contender, began the race with nearly $3 million.) Critics doubted Castor could ever raise the funds to run a competitive campaign in Florida, with its 10 key media markets.
Then Castor hired Biddle. In an effort to echo the manic vibe of the Deaniacs, he had the campaign start calling supporters "Bettyheads." He renamed the amateurish Web site BettyNet and amped it up with Dean-esque bells and whistles; now it tallies donations, and there's a plan for links to supporters' own fundraising pages.
It's working. Deutsch still has more money than Castor, but in the first half of this year she outraised him by almost $1 million. During the second quarter of 2004, she pulled in $1.5 million - $107,000 via online contributions. For example, Castor raised more than $40,000 in just six days when, taking a line from the Dean playbook, she posted her fundraising goal with a graphic to gauge the flow - bright red gradually coloring in a picture of Mount Kilimanjaro, which she climbed at age 23.
A steady flow of money and energy is coming from Florida's network of Deaniacs. They've spearheaded fundraising parties (organized online) and volunteered lots of hours. Beth Wolfram, Castor's Meetup coordinator, says the ex-Deaniacs - with their still-active Meetups and email lists - work like a virtual political machine, generating money and endorsements. "When the volunteer sign-ups were turned in, the comments would say, 'I was a Deaniac, and I am going to tell all my Dean friends to support Betty,'" says Wolfram.
The key to attracting them, Biddle says, is being "audacious." For Reno's ad, he tried to get her to say, "Betty's got the boom-boom." No luck. "There were lots of things she wouldn't say," says Biddle. And BettyNet.com is certainly more audacious than Castor, who lacks obvious boom-boom.
But she's not complaining. Over a glass of white wine at a hotel bar, she describes with mild bewilderment an Internet poll her supporters sent. "They asked me to pick my favorite musician." But the real answer - Jimmy Buffett - wasn't among the choices. Castor chose the one she'd heard of. "I said Jimi Hendrix," she recalls, laughing. It was good enough for the Deaniacs.
Brad Carson, Oklahoma Democrat
Candidate for US Senate
It's 9:30 pm, and Brad Carson and his wife Julie have just arrived at their hotel in midtown Manhattan. They flew in this morning from Oklahoma to attend a fundraising dinner in Westchester; Julie sits cross-legged on the bed in green pajamas, channel-surfing and reading the newspaper. Brad, still in a tie and cowboy boots, is dialing up the Net on his laptop.
"He'll be on them all night," Julie says ruefully from behind the newspaper. She's talking about blogs - the ones Carson reads and the one he writes, on Bradcarson.com.
It is late and I'm on the East Coast talking with Samantha Shapiro, a freelance writer. She is profiling several candidates who use the internet. She is here interviewing me right now.
Carson, a thoughtful former Rhodes scholar and two-term member of Congress, seems genuinely interested in engaging the people of Oklahoma in discussions - about the campaign, politics, what he's reading. He has blogged about the book Occidentalism and wheat harvest reports, and linked to a site about taxes he described as "interesting." Of 11,000 unique visitors to the Carson Web site in June, some 9,000 went to the blog - roughly 8,350 more than those who read Carson's formal statement under "Issues."
I love the "bloggin" idea. What a neat way for you to keep in touch with your consituents and vice versa. Wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed the tax site you mentioned. - Linda Maloney
Keeping the campaign blog fresh is a constant concern. While I was in the Tulsa headquarters, grassroots coordinator Ray Quintero walked up to volunteer Lori Hamilton-Hobbs and asked, "Would you like to blog?"
A retired businesswoman with a blond bob and bright pink lipstick, Hamilton-Hobbs looked intrigued: "Is that a new dance?"
Oklahoma is the 44th most wired state in the union. When the general store in tiny Kenton planned to start charging $5 an hour to use an old Hewlett-Packard, USA Today proclaimed that rural Oklahoma had its first Internet café. So why would Carson bother with a blog?
The point, he says, is to nationalize the campaign and highlight local issues for local voters. A key plank of Carson's is revitalizing western Oklahoma, an agricultural area neglected by the federal government and hollowed out by job loss and drought. Blog entries about stops on the trail - the Veterans Center in Murray County, the Livestock Sale of Champions in Oklahoma City - go deeper than a newspaper article and connect with a voter base that might feel disenfranchised.
But new tactics can be risky. The National Republican Senatorial Committee issued a press release titled "Brad Carson: A-Blogging He Will Go," which attacked Carson for linking to "the Web sites of radicals," including DailyKos and Juan Cole.
When the Tulsa World reported on the NRSC release in April, Carson's staff went into Deaniac mode. They blogged the newspaper article; comments flew in. Some savaged Carson for "posing as a right-wing Oklahoma Democrat while trolling for campaign cash on extreme left-wing hate sites like Kos." Some praised him and gave money: $39,000 in 15 days. And others bashed Carson's rivals:
Do not mind these frustrated kids. I bet Humphreys and Coburn, sitting in their mansions, cannot even turn on a computer. :) - Janet Lake
That's one lesson of the blog: Even the key function of a campaign war room - rapid response - can be outsourced.
Mitch Daniels, Indiana Republican
Candidate for governor
In many ways, Mitch Daniels seems like the perfect candidate to take the Indiana governor's mansion from the Democrats. With the local economy tanking, he has a solid business background as an exec at pharma giant Eli Lilly, whose red script logo gleams atop a 12-story building at the company's headquarters in downtown Indianapolis. Even better, Daniels is a party favorite, after two years as head of George W. Bush's Office of Management and Budget.
But he has a problem: Although highly regarded in Washington and by the Indianapolis business community, Daniels is still getting his name out to the rest of Indiana. He needs grassroots enthusiasm, Dean-style.
While Howard Dean didn't have party support or funding, Daniels has more insider support and money than he knows what to do with. He needs the grassroots for a different kind of legitimacy: to introduce himself to the rest of the state and to distance himself from Washington. That's where the Net comes in.
These days, Daniels doesn't even have an office in his headquarters. He spends most of his time in an Indiana-built RV, conducting a floating campaign while driving to places like the Life of Riley Grille on the western edge of the state. He has the usual posse to set up and staff events; most campaigns call them "advance," but the Daniels organization calls them "roadies." From the RV, Daniels writes a folksy email dispatch called "Notes From the Road." He talks about his trips, his daughters, his health, and the sights. (The advance kids write, too: "Notes From the Roadies.")
The dispatches, Daniels tells me in Riley, population 160, "maintain daily body contact with friends and supporters, to make them feel more like insiders, and constantly try to grow the number of people who feel connected to what we're doing."
Some of that connection comes from a young, hip staff that can wear mymanmitch.com T-shirts with only a little irony and knows how to bond over email. Christie Luther, a 2002 Purdue political science graduate, directs the online effort. Absentmindedly peeling skin off a shoulder sunburned at a weekend jam-band festival, she tells me she first met Daniels when he came to a dinner hosted by her sorority. She answers email and writes campaign dispatches, pulsing with exclamation points and in-jokes. Software lets campaigns check whether people are opening the email they send; Daniels supporters open messages from Luther at a higher rate than those from the campaign manager or even the candidate himself. "She's her own brand," campaign manager Bill Oesterle says appreciatively.
Like most Republicans in this election cycle, Daniels is using the Internet to enhance a traditional top-down campaign, not overturn it. "Notes From the Road" follows the form of a traditional blog, except it doesn't allow comments. When supporters respond to the posts, they usually get a reply from Luther. She says that the informal emails - like the ones she sends depicting roadies begging for gas money - are "just a fun accent."
Luther might be underestimating the power of her brand. Daniels already has executive experience and insider cash. Now he's using the Net to gin up outsider cred.
Tony Knowles, Alaska Democrat
Candidate for US Senate
Tony Knowles kicked off his campaign at the Juneau Yacht Club, a banquet hall with nautical fixtures and stucco ceilings and in the avalanche path of a 4,000-foot-tall, glacier-capped peak. Knowles is a skilled politician, utterly at home as he and his wife, Susan, shake hands and chat with supporters clad in an Alaska mix of rain gear, fleece, shorts, and clogs.
He isn't meeting most of these people for the first or even second time. Some he knows from Christmas, when he was governor and greeted anyone who came by the mansion with a handshake and cocoa. The mayor of Juneau, Bruce Botelho, is there; he was Knowles' attorney general. "Everyone here knows Knowles," Botelho says. "If you don't know him personally, you know someone who does."
That's what Knowles is trying to build upon. This is the first competitive Senate race in Alaska in 24 years, and Knowles won the statehouse in 1994 only after 536 votes came in absentee, flown from remote villages. So connecting with voters will be even more critical this time around. Knowles is using Friendster-style social network software - complete with online profiles of members, interest groups, and emailed invitations to join - to give him the edge.
It makes sense. Alaska has only 650,000 people, but they're spread across an area one-fifth the size of the Lower 48, split by vast, icy mountains. One-fourth of the voters aren't reachable by car; neither is the state capital. So even for a skilled retail politician like Knowles, campaigning is a challenge. Going retail buys friends but costs time; as governor he missed handling a fishing crisis with Canada because he was up the Yukon River, meeting with villagers.
The Knowles Action Network may solve the problem. It lets members collaborate on projects for the campaign and tracks the overall ideology, gender, and age of the network, so people can see how they compare. Everyone receives "political action points" for hosting meetings and posting on the blog (the prize: "special recognition from Tony," says the Web site). The point is to get supporters revved up and plugged in - without Knowles having to charter a plane. "People go to political events because it's social," Knowles says, "and the network can make campaigning social without people having to go out."
Casey Fenton, the campaign's director of Internet strategy, is a 26-year-old dotcom veteran with blond spiky hair and a slick black rubber jacket. He stays up nights in the Knowles office, coding to psychedelic trance music. A few years ago, Fenton built his own network, the Couch Surfing Project, which hooks up 100 people a week with places to crash. Now he's using the same tricks - questions, prompts, and ways of profiling that encourage people to reveal themselves.
Those revelations, and the connections they forge, build support for the campaign. "People want to be recognized in some way," Fenton says. "It's a piece of what it means to be human."
"Casey is a genius," Knowles says. "He's like a fly fisherman. You study the structure and become part of the environment, rather than taking a big net and scooping. You have to think like a fish, become a part of the scene."
Users are more cautious. In a space on his profile that asks for his opinion of the network, member "Snuffleupagus" says, "I am withholding my verdict until I can determine if this site will get me any hot dates."
Samantha M. Shapiro (allthefederales@aol.com) is a writer in New York City.
credit: Photograph by Peter Samuels.
credit:Courtesy Betty Castor. Betty Castor, Florida Democrat candidate for US Senate
credit:Photo courtesy Brad Carson.Brad Carson, Oklahoma Democrat candidate for US Senate
credit:Photo courtesy Mitch Daniels.caption_4="Mitch Daniels, Indiana Republican candidate for governor"
credit:Courtesy Tony Knowles.Tony Knowles, Alaska Democrat candidate for US Senate
Dean Machine:
>
The Online Fundraiser:
Betty Castor
