Dragging the GOP Kicking and Screaming Into the Internet Age

People like Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn are trying to do just that, and today they write about the successful Scott Brown campaign and what it will mean for future voter efforts:

Scott Brown's supporters became fans of the candidate on Facebook, where they commented on his status updates and uploaded their own photos. The Republican Senate hopeful took to Twitter, using the #masen hashtag to let his followers know how the race was going. His campaign powered its field operation through targeted online ads and Web-based spreadsheets, and raised $12 million from 157,000 individual donations in the last two weeks of the race. After he won last week, his team live-streamed the election-night party in Boston online.

Democratic candidates don't have a monopoly on online organizing anymore. Brown and his campaign staffers deserve the credit for proving this, but it's a reason to celebrate for us and our new-media colleagues, too -- we've been working to get the GOP into the Web era for the past decade. We've been laughed out of high-level campaign meetings, told that online budgets are the first thing to go and informed that having a Facebook page is "unpresidential." And it wasn't until recently that people stopped asking us to fix their computers.

But we've always had faith that the rightroots could organize for victory, as the netroots had on the left. It just needed some nurturing. And now that it's launched Sen.-elect Brown in Massachusetts, the online-organizing playing field is more even than it's ever been in the past 10 years of American politics.

From the beginning of the race, Brown's campaign knew its candidate was a long shot. To have any hope, his team needed to get his message directly to voters. This populist approach -- and the hope for a 41st Senate vote against the Democrats' health-care overhaul -- inspired the rightroots to latch onto Brown's campaign through blogs, Facebook and Twitter. This paid off in an overflow of volunteers and contributors from across the country and a nearly five-point victory.

It's not as though GOP organizers woke up last fall and realized they'd better learn to use this Internet thing. Our party is out of power -- and the party out of power has the stronger incentive to innovate. If it doesn't, the base will. Netroots protests dragged the Democratic Party into the 21st century kicking and screaming in 2006 and 2008. Frustrated with the president and health-care reform, the conservative "tea party" movement has done the same for the Republicans in the past year.

There's much more at the link.

Voters and wannabe activists no longer need to wait for marching orders from party officials. The modern communication tools we have today make is possible for just about anyone with a computer to impact a race, whether it be a push on Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or any number of other options. I'm sure this drives the old guard GOP nuts because these activists can shape the campaign message without their high-priced help.

The Tea Party movement shows just how powerful the average voters can be when they get mad and decide to act on their own. They've changed America this year and managed to do it without any help from the people who think they own the campaign business.

Can there be risks associated with all of that? Sure. Movements led by average folks can go dangerously off track without some solid supervision, but that supervision doesn't have to come from party professionals. Citizens with solid common sense can be just as effective at guiding the message as anybody who makes a living at it.

The successful candidates of the future will have a robust presence on the web, both in terms of interactive websites, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, campaign blogs, you name it. Candidates who are more in tune with the people are going to campaign better and govern better.