Obama built a digital juggernaut, and the GOP faces an uphill battle to catch up. Rebuilding the Republican netroots

Before Republicans despair at the relatively antiquated state of their campaign technology, they should remember that it was Democrats stuck on the losing end of a digital divide in the not-too-distant past.

Way back in 2000, John McCain’s campaign pioneered the practice of online political fundraising and volunteer mobilization, raising more than $2 million online in a single record-breaking week, with an average of four donations per second. Volunteer activists signed up to join the campaign at a rate of three per minute. Despite McCain’s eventual loss to George W. Bush, his infusion of online cash and support allowed his insurgent challenge to continue through several more rounds of primaries.


In 2004, the Bush campaign pioneered the practice of micro-targeting, which combined consumer data and public opinion polling, allowing the campaign to target and turn out key demographics in battleground states, including millions of first-time evangelical voters. Ironically, it was the evolution of this practice and adaptation to the digital age by Barack Obama’s operation that allowed Democrats to beat Republicans in 2008 and 2012.

Obama built a digital juggernaut for his first presidential run, leap-frogging GOP capabilities and establishing a major Democratic technology advantage. The Obama campaign’s digital dominance in 2008 and 2012 was a pivotal factor behind not only his electoral success but also down-ballot victories for Democrats in key battleground states from Florida to Colorado.

Now, in the wake of two crushing defeats, Republican leaders are taking steps to reclaim the digital lead with a commitment to technology not previously seen within the party. Despite great strides, the right still faces an uphill battle, with a great deal of legwork to do to catch up to the left’s superior digital capabilities.

Encouragingly, the Republican National Committee has made addressing its technological deficiencies a priority, making smart hires like Chuck DeFeo, who managed digital efforts for George W. Bush’s successful 2004 re-election campaign, and former Facebook engineer Andy Barkett. The GOP is also moving toward opening up its voter files to third-party software developers, allowing them to help solve the data-sharing problems that seriously plagued the Romney campaign in 2012. The move would not only help the GOP bring its database into the 21st century, it would also demonstrate an openness to technology that the digital community on the right has been yearning to see.

While Republicans have taken the critical first steps of bringing in top-level talent that can develop the systems and infrastructure the party so desperately needs, they face a race against time, with two major challenges.

First, the talent: The Republican Party will need to cultivate a broader base of technologists to provide the human capital necessary to operate and innovate a mass-scale digital and data operation.

Second, the ground troops: The GOP and its elected officials need to mount a concerted effort to court the online-savvy, grassroots community to serve as the on-the-ground volunteers needed to successfully deploy these tools in a way that translates to electoral success.

The GOP is making progress by investing in technological infrastructure, but needs the human infrastructure to power it. That means extending this effort to the broader online community by recruiting tech-oriented minds from outside the Beltway and training existing operatives to implement these new systems.

The decision to embrace the tech world is still paying dividends for Democrats. Through well-funded efforts like the New Organizing Institute, a left-wing non-profit focused on training the next generation of liberal digital operatives, and parlaying their connections with Silicon Valley into a deeper relationship with the tech industry, Democrats have broadened their access to both money and manpower.

But the GOP can’t solve its digital shortcomings with fresh hires and updated systems alone. For nearly a decade, Democrats have mounted a concerted effort to court their online base of grassroots activists, constantly tending to these “netroots” and enjoying the fruits of their mutually beneficial partnership. Republicans, meanwhile, have barely planted the seeds.

While a robust digital grassroots community exists on the right, Republican leaders have done little to embrace them. The party’s leadership and rising stars need to start putting in the overdue legwork of cultivating the online grassroots, which means leaving their comfort zone and taking their message directly to activists.

Over the years, Netroots Nation, a union-financed annual conference of liberal online activists, has served as the incubator for the core infrastructure of professional digital organizers on the left, making it possible for then-candidate Obama to leverage an existing online network to launch my.barackobama.com, which eventually grew to 2 million users. Activists in the network generated 800,000 blog posts and videos in support of his candidacy and empowered 70,000 supporters to raise $30 million.

But the push to help Obama didn’t stop online. The network helped spur 35,000 local organizing groups, which held more than 200,000 offline events. And, in the four final days of the campaign, the digital activists crowd-sourced the backbone of the incumbent’s get-out-the-vote operation by generating 3 million peer-to-peer turnout calls.

By contrast, the GOP’s failure to develop the technological infrastructure and engage its own digital activists has made it difficult to drive turnout for candidates who do not organically inspire enthusiasm in the Republican base. Even in 2012, when Obama’s base registered less excitement for the incumbent than in 2008, the campaign’s use of big data and digitally driven peer-to-peer grassroots campaigning proved adequate to overcome economic headwinds and secure reelection in large part because many uninspired Republicans were not driven to turn out.

This past June’s edition of Netroots Nation was a shining example of what Democrats are doing right and where Republicans are falling short. Prominent Democratic politicians from President Obama to Sen. Elizabeth Warren took time to record video addresses in which they highlighted the importance of the online activists. This wasn’t a new development, either — over Netroots Nation’s eight-year history, White House officials, Democratic National Committee chairs, and presidential candidates have all put in appearances. This year, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appeared in person for a Q&A, and although she was heckled for calling NSA leaker Edward Snowden a criminal, her presence was a great example of her party’s outreach to their online activists, even when they don’t always see eye-to-eye.

Republicans can start making inroads by treating gatherings of conservative online activists the way Democrats treat Netroots Nation. While Pelosi was willing to weather boos to engage with her party’s base, it’s virtually impossible to picture John Boehner doing the same at RightOnline or RedState Gathering, the closest equivalents on the right. But until he and other GOP leaders do, they will fail to inspire large numbers of conservative online activists to move from blogging and tweeting to doing the real spadework to make the new tools being developed by DeFeo and Barkett work.

A little gentle heckling never hurt anyone. But losing more elections just might.

Erik Telford is the founder of RightOnline.

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