If there's one House campaign that's had success with Reddit, it's Rob Zerban's. Campaigns find new tool on Reddit

Of all the questions Gary Johnson expected to answer during his quixotic quest for the presidency, there’s one that probably wasn’t high on the list: an online query about whether he’d rather fight 100 duck-size horses or one horse-size duck.

But Johnson and other candidates increasingly have been holding question-and-answer sessions on the social news website Reddit and fielding all sorts of inquiries — some odd, but many substantial — in an attempt to leverage one of 2012’s hottest sites for political benefit.


Besides Johnson, this year’s Libertarian Party candidate, former presidential candidate Buddy Roemer, and President Barack Obama — who held a server-crashing Q&A in late August — and at least 12 congressional candidates have held so-called Ask Me Anything chats this cycle.

Upstart campaigns in particular have turned to the site, which announced at the beginning of the year that it had served a staggering 2 billion page views in December 2011, as a way of generating interest in fledgling political bids. Online Q&As, via campaign or other popular websites, have been a part of the past several cycles, and candidates are using new tools like Google+ hangouts to similar ends, along with more established social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Still, it’s not clear how useful the AMAs are for the candidates. As it is, most of the congressional candidates who have done the Q&As are long shots to win in November — if they even made it to a general election ballot.

Harnessing an emerging technology or platform is now standard campaign practice. But picking one that isn’t suited to a particular type of campaign won’t give the contender a boost. Run-of-the-mill congressional campaigns aren’t likely to see a big bump from hosting AMAs on Reddit, said Scott Goodstein, a veteran of Obama’s 2008 digital team.

“I don’t think this is a starter to help you raise your profile to national; I think you have to already have interest to have this be successful,” said Goodstein, now the founder and CEO of digital strategy firm Revolution Messaging.

Unless candidates host their chats on lesser-trafficked, geographic-specific parts of the site, there’s little reason to think they’re interacting with many of the roughly 700,000 people who live in any particular House district.

“It all comes down to basic campaigning 101: Time, people and money,” Goodstein said. “You can’t change that equation.”

That may be the biggest way Reddit differs from other social networks where campaigns have tried to gain a foothold. While Facebook and Twitter offer ways to organize and consistently contact supporters or get bodies to in-district rallies, Reddit doesn’t really do either: As a semi-anonymous site, users don’t share their real names. And unless a campaign creates its own subreddit — a vertical on the site that interested users can subscribe to — there’s no realistic way to follow up with interested parties.

Even so, campaigns still see Reddit AMAs as an opportunity to score big in another category: public awareness. If nothing else, they’re a stab at getting noticed. They are also a natural way to get introduced to the technology-oriented liberal/libertarian mash-up that composes a big part of the core Reddit audience. And if that voting bloc is relevant to the campaign, the chance to get noticed is alluring.

“Everyone’s kind of chasing, can I be the next insert-phenomenon-candidate-here,” said Patrick Ruffini, president of Engage, a digital firm that advises presidential and statewide candidates. “And it seems like that’s getting harder. It’s harder for candidates in a presidential year to generate that kind of unique sentiment just because everyone’s attention is focused on the presidential race.”

Ruffini said candidates running against incumbents with their own national or controversial profile stand the best chance of marking a mark with their AMA, and that jibes with the 2012 landscape.

Two of the most enduring candidates to host the Q&As — Rob Zerban and Lance Enderle — are challenging GOP Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Mike Rogers of Michigan, powerful committee chairmen who aren’t well liked in the Reddit community. Ryan was targeted by users during the SOPA fight, and Rogers is sponsor of the House-passed CISPA cybersecurity bill, which had the same community up in arms in April.

If there was one House candidate who’s had success tapping into the burgeoning community, it’s Zerban. Even before Ryan’s selection as Mitt Romney’s running mate thrust his race into the spotlight, he hosted a pair of AMAs — the first of which, his campaign’s new media director, Tracy Rohrbach, says, was requested by civic-minded Redditors in December 2011.

“At that point in December, it wasn’t as popular as it is now, so we really didn’t know what was going to happen,” Rohrbach said. “But we were excited, and we thought that it was a good opportunity for Rob to connect with people.”

The campaign saw an influx of $15,000 in donations during and soon after the AMA, Rohrbach said, and has referenced the online Q&A in at least one email blast that went to a larger group.

“We had a lot of Redditors email us thanking us for the AMA and letting us know they donated,” she said.

If it takes a national playing field to move the needle with an AMA, that bodes well for candidates like Johnson and Roemer who can at least highlight their issues with a larger audience.

Current officeholders such as Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Jared Polis (D-Colo.) have held AMAs that focused more on policy than on campaigning. That might be another way politicians engage with the increasingly popular site, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin said.

“I do think there’s a very strong potential for using it as civic engagement or people talking with their constituents,” Martin said. “Especially ’cause we have so many great local subreddits. There’s been a handful of mayors or even state legislators doing AMAs that are a little more sort of practical, and I hope that increases.”

And in case you were wondering — Johnson would rather take on the horse-size duck.