Technology Gap

“While McCain was trying to scare the Abe Simpson vote, the Obama campaign had a mobile and online network that efficiently converted interested supporters into active volunteers,” says Jed Alpert, CEO of Mobile Commons, a leading mobile application provider for politics, advocacy, and cause-related marketing as well as commercial clients. “For example, some friends and I put together a group of 125 people that went to the Cleveland area for the last five days to work on GOTV. All of this activity had the effect of creating a huge and connected community that have a substantial time, money, and intellectual investment in Obama's success and can be communicated with directly by the new administration.”

For everything the Obama campaign did right with technology, the Republicans did something wrong or not at all.

During the campaign, a top GOP strategist told me: “Our voters don’t use the Internet.”

Remember the famous stories about the Obama campaign soliciting cell-phone numbers from crowds at the Denver convention, projecting supporters’ names and messages onto screens over Mile-High Stadium? There are two Democratic companies that specialize in campaign text messaging that can be used for candidate updates, community building, and GOTV. There are no major Republican companies that specialize in cell-phone outreach.

Democrats’ had an Obama iPhone application that placed a full campaign inside supporters’ cell-phones, organizing outreach state by state, allowing users to find policy positions and get email updates as well as connect with swing state friends on election day. The McCain campaign did not offer iPhone interface, but a harshly funny parody was circulated in its place. It’s a bad day when pranksters outflank the official campaign apparatus with tech investment.

But the most objective measure of the technology gap can be seen in the effectiveness of their online outreach. Obama had 3.1 million Facebook supporters, compared to 600,000 for McCain. Obama had 950,000 MySpace friends compared to 220,000 for McCain. Obama had 113 million YouTube views compared to 25 million for McCain. And when it came to meetup.com—a site famously used by Dean supporters in 2004—McCain got outhustled not only by Obama but also Bob Barr.

McCain ran a 20th century GOTV campaign—phone calls and mailings to supporters were the key metric. According to filings on opensecrets.org, the McCain campaign spent $18 million in postage and shipping costs, and $3 million on the internet. By comparison, Obama spent $15 million in postage and shipping costs and $14 million on the internet.

The technology gap not only highlighted the age gap between one of the youngest nominees in history and the oldest—it demonstrated how desperately the Republican Party needs to modernize its outreach and its outlook if it wants to regain relevance.

Ironically, McCain’s 2000 campaign, as run by Mike Murphy, was the most Internet-savvy of its day. This mantle was seized by Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign and the Democrats never gave it back. A latent Luddite instinct inside the RNC, combined with Sarah Palin’s base-pleasing paeans to the “real Americans” who live in small towns, make modernity itself look suspiciously liberal-leaning to many in the GOP establishment.

But there are a group of younger Republicans like blogger Patrick Ruffini who understand the urgent need to close the technology gap and put forward a plan at rebuildtheparty.com, including the recruitment of 5 million new online activists, minimum targets for internet fundraising, and an “open technology ecosystem.” “Winning the technology war with the Democrats must be the RNC's number one priority in the next four years,” Ruffini writes.

“The next generation of RNC leaders need to embrace the Internet, not find reasons to ignore it,” says Matthew Zablud, partner at Adfero Group, a DC-based public affairs specializing in integrated communications. “This will take not only investment but also reorganization, such as removing the silos between the e-campaign and other departments like political, communications and fundraising. It will require using social networking and online grassroots organizing techniques and technologies to keep supporters connected and engaged.”

It all comes down to one of the basic rules of modern life: make change your ally, not your enemy. But if the GOP stubbornly insists that conservative means resistance to change—especially technological evolution—it will quickly find itself going the way of the telegraph.

John P. Avlon is the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.