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The New York Times
October 19, 1999

Candidate on the Stump Is Surely on the Web

By Tina Kelley

The modern campaign headquarters is no longer a rented storefront decorated with bumper stickers, bunting and empty soda cans. Increasingly it has an annex open any hour of the day or night, at an address starting with www.

If in 1996 a candidate could prove hipness simply by posting an electronic version of a campaign brochure on the World Wide Web, White House hopefuls for 2000 are learning to use their Internet sites to raise money and rally troops. The Web page is the new whistle-stop, a way for candidates to carry their messages daily to more people than they can reach on the campaign trail.

By posting everything from their baby pictures (as George W. Bush has done) to their favorite Bible stories (an offering from Elizabeth Dole), candidates are using the Internet as a fireside chat room, to portray themselves as just plain folks.

The sites also provide a new conduit for cash: Bill Bradley has towered over the opposition in on-line fund-raising, while the Steve Forbes campaign created a way for Web surfers to crash a recent $1,000-a-plate gala -- for a small fee, of course.

No one is suggesting that the Internet has come of age as a medium of political influence, as television did most notably with the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960. But with 67 million Americans on line, up from 7.5 million four years ago, it has become a new variable in campaign calculus.

"It used to be said the candidate had to have a good message, a good ground game and enough money to wage a good air game on TV," said Rick Segal, the Internet strategy adviser to Forbes. "This is the first cycle that it can be proven that a candidate needs to have a good on-line game as well."

That game includes producing fill-in-the-blank e-mail that backers can send to all their friends in support of the candidate, and gathering campaign contributions requiring just a few mouse clicks.

And for all that, the sites are a relative bargain -- Bush spent $57,000 on his over the last seven months -- with candidates hiring Web consultants, contracting with private companies or allowing volunteers to create and maintain them.

Lately the sites have not only conveyed the campaigns' messages but also made news: Governor Bush last month became the first Presidential candidate to make updated lists of campaign donors available online, and Senator John McCain of Arizona got under the skin of fellow Republicans by using his site to single out examples of Congressional pork.

Howard Opinsky, McCain's press secretary, affirmed the Internet's growing campaign role, saying it was "almost like the 51st state."

"It has no boundaries," Opinsky said. "The Internet has progressed from a billboard to a two-way street, and I think it's probably good in the end for the political process."

To be sure, Web pages -- unlike television or radio commercials, which to the public can seem unavoidable -- depend on the initiative of people to look for them. But such surfers are valuable visitors: Bradley's campaign says that on an average day his site brings in about $7,000 and is seen by 5,000 people, more than he might encounter in a day on the trail.

Bradley's campaign workers try to drum up traffic to his site by displaying the address on every lectern he uses. And Segal has worked to make sure the Forbes site is indexed in Internet search engines, thereby increasing the probability of surfers' stopping by, and is placing advertisements on news and financial Web sites.

At the same time, as the Internet grows in popularity, candidates are cutting down on printed campaign literature. The Forbes campaign, for example, says it is sending out fewer newsletters than it would have in pre-Internet campaigns, because the Internet is a faster and less expensive medium.

And more than in a television advertisement, the candidates are able to convey their personalities through their pages. The aura of digital friendliness that results can either charm or repel prospective supporters.

Bradley's site, for example, includes recipes for dishpan cookies, oatmeal icebox cookies and butterhorns, from Rosalie Dunker, Dede Herrell and Em Aubuchon, who baked for his campaign kickoff in Crystal City, Mo. Governor Bush has baby pictures of himself and his daughters on his site and mentions his family's dog, Spot, and three cats, India, Cowboy and Ernie.

One Presidential hopeful even sells his gospel recordings on line, at www.hatchmusic.com (a site separate from that of his campaign), where one can download snippets of Senator Orrin G. Hatch singing "The Cross Before the Crown."

At www.AlGore2000.com, technologically savvy voters are rewarded with a message from the Vice President that is embedded in the source code, the programming blueprints of a site.

"Thanks for checking out our source code!" the candidate -- or a group of Gore techies -- writes, describing plans to improve the code. "The fact that you are peeking behind the scenes at our site means you can make an important difference to this Internet effort."

In another innovative move, the Forbes campaign blended virtual reality with real reality by inviting 400 computer users to an on-line version of a $1,000-a-plate bash in June at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. For $10 each, plugged-in supporters saw live video of the festivities, and typed messages back and forth with Forbes and others in attendance. Later that night his address was seen on a free Webcast by about 1,800 people, 600 more than at the live event.

In many respects, the partnership between established candidates and the wild, wild Web is uneasy as they plumb the possibilities of this new technology.

"Campaigns are a tight, disciplined, focused message delivered in a focused way, reducing chance, variables and conflict to a minimum," said Phil Noble, president of PoliticsOnline of Charleston, S.C., a company offering Internet expertise. "The Internet is about millions of voices colliding, all at the same time, about all kinds of things in a near-chaotic pattern."

But candidates recognize that the Internet is an effective way to get their messages across and to keep the prospective voter's attention. Studies have shown that campaigns can usually get 45 seconds of a voter's attention by phone or 30 seconds in a television advertisement, compared with eight minutes through a Web site, said Emilienne Ireland, president of Campaign Advantage, an Internet campaign-services company in Bethesda, Md.

And more than ever before, the candidates' pages are used to bring in contributions. Bradley's campaign says it has raised over $770,000 through his site, 4 percent of its total contributions. (According to a survey by PoliticsOnline, McCain had raised $260,000 on the Internet through September; no other candidate had brought in more than $100,000 through the Net.)

Of the half-million people who have visited the Bradley site since last December, 14.4 percent have filled out a form to get involved, and 1 percent have brought out their credit cards or checkbooks to contribute, said Lynn Reed, a consultant to the campaign.

"The Bradley campaign has been real effective in the overall strategic use of the Net," said Jonah Seiger, co-founder and principal of Mindshare Internet Campaigns, consultants in Washington. "They raised a great deal of money and a great deal of press attention, suggesting they clearly have a better strategic sense of the Net than the Gore campaign does, considering that Gore is so identified with the Net. Here they're doing something that is really going to hit Gore where it hurts."

But Andrew Sather, senior vice president at Sapient, Internet consultants in Cambridge, Mass., and redesigners of the official White House Web site, cited the Gore campaign's use of the Web to let visitors interact with the candidate, through electronic town halls, where people can pose questions about anything from class size to the income gap.

The Bush campaign has used its site to gain credentials for the Texas Governor as a Net-savvy candidate, notably with the decision last month to begin posting a list of all his contributors, even those who gave less than $200.

"This gives Americans the opportunity to look for themselves at the broad-based support Governor Bush is receiving," said Scott McClellan, a campaign spokesman. About 100,000 people have dipped into the 1,750-page listing so far, he said.

At the same time, just as readers of Web pages get more information about their candidate, the candidate gets more information about them, helping a campaign organize its ground troops. Several Web watchers pointed to what the Forbes campaign calls electronic precincts as a canny use of the Internet: In a political version of multilevel marketing, a campaign volunteer brings in a handful of other volunteers, who in turn bring in more. The first volunteer, the E-precinct captain, is rewarded with special briefings, on-line video presentations, a chance to meet the candidate and real-world recognition.

"It's something that's growing in its own viral kind of way," said Segal, the Forbes adviser, who added that the campaign had about 5,000 E-precincts, a few with as many as 5,000 members each.

The Forbes campaign keeps tabs on where its e-volunteers live and what kind of volunteering they would like to do. Using similar information, the Bradley campaign was able to send e-mail to 5,000 supporters in the Northeast, encouraging them to take part in a weeklong canvass in New Hampshire this summer.

"We were able to get 300 folks, free," Ms. Reed said. "If you had to make phone calls for the same return, it might not be worth it."

With all those electronic addresses and ZIP codes flowing in from supporters to Webmasters, some Internet experts have become concerned about what is done with this information. To reassure supporters, the Gore site posts this disclaimer: "We do not share our volunteer lists with any other site or any other entity."

Chuck Todd, managing editor of The Hotline, a daily Web-based political newsletter published by The National Journal, predicts that the watershed event of the Internet's new power will most likely occur in a primary campaign, in a small or particularly well-wired state. "The way, in the past, there was a last-minute TV barrage, there will be a huge Internet campaign to swing votes toward a candidate," he said.

Some analysts say the Internet may not show its full potential as a political tool until 2004 at the earliest, when high-speed Internet connections become more common and zapping messages to particular groups of voters has been refined to an art.

"The potential watershed moment will be when Al Gore can make sure his pro-choice abortion ads are only seen by moderate, pro-choice women," Todd said. "That's what the Internet allows, targeting and identifying voters by household."

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