Where Are the Goalposts for Online Politics?
by Patrick Ruffini :: January 10th, 2007 2:31 pmBill Beutler is knocking ABC PAC for its fundraising totals and engaging what smacks of some end-zone dancing for ActBlue. This part in particular is the kind of apples-and-oranges comparison I warned about earlier:
Note the figures. Yes, it’s all this cycle. The top 5 presidential candidates on ActBlue have received about $434,000, while all candidates on ABC PAC have collected exactly $298.
Of course, $428,854 of that total comes from one candidate, John Edwards, who is using ActBlue as his exclusive online fundraising provider. If Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and Brownback all channeled their contributions through ABC PAC, the numbers for it would look a lot different as well.
Bill does make a fair point: ActBlue is more of a Web 2.0 site, where users can sign up for accounts. There’s a reason for you to come back. It is long established and has achieved a baseline traffic number it will get just by showing up. ABC PAC isn’t quite there yet, something PAC advisor and ex-Ruffini boss Mike Turk was perfectly upfront about:
ActBlue has been in development for two years, and already raised north of six million dollars. To compare the functionality of a site that has been online for less than two full days, and which publicly states it is trying to put together funds for further development to a site like the one ActBlue is today is a bit disingenuous. … Given full funding, full functionality and a full catalog of candidates, ABC PAC has the potential to meet and exceed what ActBlue has done - and we plan to do so.
Bill expected it to be built by now, but speaking as someone with a bit of experience in the development world, these things don’t get built in the final three months of a campaign when all involved were a bit preoccupied with the 2006 elections. Strategically, you want to build these types of things in an off-year, and 2007 is such a year.
Ultimately, I have a bigger complaint to lodge about how outside observers cover the blogosphere and new media in politics: they tend to focus on the small fry instead of the big picture. If there is an apples-to-apples comparison to be made, it’s between ActBlue’s $6,000 towards presidential “draft funds” vs. ABC PAC’s more modest number for essentially the same thing. The salient point, I think, is not that ActBlue won, but that in the world of political fundraising, neither number is very good. $6,000 is nowhere near what ActBlue can do and $298 is nowhere near what ABC PAC shown it can do, to say nothing of the $1-2 billion that will be spent on the next election. Why is that? Because people want to contribute to a living, breathing candidate, not “prospective candidates” who may not ultimately run. A “draft fund” sounds like a cool idea (I was a big fan conceptually) but one that probably doesn’t hold up well in the real world.
To make a broader point of this seems pretty tangential. “Draft funds” are the stepchild of third-party viral fundraising which are themselves less lucrative than e-mail/website based fundraising. The even bigger picture is the campaign’s overall fundraising picture and how a good online performance can upend the dynamics of a race. We need to put the goalposts in the right place. This is not meant to poo-poo the blogosphere/ActBlue/ABC PAC (they are best seen as proxies for what’s going on in a larger universe of online influentials) but to acknowledge where we actually are and to challenge the blogosphere to play an ever-larger role in the process.
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Tagged: abc pac 
actblue online politics strategy
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