The Maverick Returns
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 26th, 2007 12:00 am
How bad will this fundraising quarter be for McCain? Well, they’re sending emails like this out to their list:
In fact, The New York Times reported last week that John McCain’s long crusade against business as usual in Washington, he does not rely on big money contributions from Washington lobbyists and power brokers; he relies on contributions from hard-working supporters like you. That is why we need your help today. …
Some industry lobbyists call John McCain a “one man wrecking crew” because of his efforts to defend taxpayers. In the Oval Office, John McCain will follow through on his promise to veto every bill packed with wasteful spending that comes across his desk and make the people who wrote it famous. John McCain has the courage to stand on our side; it is time for all of us to stand with him.
Isn’t this the kind of email you’d expect from John Edwards, who has raised under $8 million? And this comes from a campaign that’s stuffed with lobbyists.
Don’t count me in the McCain Death Watch camp just yet. Edwards is what a campaign that’s in a real money tailspin looks like. The true moment of decision for McCain won’t come until September, when net cashflow starts turning red. And consider this: If things got really dire, McCain would have the option to self-fund or loan himself some of his wife’s eight figure fortune, like Kerry mortgaged Teresa’s house to rescue his failing campaign in late 2003.
With his strategic investments in early primary states, Romney is failing to put this away from a money perspective, and will likely raise less than $20 million organically this quarter — down from last quarter. The real question is if Giuliani does better this quarter than last.
Enter New Media Fred! If he can raise a minimum of $5 million and keep the overhead low, he’ll be on track to best the Big Three’s COH totals sometime this summer. If he does $7-10 million, it changes the complexion of this discussion entirely.
Tagged: fundraising 
john mccain
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The Politico’s Design Woes
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 25th, 2007 4:27 pmBen Smith notes that his blog on the Politico has been redesigned. And he’s right, it’s a step in the right direction.
But the design of the Politico overall leaves much to be desired. It’s clear that most of the user interface was put in place by programmers, not designers. Note the awkwardly sized fonts and the use of unstyled bullet elements in related story lists. (Aside: Who uses Trebuchet on a serious news site anymore??) Every blog post features a lot of white space between the content and the post footer. That happens in a lot of homegrown blogging tools that rely on Microsoft Word-like HTML editors that automatically insert paragraph breaks after each save.
Politico.com would have been in a lot better by choosing Wordpress or Movable Type for its blogging engine. Check out the Fred File blog that the Bivings Group built for the Thompson campaign. It resides on a different server than the main website. Sites like the Huffington Post are also showing how you can create beautiful, precisely styled news content with an engine like Movable Type, which has seen better days. These open source tools give you the best of both worlds: complete control over layout with a bevy of pre-existing templates and plugins that can prevent you from having to reinvent the wheel. Another downside to a custom solution: Politico comments are rife with spam. If they had the benefit of Akismet, this wouldn’t be nearly the problem that it is. Also: it’s a pain to make trackbacks work with a custom platform.
Why then do big sites like the Politico go with their own tools? Not for trivial reasons. First and foremost, they are primarily a news site, while tools like Wordpress are geared towards blogging. It’s possible to use Wordpress for a news site, but a major pain to integrate, particularly if you’ve got both blogs and news going on at the same time. If you really want to get the benefit of Wordpress — the best blogging engine out there — you’ll probably have to keep it walled off from your main content management system (CMS), as the New York Times apparently does with its Caucus blog.
But IT types don’t just try to keep things under one roof for posterity’s sake. The main reason they do it is user authentication. It’s very difficult to build a single user login/profile system that works across all the different platforms you’ve got going on your site, be it blogging, news rating/commenting, social networking, action tools, etcetera. The off-the-shelf tools that are out there are getting more and more powerful, so it increasingly makes sense to use them, but the challenge of getting them to play nicely together isn’t going away. Enter OpenID, which is trying to build a standard for user login & authentication across the Internet. Will OpenID be the death of custom code, at least for small CMS-like projects? What are the prospects for Wordpress to adopt OpenID as part of its core distribution?
For the Politico, I still say that hosting the Smith & Martin blogs on a Wordpress platform is still a good idea, particularly if they can unify login access right across all their blog properties. It helps them be good blogging citizens, with trackbacks that work and spam-free comments. And with plenty of themes to choose from as a basis for the design, the presentation will finally match the quality of the content.
Tagged: cms design open source politico wordpress
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Kathleen Parker & America Offline
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 25th, 2007 2:20 pmThink web video is going to sweep the land in 2008? Kathleen Parker offers a contrarian view (via Josh Levy’s indispensable daily roundup):
Yes, it’s hard to believe if you’re a tuned-in, turned-on popular culture vulture umbilically connected to the blogosphere/videosphere. But cross the country and ask normal people about the latest Gravel ad and they’d think you don’t know how to pronounce the word for tiny pebbles.
Ask working folks about “You and I,” the campaign song selected by Clinton in her recent Sopranos-spoof video, and most will shrug indifferently.
Everyday people, in other words, are too busy getting to work, raising children and going to their respective houses of worship to monitor the virtual world where Gravel (who is running for President, by the way), Clinton and other Presidential candidates have posted about 900 political videos.
And:
Candidates can’t afford to ignore either, but ultimately they’re forced to present two different faces to two different audiences — the plugged and the unplugged, the hip and the un-hip.
There’s a meme going around that being online makes you young and hip. That isn’t so. The average resident of Blogistan is 45. The readership of Daily Kos skews old.
While the Clinton video was designed to show the couple as culturally aware (BTW, the biggest subtext was actually showing them off happily married), success online comes in many flavors. If Parker read blogs like TechPresident and TechRepublican closely, she’d see that the message that gets constantly repeated isn’t coolness. It’s authenticity. That means if your iPod is stocked to the gills with classical music, tell us. Of if you don’t have an iPod, that’s fine too.
Mostly, the other insinuation of Parker’s piece — that campaigns are two-faced — is a yawner. Campaigns message to different audiences all the time. If you’re a Republican, what you send to your Faith & Values list is different than what you send to your Veterans list. If you’re a Democrat, what John Edwards says is different than what Elizabeth Edwards says.
Moreover — and I’m exploring this for a more in-depth piece coming up — campaigns have thoroughly bought into Keller & Barry’s Influentials thesis. Meaning that more and more of campaign communications are about developing an intense connection with the 1-in-10 who really care rather than a passing connection with those who couldn’t care less. I would argue that there is now almost complete overlap between online citizens and the 1-in-10. In a primary, this matters even more because the “don’t care” voters probably won’t be voting at all. Right now, it’s more important for Rudy Giuliani or Barack Obama to tap into an energized base of evangelists than it is to be broadly acceptable to a wide audience who may get yanked away by the media tide tomorrow. The debates were watched by 2 million people apiece, and there’s a legitimate argument to be made that they moved the 30-40 million universe being polled. Somehow the message got out, through the Dayton-to-Ambinder-to-Balz-to-local newspaper syndication-to-evening news media conveyor belt.
When it comes to media, the campaigns shouldn’t make value judgments, only marketing decisions. Does sending a direct mail fundraising appeal make you old and stodgy in an era where no one (my age least) sends letters anymore? Should a candidate who doesn’t personally like to watch television not do TV ads? These questions are about as ridiculous as suggesting that a candidate shouldn’t play online because he or she doesn’t go online, or a certain segment of the population isn’t online. Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are just channels, and in a campaign you message through all the available channels. The only time it doesn’t make sense to do this is when there is literally no market penetration for these tools in the audience you’re targeting (the AARP on MySpace for instance, and even there, I might be proven wrong).
As much as I disagree with Parker’s analysis, I’m really glad to see when critics of the online world engage. Incredible Seth Godin lectures don’t do very much when you’re just preaching to the choir at PDF. The influentials on both sides of the online-offline debate need to come together to hash this out.
Tagged: kathleen parker online politics video youtube
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links for 2007-06-25
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 25th, 2007 8:31 am-
What will Facebook look like in 40 years?
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2008 State Wires
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 24th, 2007 10:09 amMore work under the hood of the 2008 Wire this weekend with the launch of state Presidential Wires for Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, and Florida. They’re all accessible through a new menu bar throughout the Wire that will include quick links to key pages. Next to each state is a current tally of total mentions, a gauge of where the media thinks the action is in the early nominating contests.
ALSO: I’ve added special pages for stories on polls, campaign finance, and Internet campaigning
Tagged: announcements florida iowa nevada new hampshire south carolina
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links for 2007-06-24
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 24th, 2007 8:24 am
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links for 2007-06-23
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 23rd, 2007 8:23 am-
The more apt comparison to Lieberman this cycle seems to be John McCain on the Republican side. McCain’s tank, to barely holding onto single-digits now, is astounding– especially when you look at the BushCo talent that he arranged on the campaign deck.
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“If you’re a campaign with lots of enthusiasm, you have to make sure that you are capturing everyone’s information,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager. “We are very mindful of that every time we do an event.”
But Mr. Plouffe warns agains
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links for 2007-06-22
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 22nd, 2007 8:28 am
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Edwards Has Only Raised $6 Million
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 21st, 2007 11:10 amFrom a Joe Trippi email:
This is it— with 10 days left in the second quarter, we’re about two-thirds of the way towards our goal of raising $9 million—double what we raised at this time in the 2004 race. And I know what you’re thinking—my $25 doesn’t matter for a hill of beans against all those four-figure checks rolling in to the campaigns.
This isn’t wildly off the mark form Marc Ambinder’s Q2 fundraising predictions, which probably have been heavily massaged by the campaigns themselves. But still, this is well, ehh…
When it comes to fundraising, there is no Big Three on the Democratic side, just a Big Two: Obama and Clinton. And Obama is currently projected to outraise Clinton. But while Obama and Clinton are projected to hold steady or gain ground from Q1 (and at give or take $25-30 million), we know that Edwards will lose ground.
Now, Edwards has been running a frugal campaign and his COH will probably rival that of the relatively free-spending Republican frontrunners, but I’m very close to reverting to my old position on Edwards: he’s DOA.
Like David Axelrod says, good on paper, but he can’t close the deal.
Tagged: fundraising john edwards
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Early State Whiplash
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 21st, 2007 10:50 amAbout a month ago, the McCain campaign had a legitimate argument that they were ahead or polling strong in the early-voting states. Today, that’s no longer the case. In fact, McCain today is weaker in the early states than he is nationally.
That shock South Carolina poll gave us a taste of it. Now he’s at 6% in Iowa. And 11% in Florida. Nationally, he’s still at 15%, but falling.
This gives us a sense of the fickleness of basing your campaign on early state polling. The early states are more sensitive to wild swings in opinion because the voters there are paying attention. If your momentum is sagging, you’ll see it in the early state polls soon enough. Which is why McCain went from first to fourth in many of these polls.Eventually, the rest of the country follows.
Top dog status in early states is a moving target, much more so than national polls.That’s why it’s way to soon to tell who will have the momentum there come January. Mitt Romney’s first place position in Iowa and New Hampshire was attained with relative ease, but it can also be lost just as easily. What we do know from history is that the early states won’t vote for candidates with falling momentum. Early states may sometimes be ahead of their time, rewarding surging niche candidates who fail elsewhere, but they are seldom behind it.
Tagged: florida iowa john mccain south carolina
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