The Change Message Worked
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 16th, 2007 10:15 pmMA-5 has been called, and it’s looking like a narrow 5-point Tsongas win. That’s closer than all the public polls and it showed Ogonowski’s momentum was all upside the entire campaign.
This was always an uphill battle. MA-5 voted by 17 points for John Kerry in 2004. After 2006, I’m not sure there’s a district anywhere in America that Democratic that’s represented by a Republican.
But there is a clear way forward for the Republican Party out of tonight. It’s one that we didn’t have last night. Or last month. Or a year ago.
It’s simple: the change message works. America is anti-Washington, anti-Congress, and anti-corruption. When that’s where Republicans are, they win. Jim Ogonowski showed us that. Maybe not in an overwhelmingly Democratic district like MA-5. But what about in a +7 Democrat district? Or in purple seats?
Nor do we need the usual suspects to deliver this message. You don’t need to recruit a risk-averse State Senator who talks to his consultants and waits for “his time” to run. All you need is a plain-spoken veteran with an extraordinary life story. We need more citizen-candidates like Jim Ogonowski. We need them to pick off Democrats in blue and purple seats. We need them as primary challengers to corrupt incumbents. In “safe” Democrat-held districts, we need to run people who can get 45% of the vote, and then be in a position to finish the job in 2010. In 2006, the average second-time Democratic challenger who won received 43% of the vote their last time out.
When he announced, I don’t remember anyone in Washington being overly excited Jim Ogonowski was running, or thinking this could be a close race. (For me, it was that first SurveyUSA poll that really raised my antennae.) But he turned out to be exactly what the district and the Republican Party needed.
Tonight, we’re confident and playing on the other guy’s turf. That hasn’t happened in a while. There’s a reason the MyDD guys are muttering “Not good” tonight.
Tagged: 2008 
congress jim ogonowski MA 5
Comments (2) 
Trackbacks (3) 
del.icio.us 
digg it 
subscribe
links for 2007-10-16
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 16th, 2007 8:21 am
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) del.icio.us digg it subscribe
Inside Ron Paul Nation
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 15th, 2007 10:23 pmRon Paul’s supporters have provided a measure of radical transparency into his fundraising that would make most political operatives suffer heart failure. Going well beyond the now-passe end-of-quarter fundraising “bat,” the Paul campaign has set a public goal of $12 million raised for the quarter, posting their current total live on the homepage and including the names and hometowns of donors. If a donation comes in while you’re on the site, you’ll see it update live.
As if this weren’t bold enough, RonPaulGraphs.com has taken it a step further. Using the live data feed that powers the graphic, the site publishes an impressive array of analytics including a minute-by-minute view of donations and projected totals for the month and quarter.
But that’s not all.
The script also captures the name and hometown information for most online donors. A quick analysis of this data gives us the most revealing look yet at who Ron Paul’s donors actually are.
First off, I took the state-by-state breakdown of donors and plugged into an Excel sheet, using it to produce donor-per-capita numbers for each state. Using this data, I created this map.
This really is a Western movement, with some of the Northeast thrown in. Basically, these are the places where you would expect libertarians to be strong. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a data set this good about the state-by-state strength of libertarianism. And the data gets more reliable every day .
The Paul movement is weakest in the Deep South and the Ohio River Valley. Ohio (and surprisingly New York) are Paul’s weakest big states.
The differences are also fairly dramatic. One is 4 times more likely to be a Ron Paul donor in Nevada than in Mississippi. And more than twice as likely in blue Washington state than in blue New York. Alaska and Hawaii, which are not on the map, would also be colored the darkest shade of red.
The state-by-state numbers I crunched are below (current as of about 24 hours ago):
Oh, and by the way, on the names…
Though not exhaustive, I did go through the last 200 names. A whopping 83% of donors were men, 14.5% were women, and 2.5% I couldn’t determine from the name. Readers should comb through this list to confirm these numbers.
Tagged: 2008 epolitics ron paul traffic
Comments (42) Trackbacks (23) del.icio.us digg it subscribe
links for 2007-10-14
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 14th, 2007 8:20 am-
On the perils of exhaustion.
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) del.icio.us digg it subscribe
links for 2007-10-13
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 13th, 2007 8:19 am-
This is awesome!
Comments (3) Trackbacks (0) del.icio.us digg it subscribe
links for 2007-10-12
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 12th, 2007 8:22 am
Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) del.icio.us digg it subscribe
Free Speech in Advertising
by Patrick Ruffini :: October 11th, 2007 11:03 pmOn this one, I stand with Lance Dutson and the Collins campaign and not with MoveOn.org and Google who censored a legitimate political ad. I love Google as much as any technologist, but they’re flat wrong here.
In case you missed the brouhaha (which exploded onto Drudge and elsewhere), Susan Collins Internet director Lance Dutson placed Google AdWords ads fighting back against MoveOn’s extensive involvement in ME-SEN, raising upwards of six figures for Tom Allen.
William Beutler has some great comments responding to Google’s lame explanation over in the comments at TechRepublican:
So what Google’s saying is, MoveOn can place an ad criticizing Susan Collins, but Susan Collins can’t place an ad criticizing MoveOn?
The new campaign finance laws largely amounted to incumbent-protection, with its temporary, pre-election advertising blackout. Google’s TOS appears to be a permanent blackout on criticizing any proper nouns who’ve requested it. Both result in less speech.
What Dutson did is not Coke trying to compete with Pepsi. This is not a commercial brand wielding a rival’s trademark to drain profits from the competition. It is someone on one side of the political divide making a point about someone about someone on the other side. Isn’t that what political advertising should be about?
MoveOn is a political actor, which likes to fancy itself as the equivalent of a party or candidate committee. It runs ads that elicit strong pushback from official Republican committees and candidates. So, are now conceding that an organization like MoveOn is above criticism in the Web’s #1 advertising medium because they happen to be an organization with a trademark, rather than just an elected official or a party?
And more disturbingly, do politicians just trademark their name to (among other things) protect themselves from criticism on Google’s expanding ad network? If so, that’s a pretty severe distortion of the open, participatory online culture that Google claims to be fighting for. Major organizations and political rock stars with trademarks would be automatically immune. Everyone else, not so much.
That’s not as far off as you think. Hillary Clinton successfully sued for the rights to HillaryClinton.com citing the trademark rights to her name. Could she now wield that newfangled right to thwart paid online advertising against her?
Unlike the “miserable failure” Googlebomb, this strikes right at the heart of the company’s judgment. This controversy didn’t result from an algorithm, but from someone deep within the bowels of the company’s selective enforcement of trademark. This is not the first time that conservatives have felt the sting of Google’s censors first. Many conservative creative types have experienced just this sort of bias in other supposedly open Web services. In 2003, my anti-Che Guevara t-shirts were banned from Cafepress because (I was informed) a law firm called — appropriately — “Legend” informed the site they were very stringent about enforcing their rights to the iconic image.
Of course, this did not stop several other pro-Che Cafeshops from cashing in on the dead Commie’s copyright. My repeated emails to the company pointing this out were not responded to.
I don’t come down cleanly on either side of the current copyright wars. I think current IP law especially as it applies to software and music is a mess. I’m on Google’s side in the 700 MHz spectrum auction, but I think net neutrality worries are just hype.
But it’s abundantly clear to me that if we blindly accept Google’s claims just so we can assert our tech bona fides, conservatives will get the shaft. Why? Because enforcement will be manual and selective at best, with MoveOn getting better treatment than Wal-Mart and Exxon-Mobil with their phalanx of corporate attorneys. And guess who that helps?
Google has had no problem raging against trademarks (can you say Google Book Search?) and for an open Internet without walls around content. Certainly it should have no problem extending the same freedom to political speech on its ad network.
This isn’t the first time Lance Dutson has successfully fought back against the Left’s invasion of his state. Go Lance!
Tagged: advertising google online politics
Comments (0) Trackbacks (1) del.icio.us digg it subscribe
