Republicans “Getting” New Media?
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
As you have no doubt figured out by now, today is Election Day in the Massachusetts special to replace former Senator Ted Kennedy.
For a variety of reasons, the last few weeks have seen remarkable movement in the polls towards Republican State Senator Scott Brown. At the start of the race, Brown was down by as much as 30 percentage points, today the smart money is on him edging Democrat Martha Coakley in the bluest of blue states.
Real Clear Politics looks at how it “may have started with a simple hashtag:”
On December 28, Brown announced what became the signature force behind his campaign, his pledge to be a 41st vote against President Obama’s national health care reform legislation. Accompanying that news on his Twitter feed was this notation: #41stvote. Referred to as a hashtag, those nine characters became a mechanism to attract like-minded activists and identify new ones. Reflecting an enthusiasm gap not just in the state but among national politicos, Brown now boasts more than 11,000 Twitter followers, compared to barely 4,000 for Democrat Martha Coakley.
That following paid dividends last Monday when, aided by a strong Twitter campaign from Brown and dozens of his newest online advocates, the Republican smashed a fundraising goal of $500,000 for a one-day “money bomb,” generating instead well beyond $1 million. That total from just 24 hours was well beyond what he had raised in the entire previous fundraising period. Where there had been skepticism before about what kind of impact Twitter could have, the Brown campaign is making a convincing case.
Throughout the piece, RCP quotes Republican officials and strategists from around the country who have clearly gotten the message:
“When I started, everyone joked that I was the director of shiny objects,” said John Randall, director of new media for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “This is not a shiny object. This is industry standard now. It’s definitely something that I point out to all the campaigns.”
“It’s absolutely the quickest, most accessible, most open platform for sharing information on the Web,” said Jordan Raynor, a Florida-based Republican online strategist. “Twitter by nature makes information valuable, if it’s valuable information. If you’ve got a juicy piece of news it’s going to spread fastest through Twitter.”
“We realized there is a changing phenomenon. More folks, particularly young people in that demographic that frankly our party has not done that well in the past, are getting their information [from social media],” [VA Gov. Bob] McDonnell said at an RGA conference after the campaign.
Certainly a number of factors went into Brown’s popularity spike, but the role of new media should not be overlooked. In addition to a significant edge in Twitter followers, Brown has more than three times the Facebook Fans and nearly eight times the number of YouTube subscribers as his opponent. All of this has fueled Brown’s populist, “Its the people seat!” message and have engaged the electorate to the point that election officials are expecting record turnouts across the Bay State.
As with seemingly many things in the last few months, Martha Coakley and Massachusetts Democrats lost site of a key component to a 21st Century campaign and this blunder could certainly prove costly. To really capitalize, however, the Republican Party must continue to invest in and employ these technologies based on the lessons learned in this race.