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Intelligence
The First Net-Enabled Election

Intelligence

The First Net-Enabled Election

Jun 29, 2003By Michael Stoner

Thus far, the 2004 presidential election is shaping up to be the first race that will take advantage of the Internet. Although candidates have mounted websites and conducted forays into online fundraising before, this is the first presidential race in which the Internet could really count.

Up to now, the campaign to watch has been the upstart Howard Dean campaign. The campaign (whose website is hosted by Convio) has been an early adopter of Internet and has benefitted from organizing by a number of “net-roots” organizations.

The Dean campaign was astonished early on to find that netizens self-organized meetings for Dean through the use of MeetUp. Meetup provides a web-based services that allows all kinds of groups (and I do mean all kinds) to organize face-to-face meetings. So Dean’s campaign partnered with MeetUp—most recently, Dean partisans used MeetUp to organize national meetings for Dean’s official announcement of his candidacy.

And, in case you haven’t been paying attention, the national “net-roots” organization MoveOn, with 1.4 million members, held the first national primary last week. The organization was poised to endorse any candidate with more than 50% of the vote in the primary. With 317,639 members voting, Dean received 44% of the vote—not enough to receive an endorsement. Yet, pundits are paying close attention to MoveOn, with some speculating that Dean could raise millions of dollars in a very short time through the organization’s growing email list.

If you’re interested in following how this election plays out on the Net, we recommend susbscribing to our friend Kari Chisholm’s email newsletter, Politics and Technology. Sign up here.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?