In November 2007, the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s campaign dismissed Obama saying, “His supporters look like Facebook (FB)”. Indeed, most Obama-supporters spent a lot of time on FB. They also frequented Myspace, Youtube and other Web 2.0 hangouts popular with “kids”.
Over 70 million Americans have a Facebook account. The majority are between 18 and 35 years old. Most of those social networking dudes are voters. First, they turned out in droves at Democratic caucuses to ensure their man’s nomination. Then, they turned out in unprecedented numbers to give him the election.
All this happened almost under the radar as far as the Clinton campaign and the Republicans were concerned. By the time, Obama’s rivals woke up, he had already locked up the Net-savvy vote.
Chris Hughes, one of the 24-year-old founders of Facebook, helped orchestrate Obama’s web-campaign. The website my.barackobama.com became the rallying point for over a million, Net-savvy BHO volunteers.
The Obama website is itself a social network and it offered software tools to hook up more mainstream social networks. That helped Obama supporters launch and micro-manage the campaign, state-by-state, county-by-county, ward-by-ward, in cyberspace. Every Obama quote was posted up at Youtube. Over 40,000 neighbourhood meetings were coordinated via FB. Every dirty rumour was instantaneously countered on a site called FightTheSmears.com.
The campaign raised more than two million online donations of under $200 each. Obama’s campaigners used e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging, FB and Myspace groups to pull out the vote. Obama supporters were told where to sign up and how to vote. There were no hanging chads this time.
Yes, the Obama-ites did work the phones and make door-to-door visits. But it was cyberspace that was the force multiplier. The McCain website looked ten years behind the curve in technology and McCain made no serious attempt to use social networks. Neither did Clinton — ironic, since her chief strategist had put his finger on it, albeit derisively.
The power of a social network-based campaign lies in the small degree of separation between campaigner and voter. Obama voters were contacted by friends, or by people who were friends of friends. The messages were intimately personalised because the campaigners actually knew individual voters.
This interactive intimacy proved to be more effective than the old style of campaigning through intrusive phone calls and house visits by random strangers. In fact, the FB user demographic overlaps strongly with “cellphone-only” (no landline) demographics. US cell users pay for incoming calls so they are less than happy about cell-based telemarketing. Obama’s folks got around that neatly by using the Web and, as a result, they influenced under-30 voters who weren’t reached by anyone else.
The 2008 campaign suggests US politics is now moving beyond the TV-based campaign paradigm that has dominated since John Fitzgerald Kennedy out-talked Richard Milhous Nixon in the televised debates of 1960. That was when it became apparent that electronic media had more influence than print media and physical rallies. Post-Obama, it’s becoming apparent that the Net can reach further than even TV can.
All this is a function of Net penetration, of course, and of a generation that has learnt to consume and debate news online as well as keep in touch with its peers online. Also, the Obama campaign was clearly driven by the imagination of a tech-savvy politician.
Sadly, it is not likely to be replicated anytime soon in the Indian context. Nor for that matter, is the McCain campaign with its TV-centric paradigm. Indian Net penetration is abysmal. But it has huge cellphone and TV penetration. It also has a much larger pool of young voters, with Orkut and FB accounts. What it doesn’t have, is tech-savvy politicians capable of using these demographics effectively.
