Glenn Reynolds points to a new voter poll of people who use the Internet for political news, where Bush leads Dean by 20 points and extrapolates that perhaps Bush is doing a better job than he thought.
That doesn't mean the the Internet hasn't been a useful tool for organizing Dean supporters -- it obviously has -- but I guess it means that it hasn't been a dramatically effective tool for winning new converts.
Now, its a hasty generalization to say Bush is doing a good job using the Internet. The sample of the poll is of a affluent and savvy-enough-to-browse constituency that is naturally tilted to the right. But its a good point that there remains much work to do. Just because someone is on the right doesn't mean they can't defect.
The self-organizing aspect of the Dean's grassroot's campaign is well known. From a distance this means a lower cost for getting out a message through activism and low-cost grassroots fundraising, but there is a greater phenomenon emerging.
For any candidate to win a Presidential election they must pursuade swing votes. But actually, its not the candidates that pursuade, but the discussion networks (social networks) of swing voters that influence choice.
Paul Beck studied third party campaigns to reveal the role of discussion networks in encouraging political defection (.pdf). What he found was that social context strongly influences voter behavior:
People were more likely to vote for Perot if their personal discussants supported him and to convert preferences for him into a Perot vote on election day. Partisans also were more likely to defect to the other major party if their discussion network failed to fully support the candidate of their own party. These results withstood controls for candidate evaluations and partisanship as well as for selective exposure to discussants and selective perception of their preferences. They show the importance of adding social context to personal attitudes, interests, and partisanship in explaining voting behavior.
What Dean is doing with MeetUps and DeanLink is not just activating a network, but enabling group formation that can provide the social context for change. Blogs as discussion networks and deliberative polling are key aspects of emergent democracy that can enable rational change. MeetUp allows swing voters to at first passively engage in discussion with others and form implicit relationships. DeanLink allows large-scale explicit social context. Letter writing provides social context from afar.
The latent potential of these networks to sway swing voters isn't realized until the point of decision approaches. Don't under-estimate it, the conversation continues. By offering diverse social contexts with networks at various scales, there are multiple opportunities for a voter to form weak ties that provide new information and enable the Left decision.
UPDATE: I'm looking at you Tim.
ALSO: Joi, since you are thinking about the context of big media, watch this year as the first when it adopts tools of social context.
