RALEIGH – Back in the 1980s, when I first began paying close attention to electoral politics – and reporting on them, beginning with the 1986 campaigns for state legislature – the trend seemed to be increasingly against the coherence and relevance of political parties. Individual campaigns, run by consultants with direct-mail proceeds and to a large extent on television, represented the political organization of choice. North Carolina’s Congressional Club, having just cemented its reputation with Jesse Helms’ 1984 victory over political demigod Jim Hunt, overshadowed the state Republican Party, just as Hunt’s organization dominated Democratic politics.
Today, the situation is muddier. In some ways, candidates and consultants still run their own affairs. But I would argue that some of their power is in the process of being eroded, from both the top down and the bottom up. Technology is a critical factor in both trends.
As previously discussed in this space, one manifestation of the technological transformation of politics is the use of sophisticated databases, stuffed with the latest census data and survey research, to guide campaign decisions such as media buys and get-out-the-vote efforts. As Alan Greenblatt reported in Governing magazine’s October cover story, the uber-database style of politics is strengthening the hand of political parties and campaign committees, who typically have the resources and expertise to manage and use the information.
Particularly in competitive races for Congress and legislature, candidates in many states now have less autonomy than they used to. Be it Republican candidates for state senate in Michigan or Democratic candidates for U.S. House such as Heath Shuler in Western North Carolina, many campaigns are in effect staffed from afar, funded from afar, and directed from afar. Greenblatt provided the example of Julie Dennis, a Democrat running for Michigan’s 34th Senate district. Using a handheld device programmed with the state Democratic Party’s latest database, Dennis was walking neighborhoods. Discovering a loyal Democrat on her pre-arranged route, she reflected that this was an obvious mistake – but an exceedingly rare one. Republicans may have had a more accurate database in 2004 – some credit this advantage as explaining the GOP’s success that year – but by this year it seems that Democrats have at least reached parity.
While resurgent party hierarchies and committees, empowered by technology and fundraising prowess, are calling some of the shots for today’s candidates, another tech-driven change has reduced their ability to control the political message. That is, of course, the rise of political blogging and other web resources. Their potency became evident during the 2004 election cycle, initially with the Howard Dean phenomenon. In retrospect, what was important here was not the presidential campaign itself – an incompetent operation responsible for a spectacular failure – but the ability of hundreds of thousands of Democratic activists to organize, fund, and carry out political communication on their own.
By September 2004, it was GOP-leaning bloggers who came to the fore, helping over a few days to facilitate the implosion of CBS News and the end of Dan Rather’s career (not the same thing, though perhaps he didn’t see it that way). At Carolina FreedomNet, a conference on political blogging hosted this past weekend by the Locke Foundation, one of the bloggers at Power Line, attorney Scott Johnson, provided a play-by-play account of how the documents at the center of the CBS hit piece on President Bush’s military service came to be exposed as fraudulent. His history demonstrated the interplay of connectedness, distributed expertise, and serendipity. It is likely to be repeated with escalating frequency in our political future (indeed, the Mark Foley scandal has been powered in part by the blogosphere).
Candidates and consultants continue to make key decisions (in many cases in apparent denial about changes in the media market). They still matter. But party leaders at the top and party activists at the bottom matter more than they used to. The former have new tools with which to seek to coordinate large-scale campaign strategies. And the latter have new tools either to help carry out those strategies – or to subvert them. Looks like fun.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.