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Nation & World 10/6/03
The Democrats' Internet Gain
MoveOn's unlikely success story is shaking up the 2004 campaign
By Dan Gilgoff
When the online advocacy group MoveOn.org E-mailed its members this summer soliciting funds to fight the Republican-led redistricting effort in Texas, it raked in $1 million in a week. When it posted an online petition asking Californians to pledge a no vote on the recall of Gov. Gray Davis, 100,000 signed up in six days. And recent votes in Congress to repeal a Federal Communications Commission rule that would permit more media consolidation can be partly traced to MoveOn, which collected 340,000 signatures opposing the rule.
All this from the couple who brought you the flying-toaster screen saver. Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, a husband-wife team who started the software company that pioneered whimsical winged appliance graphics, founded MoveOn in 1998 as an E-mail campaign urging opposition to Bill Clinton's impeachment, an effort dubbed "Censure and Move On." MoveOn then raised more than $2 million for Democratic candidates in 2000. Its E-mail subscriber list grew gradually until the run-up to the war in Iraq--which MoveOn opposed--when it shot from 480,000 names to a million plus. Now, as membership (there are no fees, just the subscriber list) nears 1.6 million, Blades, 47, predicts her group could raise upwards of $10 million for the next Democratic presidential nominee.
Call to action. Blades and Boyd have long been Democrats, but they weren't always politically minded. Their firm, Berkeley Systems, was geared toward developing software for the disabled; that mission was overtaken by the success of its screen savers. After selling the business in 1997, they planned to develop educational software. But "circumstances called us," says Blades. "There was a vacuum of leadership, and we stepped in."
When big political news breaks, the MoveOn team (which now includes four employees besides Blades and Boyd, who are unpaid) sifts through communiques from its left-leaning members. Once an issue generates enough buzz, the group fires off an E-mail call to action, which might include calling a congressperson to voice opposition to the FCC rule. About a third of MoveOn members live in California or New York, and the group says its online format tends to attract young people. But many members are middle-aged. Joan Gordon, a former lawyer in her mid-50s now pursuing a linguistics degree at Yale, says she used to be relatively apolitical, but MoveOn "gave me a voice and a forum for connecting with others."
Experts say MoveOn represents only the infancy of online organizing. "People are frustrated with the parties because there are so many barriers to involvement," says Max Fose, Internet campaign manager for Sen. John McCain's 2000 presidential bid. "You can go to MoveOn right now and get involved." Some centrist Democrats worry that MoveOn's anti-Bush rhetoric (like recent full-page newspaper ads) could alienate undecided voters. "You're not going to win swing voters by screaming at them," says Ed Kilgore, policy director at the Democratic Leadership Council. But MoveOn is only gaining status. When Al Gore delivered his first major address in eight months in New York last August, he spoke to MoveOn members. This fall, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee will relaunch its Web site to operate more like MoveOn. While there is no Republican analogue to MoveOn, the Republican National Committee has recruited more than 342,000 activists for its Internet-based Team Leader program since 2001. The RNC regularly updates so-called team leaders on Bush policy via E-mail.
Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean proudly owns up to copying MoveOn. This spring, the Dean campaign hired a MoveOn employee for three weeks as an online organizing consultant. When MoveOn hosted its first online primary this June (which drew 317,000 voters), the former Vermont governor came in first, with 44 percent of the vote. The primary helped feed a one-week, $3.5 million fund raising boom for Dean, with at least $500,000 from online givers who clicked directly from MoveOn.org to Dean's campaign site.
According to cofounder Blades, MoveOn's agenda for the rest of the year (besides the campaigns against the California recall and Texas redistricting) depends on what issues resonate with members. Since no candidate won a clear majority in that first online primary, MoveOn may host a second one later this year to decide which Democrat to endorse. That might get more attention than even a flying toaster.
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