The Internet's Impact on Politics Is Beginning to Take Hold

This evening, I came home from a reception and panel discussion about the impact of war on families of those in the military. It was a wrenching discussion, in many ways, with descriptions of wives with several children at home and no support network. These families live far from military bases, and the stories of those in the National Guard and Reserves are particularly tough. For many of them, survival has come by building their own networks and communities -- over the Internet, on iVillage. Tens of thousands of military spouses, parents, and grandparents have found that the Internet is a lifeline.

The Internet has transformed all of our lives in profound ways -- how we communicate with each other, how we organize into communities, how we get information and spread rumors and news, how we shop, and how we organize and spend our time. So it is not surprising that the Internet has transformed our politics. But the impact of the Web on politics is just beginning to take hold. Every politics observer these days is struggling to make sense of the remarkable communications revolution and what it will mean for voters, politicians, consultants, interest groups, and the media.

Consider the 2008 presidential campaign. It is in its 37th month. (I count its beginnings at the 2004 Republican presidential convention in New York, when George W. Bush's renomination was rivaled by the spectacle of putative 2008 candidates strutting on the catwalk, already jockeying for position to succeed their own party's president.) We are still months, or at least weeks, from the first actual primary or caucus. But we have already seen the power of the Web. It has transformed fundraising, at least for the Democrats, or at least for some Democrats with broad appeal. The fact that Barack Obama could ascend to the political stratosphere so readily is clearly linked to the Internet's unique ability to transform the excitement he brings to voters into a veritable fundraising machine -- now totaling more than 350,000 individual donors.

Obama has been able to raise money from big donors able to write checks for $2,300, or twice that for a couple. But his average donation is not much more than 50 bucks -- and many of those donors will give two, three, four or more times, in some cases, to their shock, ending up as large donors. A huge number of these online donors are first-time participants in a campaign, not only motivated by their desire for change, but also by the ease of giving to a candidate over the Web. Online donations have been made much easier by the fact that so many Americans now regularly purchase things with their credit cards on Amazon, eBay, or other Web merchants. The same phenomenon has helped lift Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) into a strong financial position in what remains a longshot campaign.

When Gary Hart skyrocketed to national prominence in the 1984 campaign, beating long-time favorite Walter Mondale in the New Hampshire primary and leaving Mondale on the canvas nearly counted out, he too generated massive public excitement. But by the time donors figured out where to send checks, put them in the mail to the Hart campaign office, waited until the checks were opened, endorsed, deposited, and then cleared, it was too late for him to capitalize. Now, motivated donors go on the Web, Google the campaign Website, give their credit card numbers, and give the candidate of their choice instant access to the money.

But even candidates who have not been able to hit Internet donor paydirt realize the Web is now an essential element of campaign community building. All the candidates have Websites, some with elaborate ways of communicating with their supporters; nearly all are trying to build large networks of "friends" on Facebook .

All of this sounds wonderful -- great new tools for building support and creating campaign networks. But the same process of community building also mobilizes ideologically-driven base voters, skewing the political process both to left and right. And it encourages narrowcast communications, focused on groups of like-minded people, moving away from a broader public square, from a dialogue to a monologue.

The online campaign donation process is contributing to the ideological polarization and corrosive partisanship that is characteristic of our times. The technology is wonderful, democratizing, and liberalizing. But it remains to be seen whether it will in the end be more functional than dysfunctional for our political process.

— Norman J. Ornstein, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute