As Voters Log On, So Must Politicians

Most campaigns didn't use the Web effectively, but they'll need to get Web-savvy for the next election, experts say.

Jennifer O'Neill, Medill News Service

WASHINGTON, D.C.-- Political candidates lag behind most other people and professions in exploiting the Internet to do their job, say campaign experts.

"The Internet is to this election what television was in 1952," says Lee Rainie, former chief of staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. "Internet campaigning is still an afterthought for candidates." Now director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Rainie was among panelists speaking on the topic recently at the National Press Club.

Many politicians are uncomfortable with the technology because they haven't grown up with it, Rainie suggests. "And if their race isn't competitive, they don't feel they need to work that hard to learn how to use it for the campaign," he adds.

Dan Schnur, director of communications for Senator John McCain's presidential Campaign, agrees.

"While there's been a great deal of Internet growth, there's also been a great deal of groping around as politicians figure out how to use this great new toy," Schnur says.

The public, however, is using the Web, and panelists say candidates are missing out on that audience. According to Rainie, 312 million people got campaign information from the Web in the last election, and 13 million say the Internet was important to their decision.

"There was a more than four-fold increase from the last presidential election to now, in adults who got information on politics online," he adds.

Campaigns Are Getting Wired

But if politicians didn't figure it out this time around, in the next election Netizens can expect to be courted for votes.

"In the future, candidates will start engaging voters online, so citizens will be engaged more and the audience will grow," Rainie says. "On the provider end, the politicians will get more sophisticated about campaigning in cyberspace. The technology will be better and candidates will be offering more features on their sites."

Campaign supporters can use technology to find others sharing their views, Rainie says, citing the usefulness of e-mail in coordinating the Million Mom March.

"By 2004 we expect that the Internet will replace newspapers as the way people get political information," says W. Russell Neuman, a fellow in media technology at the University of Michigan.

So political sites and campaign sites need to improve by then, advises Steven M. Schneider, an editor with Netelection.org.

"If a site is going to help a candidate, it has to help the voters," Schneider says. "It's not good enough to just have a site, the site has to address the information people are looking for. I'm not sure that standard of merely having a Web site will be good enough in the next election."

Fifty-six percent of congressional candidates had campaign Web sites in 2000, according to Schneider. But few of those sites maximized the technology available to reach and engage voters.

Ex-Tech Exec Used Net

Recently elected Washington Senator Maria Cantwell is an exception. The former RealNetworks executive successfully used the Internet to reach voters.

Cantwell's campaign relied on Internet communications to distribute information and nudge voters, says John Beezer, Internet director of Cantwell2000.com. It ran listservs to reach voters through e-mail and posted in-depth voting record comparisons on the site, he says.

Through a measure the campaign termed "vote without leaving your desk," it coordinated plans intended to motivate voters to register and file absentee ballots online.

"We wanted to make it as easy as possible for people--even lazy people--to get involved. The idea was that if you're lazy, we'll meet you halfway," Beezer adds.

"We did this because we knew it was the way of the future and we wanted to move closer to it," he says. "Politics hasn't yet caught up with the Internet and isn't in a hurry to catch up."