Micah Sifry has been one of those effective, low-key people out there expanding and promoting the use of the internet in the service of democracy. It seems to be working.
"We've been arguing for a while here on techPresident that the candidate
who best used the internet to enable his supporters to join in
co-creating the campaign would have a big edge come November. Now we're
seeing what Isaac Garcia, CEO of Central Desktop, called the rise of the 'long tail of politics':
tremendous metrics as the Obama get-out-the-vote operation goes into
the final stretch. Those numbers include 50,000 new events organized
using myBO in the last three weeks, at least 20,000 neighborhood team
leaders, 1.9 million newly registered voters, and 13.3 million voter
contacts."
We won't know for another 30 hours -- at least -- whether the Obama campaign's organizational drive, much of it online, has had the impact one could reasonably expect. McCain is still out there punching away.
"As best as I can tell, there's little sign of an equivalent field
operation on the GOP side, compared to the last few cycles when the RNC
drove a very effective '72-hour' campaign into the field. If anything,
the McCain campaign has supposedly cut back on its field operations to put more money into a bigger last-minute media buy. Of course, if McCain wins, we'll be wondering if there was more movement on the ground than anyone was aware of."
