Executive Summary- Successful Online Campaigning

[ Successful Online Campaigning for National Office: A Focus on the 2008 Presidential Campaign]

{ABSTRACT}

The internet has been an effective tool which has changed every area of the public world, and politics is no exception. In the past 3 decades, there has been a dramatic shift in the way political candidates, particularly presidential candidates, use the internet as a platform for increasing name recognition, gaining political support, fundraising and other purposes. The author proposes that the success of the political website depends on three distinguishing factors- planning, execution and maintenance. The paper begins by tracing the use of political websites in presidential campaigns, starting in 1996, and continuing into the 2008 presidential election. Specifically, the paper will cover the degree to which each website utilized the model of planning, execution and maintenance, and its positive and negative factors which went into the process. It will also go into detail about how branding and graphic design have been incorporated with the recent trend towards social networking, and how that played to Obama’s advantage in the 2008 election.

Introduction and Overview

The greatest goal of democracy is to empower the citizenry to work with its government for the greatest overall good. Until recently, this goal had to be met through the necessary compromise of representative majority, where in many cases; a few would represent many, usually in a manner which was necessarily fitted towards a trustee role rather than a pure delegate format. At bare minimum, there were relatively few instances where the representatives could reliably communicate with their constituents; as with any proportional representation, input would only be as fast as the communication that was available during that time. But now, as with every other area of communication, the face of political communication is changing like never before.

Obama's '47 Million Uninsured' Claim Is False (NewsMax.com)

Obama's '47 Million Uninsured' Claim Is False (NewsMax.com) Reposted for public benefit.

President Barack Obama claimed during his Wednesday night press conference that there are 47 million Americans without health insurance.

A simple check with the U.S. Census Bureau would have told him otherwise.

Obama said: "This is not just about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance."

That assertion conflicts with data in the Census Bureau report "Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007." The report was issued in August 2008 and contains the most up-to-date official data on the number of uninsured in the U.S.

The report discloses that there were 45.65 million people in the U.S. who did not have health insurance in 2007.

However, it also reveals that there were 9.73 million foreigners — foreign-born non-citizens who were in the country in 2007 — included in that number. So the number of uninsured Americans was actually 35.92 million.

And of those, "there were also 9.1 million people making more than $75,000 per year who did not choose to purchase health insurance," CNSNews stated in a report based on the Census Bureau data.

That brings the number of Americans who lack health insurance presumably for financial reasons down less than 27 million.

The Census Bureau report also shows that the number of people without insurance actually went down in 2007 compared to the previous year — from 47 million to 45.65 million — while the number with insurance rose from 249.8 million to 253.4 million.

The next Census Bureau report disclosing health insurance data, with 2008 numbers, is scheduled to be released in August, and could figure in the healthcare reform debate.

Obama's Online Campaign: An In-Depth Report on Successful Social Media

Another in-depth look at the 2008 election, this time with a specific emphasis on Barack Obama’s social networking campaign online. This research project reflects the historical perspective I included in my previous project, but here, specifically emphasizes on what made Obama’s social network camapaigning so effective. Hopefully we can take these lessons and make the most of them in our future attempts to regain political ground as a party.

In the aftermath of the 2008 election, a few things were immediately clear: Barack Obama was to be the next president of the United States, and we as a nation had just entered a new era of political communication- the online age. Obama has been praised far and wide for his online campaign, which raised over half a billion dollars through the Internet alone (Washington Post, November 2008). Yet, beyond being an extremely effective fundraising tool, it was difficult to measure the impacts of Obama’s Internet campaign and its outreach on social networking websites. To examine this, the question arises- what social networking campaigns were employed by Barack Obama’s campaign, and how can they be most effectively measured to determine their impact? To answer this question, we must look at the campaign’s user targeting, branding and message use, and overall penetration in terms of supporter metrics. This allows a complete perspective of the campaign’s intention and planning, adaptation to the nuances of the candidate, and a measure of effectiveness from immediately available numbers.