The revolution in campaign affairs

Noam Scheiber has a must-read in The New Republic on the state of the art in primary campaigning. It’s ostensibly a profile of Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager. It’s really about how Trippi has exploited the Internet in revolutionary ways. The key part:

Trippi is racking up a hard count most campaign operatives could only dream of–and without having to make a single phone call, knock on a single door, or send a single piece of direct mail. Every time the suits have heard about the Internet changing politics over the last ten years, their eyes have glazed over. And for good reason. Up until Howard Dean and Joe Trippi came along, the only thing I.T. had done was marginally lower the cost of doing the same things they’d always done. And it wasn’t even clear it did that. But Trippi is doing something radically different…. the Dean supporters are doing the hard work of organizing for him, which means the cost per body is falling like mad. Come to think of it, the campaign is even making money in the process…. Trippi gets a perfect test of this proposition in late June, right in the middle of the $7.6 million push. Dean goes on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and, according to just about every pundit in Washington, falls flat on his face. But the average Dean supporter doesn’t quite see it that way. He sees the same candor and forthrightness that won him over in the first place. And, truth be told, he thinks Tim Russert is a bit of an asshole– constantly trying to trap Dean in contradictions and hypocrisies. Furthermore, he’s annoyed at how dismissive the media is when it comes to a campaign that, after all, he partly owns. Pretty soon, he’s writing e-mails and ponying up more cash, trying to send a message to the people who would tread on his investment.

Decentralization leads to greater ownership, which in turn overcomes the collective action problems that plague all political campaigns. Read the whole piece. The figures Scheiber throws around suggests that the polls in many states don’t matter so much, because the raw number of Dean’s supporters are astonishingly high relative to average primary turnouts [Anything about how this revolution in campaign affairs affects Dean’s standing in the South?–ed. No, which offers a glimmer of hope to his opponents. But just a glimmer]. The thing is, as Scheiber notes, this revolution is confined to primaries, not general elections:

The bad news if you happen to be a Democratic partisan intent on beating George W. Bush is that there’s no obvious way to organize yourself to a general-election victory. Unlike the primary, where the goal is to win over one or two million hard- core partisans, winning a general election requires something on the order of 50 million votes–many from the vast political center. Take the most successful Internet operation in history, raise it an order of magnitude, and still you don’t come anywhere near the number of votes you need. And that’s under ordinary circumstances. The problem grows considerably worse when you consider that your opponent is a president who plans to raise some $200 million and who has spent four years courting his own conservative base. The combination of the two means Bush is likely to have both the money and the political latitude to woo the millions of swing voters he needs to cement his reelection.

Developing…. UPDATE: Jacob Levy has further thoughts.