How Political Campaign Strategy Works #4

An interesting look at the Dean/Obama 50-state strategy, where the candidate tries to win in all 50 states rather than focusing strictly on “swing states”:

The Dean Legacy

From the article:

Besides a desire to push the party away from a strictly swing-state mentality, Dean and Obama share a commitment to the nuts-and-bolts of grassroots organizing. On the stump Obama is quick to stress his roots as a community organizer and always thanks his precinct captains, who routinely introduce him at campaign events. “Change doesn’t happen from the top down. It happens from the bottom up,” he now says in his stump speech. Obama’s organizing has been greatly enhanced by new technologies like YouTube, Facebook and MySpace (Friendster had just arrived when Dean was running). “We pioneered it and Obama perfected it,” Trippi says. Obama embraced elements of the new politics, hiring the co-founder of Facebook, for example; but other efforts came from the grassroots–just as with the Dean campaign–as supporters organized themselves online and on the ground. The net effect is Obama’s large base of small donors, who are enthusiastic supporters he can tap again and again. Ninety percent of the $28 million he raised online in January, for example, came in donations of $100 or less. Obama has fused a tightknit group of advisers with a mass of ordinary people, creating what Trippi calls “command and control at the top while empowering the bottom to make a difference.”

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