Howard Dean and the internet campaign

Filed in archive Politics on February 3, 2004

Wired analyzes the failure of the Howard Dean campaign and it's main pundit Joe Trippi.

"The Dean campaign, with Trippi at the helm, had shattered traditional top-down campaign models by allowing its supporters to act on their own. The campaign broke Democratic fund-raising records by collecting $40 million in 2003 from 280,000 individuals (an average contribution of $143).

Dean also mobilized 163,000 individuals to locally organized Meetups and drew millions to the campaign's official and unofficial blogs.

Now, the architect is gone, and the evening talk shows, news reports and major columnists are suggesting that the Internet and Dean will soon become just another historical footnote, like Ross Perot's insurgent campaign in 1992 and the over-hyped Internet companies of the late '90s. "

But it's easy to predict that the next presidential election in US will be broadly influenced by the internet. It might not be the leading media, but without a perfect internet strategy it will be quite impossible to win.