Looking back at the past 18 months, what’s remarkable about the 2008 campaign is how unremarkable it’s actually been when it comes to the use of the Internet. While Patrick Ruffini earlier argued that Barack Obama’s website is boring, it’s been stewing in my mind for months that the entire cycle has been rather ho-hum.

All campaigns, from the presidential level on down, have seemed to be unwilling, or unable, to rewrite the rules of the game when it comes to how technology is used in electoral politics. They have (pardon the word play) been shiftless in producing a paradigm shift. And maybe, after the upheavals of 2004 and 2006, that should be expected.

Looking Back to 2004 & 2006

Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book titled “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” first coined the term paradigm shift to describe the manner in which scientific theory progresses. Kuhn contended that instead of small, incremental advances made at a steady pace, science actually moves forward in big, groundbreaking bursts of progress. Copernicus theorizing that the Earth was in fact not the center of the Universe. Mendel’s beans and the subsequent foundation of the field of genetics. Quantum mechanics, which drastically altered our understanding of Newtonian mechanics (now considered Classical mechanics).

All these revolutions of science brought with them a drastically different way of thinking that helped create a completely new worldview. After the initial period of rapid innovation, that worldview would then stay relatively static for a long period of time until the next disruptive paradigm shift came along. While Kuhn’s theory had its holes, the basic concept proves applicable to areas other than science.

Politics experiences paradigm shifts coupled closely to revolutions in communications technology. The printing press, radio, television, and most recently the Internet, have all dramatically altered the political landscape of their day. The 2004 and 2006 cycles were full of such examples:

• The Dean campaign’s use of an online tool (Meetup.com) to empower supporters to self-organize offline. Meetup.com forced organizers into setting up regularly scheduled monthly meetings, which quickly built a national field program that couldn’t otherwise have been created. While that field program crashed and burned in the snowy fields of Iowa, this first foray into social activism networking set the model for future campaigns in 2006 and 2008.
• Microtargeting and online GOTV tools built by the GOP. Campaigns are about winning more votes than your opponents, and the GOP masterfully used microtargeting, which had previously been limited to the private sector, to target voters likely to vote Republican. The RNC also built the first online phonebanking tools during the 2004 cycle, beating MoveOn.org’s Call for Change program by two years. An activist could get out the vote by staying at home, much like consumers could go shopping online while still in their pajamas.
• Online donations as the main funding engine of a campaign. While the influx of cash into the McCain website after his New Hampshire primary victory in 2000 was a welcome surprise, it wasn’t until Howard Dean in 2003 that campaigns realized they could build their strategy around the expectation of raking in huge amounts of money via small dollar donations through the Web. John Kerry’s general election campaign took Dean’s efforts a step further, and nearly matched the Bush/RNC fundraising machine.
• The rise of the Left’s activist blogosphere. The power of blogging to connect people to each other and affect campaigns drastically altered the political landscape from 2003 to 2006. The Netroots became a thriving community that today holds a news-making annual conference attended by top Democratic leaders. The national blogging infrastructure the Left set up for itself paid off particularly well in 2006, when state-based activist blogs were able to contribute to the Congressional landslide the Democrats experienced that year.
• YouTube and user-generated video. In 2006, George Allen’s Macaca moment changed how candidates behave on the trail, and today even the sitting President is wary of YouTube. That cycle, congressional candidates ventured onto a pre-Google-owned YouTube to speak directly to their supporters, a practice that seems quite normal today.

2008: Honing What Works

The examples above all dramatically changed the nature of how campaigns are waged. Looking to the 2008 cycle, it’s hard to find anything that sticks out as a game changer. When campaigns gear up for the midterms later in 2009, campaigning will most likely look much similar to 2007.

Instead, campaigns this cycle have taken lessons from 2004 and 2006 and built on them. If waging electoral politics is a craft, the staffers of these campaigns have used this cycle to hone their skills. Some examples of the biggest successes:

• MyBarackObama.com: Yes it’s boring, but it’s incredibly effective. Chris Hughes, former Facebooker and current manager of MyBO, has conceded that it’s not much more technically impressive than Facebook was in 2004 (when it was called TheFacebook because the company didn’t yet have the money to purchase the better facebook.com domain). Its strength is based on the fact that the campaign uses it to organize everything. It’s essential to the workings of the campaign and has full buy-in at all levels and from all departments.
• Ron Paul’s Moneybombs: While there will be arguments that these were in fact paradigm shifting events, I’ll point out that since they didn’t even shift the race for the GOP nomination, they can’t be considered as changing the rules of electoral politics. But the Paul campaign should be commended for opening up their contribution data in real-time, which gave their donors more of a feeling of ownership of the campaign. It also helped create the interesting RonPaulGraphs.com.
• Mitt Romney’s Supporter-Created TV Ad: Producing video is incredibly difficult for the average person, so when the Romney campaign put out a call to supporters asking them to create a TV spot for the campaign, the campaign wisely partnered with Yahoo to supply a video editing tool and provided supporters with video clips, audio files, and photos to use for the spot. The winning video was very well done, which would not have been the case if the campaign had not given their supporters a good starting point.
• The Social Network Badge Bar: I first noticed this on the John Edwards site when he announced after Christmas of 2006, and it has since been emulated by seemingly every campaign at every level. Social networks are often misunderstood as tools for organizing. But because a campaign has little control over the application or the data being gathered, social networks are more suited for outreach: reaching supporters who are otherwise unreachable.
• Online Advertising: It’s estimated that the Obama campaign spent nearly $3 million on online search advertising during the first part of this year, and the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and John McCain have also made significant ad buys this cycle. Because online advertising is so metrics-driven, it’s easy for campaigns to calculate ROI on their ad buys. Since they seem to be happy to continue with the ad campaigns, it must be incredibly effective at driving traffic and donations.

Prime Opportunities

The innovations this cycle were extensions of the progress made in the previous two cycles, but they didn’t rock the boat. The question then is: Well, why not? Why wasn’t there that big, monumental change this time around?

The answer to that question could be the subject of another blog post, but for the time being, there are two possible explanations: (1) The 2008 campaigns employed the same staffers who used the 2004 and 2006 campaigns as their proving grounds. They executed what they knew worked and improve upon it, but didn’t look to break the mold. (2) The Internet industry just hasn’t produced a killer technology in recent years that could be used for electoral politics.

The second argument is convenient, but a bit lazy. There are plenty of technologies to leverage:

• APIs: Application programming interfaces allow developers to programatically access site data we access through the web browser. Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, and Google (for several of their properties) all offer open APIs for accessing data beyond their websites. APIs build community and act as an empowering force: something that campaigns and committees should seek to leverage.
• The Open Web: OpenID, OAuth, Microformats, AtomPub, and other open standards all solve one major problem: Social applications behaving as walled gardens. Web 2.0 is focused on services, but the very presence of competing services means that there isn’t enough open flow of data between web apps. While a single campaign adopting Open Web standards doesn’t make much sense (they’ll have few others to interoperate with), a political party or coalition within a party deciding to embrace open standards over closed services would make a huge difference in the way online activism occurs.
• RSS and Atom Feeds: While feedreaders like Google Reader and Bloglines are not yet used by mainstream web users, a campaign which promotes feed technology by creating exclusive feed-only content or valuable issue-based feeds can find a devoted audience, and maybe help propel feedreading to the masses.
• Twitter: Barack Obama may have 50,000 followers, and Bob Barr may tweet for himself, but no campaign has used Twitter to really engage supporters like Web 2.0 celebrities do. Of course, elected members of Congress like John Culberson and Tim Ryan have taken to tweeting from the House floor, and Rep. Culberson set off a mini-scandal in the process. But it seems like Twitter hasn’t really reached its full potential as of yet.

I’m not completely sure that adopting any of these technologies will actually change the way electioneering is waged, but they would open up the doors to some new ways of thinking.

Conclusion

The 2008 cycle, when viewed from a geeky prism, is much like the iPhone 3G. Better, faster, stronger, to be sure. More people will own an iPhone 3G than its predecessor. But the original iPhone is what changed the game. A real web browser, a multi-touch interface, gorgeous graphics. It was a true paradigm shift, and it forced all the other players in the mobile phone industry to follow suit.

In the same vein, the 2008 cycle involves bigger email lists, more online fundraising, better activists, and stronger staffs who really get how to use the Internet effectively. But the paradigm shift happened one and two cycles ago, and that just might be the natural order of things.