Problems with the GOP

Thanks to a pesky mid-term, I’ve been out of the loop and completely missed the buzz over the past week about the GOP’s lack of web 2.0. This is covered in my thesis topic (I’m writing from the perspective of online activism), and I’ve spent the past three months agonizing over finding research. Suddenly, everyone is talking about it. Since I’m never one to miss a party, I have to share my thoughts.

I honestly believe this comes down to a change in the foundation of communications. The issue is who controls the message. I’ve mentioned this before, but our comm models are changing. There’s no longer one sender transmitting information to numerous receivers. There are multitudes of senders transmitting to each other. The sender/receiver function is largely interchangeable now. If there’s one thing the PR world loves, it’s control. This is a fundamental change in the way we operate, and it’s encountering massive resistance from the establishment. Very few practitioners are embracing this perspective. It’s largely coming from the tech people, who don’t always understand the ways of marcom.

Why is this relevant to the issue of the Republican Party and Web 2.0? The GOP is the main example of this greater issue in the communications field. Of course the pundits don’t really care about this since their main goals are getting the candidate elected, the bill passed or the party in power. However, marcom blogs have been murmuring about the control issue for a while, but it is just now gaining traction because the election is coming up.

While I don’t believe this is the death knell of the Republican party, if we’re still debating this in 2010 or 2012, we will be in serious trouble. If the tech predictors are correct, social networking will be much more integrated into our lives and the problems of metrics and converting online buzz to offline action will hopefully be resolved. The Facebook team is currently hard at work solving this problem.

This also shows that we’ve reached a point where online campaigns aren’t just bonus tactics to recruit those web-savvy kids and computer geeks. We need to start viewing the web as a strategy and not a tactic in the larger campaign.

Think about the statistics. Professor Graf covered this topic in his 2004 Political Influentials Online report and Pew released further data on the topic from the 2006 Election. While 2.0 activities really only affect about 7% of US voters, these people make up about 70% of the opinion leaders, mavens, and influentials. This is a critical group of people to reach, and they like the web. If the GOP does not reach out to this group, they are breaking one of the fundamental rules of communications: identify your opinion leaders and reach out to them through their preferred channels.

The youth vote will also play an important role in future elections. In both 2004 and 2006, more young people started to vote, yet the GOP really did little to attract them (I speak from experience on this one). In 2008, first-time voters will not remember a life without the Internet. The average 18-year-old would have started kindergarten in 1995 or 1996. To them, the Internet is as much as a part of life as the television is to the Boomers. My family didn’t get dial-up AOL until 1996 when I was a freshman in high school, and I can barely remember life before the web. These kids simply can’t fathom it, and messages need to be integrated to successfully reach them.

Why are the Gen Nexers so important? This is where the top-down approach really hurts the GOP. While the under-35 crowd really doesn’t contribute financially to the party, they are the foot soldiers. Who mans the phonebanks and canvasses? Gen Nex is the most media-savvy generation to date. They demand messages that are tailored to them. Come November 2008, the GOP may have more money because of fundraising and direct mail, but if they can’t get voters to the polls, what’s the point? Furthermore if the youth vote continues to grow, these votes are going to the Democrats. It’s a completely different reality to have a population of young people who consider themselves Democrats, than it is to have a population of young people who vote Democrat. The GOP needs to study the business world and start reaching out not only to the college and young adults, but the tween crowd.

However, this change needs to come from the top. Look at who is in charge of the Democrats. Howard Dean understands these strategies, and they’ve devoted resources whole-heartedly. If the GOP has done it, it’s with a begrudging, “only if we have to” attitude. Supporters sense that.

In addition to the control issue, I think that there’s a different culture on the left than on the right. New media strategies appeal to the far-left and the far-right. The Democrats have encouraged these movements, as underdog innovators. They’ve embraced groups like MoveOn, TrueMajority and Democratic Underground. The GOP, on the other hand, has largely squelched them. In full disclosure, this comes from a disgruntled conservative activist, who’s very angry at the Republican Party right now, but what do we have in terms of netroots? I’ve spent months researching web sites, and all we have is Free Republic.  When was the last time that Freepers were taken seriously? The core issue here is that the Dems have allowed their activist wing a seat at the leadership table, while the GOP has shunned us.

What we are successful at doing is blogging and creating personalities. Alexa rankings of political web sites shows that the top right-leaning sites are blogs or pundit home pages. We have the blogosphere covered, but what does that do? We’re great at discussing things, linking to each other and creating pretty banners to put on our blogs, but how effective is this at transforming the party into something that modern voters respect? We’ve built an intelligentsia but lost the base.