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 Political Communication Tools Used in Presidential Campaigns and National PoliticsMatt DeLucaMattdeluca.gop@gmail.com 
 
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Since the 2000 elections more and more Americans have begun using the Internet for receivingtheir news and political information. As a result, politicians as a whole have begun using theInternet more and more for campaigning and other political operations. Using the Internet allowsfor quicker political communication, data gathering and analysis because in today’s increasinglyconnected world, politicians must stay up to speed - because staying connected with constituentsand voters is a vital aspect of politics and campaigning. The presidency of George W. Bushcreated a fervor within the Democratic base and liberal blogs, and throughout his eight years inoffice, the Democratic base used the Internet to fuel their candidates and platform, and theRepublican Party began to use the Internet. Howard Dean’s ground-up ‘Dean-Machine’ was oneof the first successful voter programs that used the web and Barack Obama took the key elementsfrom that program and has created a successful web system that helped deliver victories in the primary elections. The GOP has used the web to create a GOTV database called Voter Vault andnumerous Web 2.0 tools on John McCain’s main campaign site and the RNC homepage. JohnMcCain’s supposed technological failings have been brought up throughout the 2008 campaignyet has not stopped his campaign from having an Internet presence.Tools such as Twitter became a primary political tool during the primaries when Twittererswould report on GOTV efforts and results. The opinions of Twitters all throughout the primaryelections allowed mash ups to be created to show geo-tagged ‘’tweets’ on a map. Google andTwitter created an application, which allowed one to see where twits were occurring. Twitter hassince proved to be a useful political opinion tool — despite the fact Twitter users are limited to140 characters. Twitter has been shown to be useful in political opinion and breaking news.Anyone can access Twitter and the number of political tweets is quite astounding. The presidential debates were so tweeted about that Twitter was forced to create a live-updating site
 
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for election tweets only. Current.TV also used Twitter to allow user commentary on thePresidential debates in real time. Normal Twitter users can also report quickly on developingnews stories. With a cell phone or web-browser any American can become a reporter breaking anews story. Congressional Republicans used Twitter to tweet about the ‘#dontgo’ movementduring the summer energy crisis over Nancy Pelosi’s decision to close congress over the summer without an energy solution. Digg was used during the RNC and DNC to ask user-submittedquestions to prominent Republicans and Democrats and has been a mainstay in ranking politicalstories. Internet tools such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia along withthe voter databases run by the RNC and DNC are the future of social political tools. This paper will detail the types and usages of web-based political tools that have been created during theBush Administration and their usage by various campaigns in the 2004 and 2008 election cycles.Political Party ToolsOne of the key uses of the Internet is to build databases of voter data and access thatthrough different applications for different purposes. Because data entry can be easily doneautomatically by scanners or by hand more campaigns and political operatives are recognizingthe importance of capturing, storing, analyzing and using voter information. What used to takedays of analyzing can now take minutes by using computers to analyze important information.That data can also be used offline or online for a number of different ways and the usage of thesesystems have become key components of the political system.The Republican National Committee was one of the first to make targeted voter databases a priority in campaigning. They used their existing database information and bought consumer data from 3
rd
parties to improve voter IDs. Then in order to improve targeting the RNC used
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whitewaterwatch

Another very effective tool that is being used more often is Town Hall Teleconferencing that can enable candidates to speak directly to tens of thousands of targeted voters at once, over the phone. The system calls out and invites voters to participate in a live teleconference. They can either join or not. Those who join can listen and/or ask questions of the candidate. Questions can be wide open or screened. Amazingly, the system also tally live polling results. More details can be found here: http://www.orangepoint.net

reply08 / 11 / 2009
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