Intellectual Property Law

Barack Obama raised an unprecedented amount of money in small, online contributions, and large numbers of people organized on his behalf with the help of social networking tools.
Photo: Associated Press/Chris Carlson

Through a combination of soaring rhetoric, charisma and gritty street-level organizing writ large, Illinois senator Barack Obama finally managed to capture the Democratic nomination for president Tuesday, after a protracted climb to the top of the ticket for more than 16 months.

CNN called the race for him early Tuesday evening based on its projection of the Democratic primary results in South Dakota and the number of superdelegate endorsements he received Tuesday. The networks says the combination puts him over the 2,118 delegates needed to  win the nomination.

"Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with beginning of another," Obama said in a victory speech at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota. "A journey that will bring a new and better day to America. Because of you tonight, I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for the president of the United States of America."

The Tuesday victory is a hard-fought battle that began on the internet last January when both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama announced their bids for the Democratic nomination for president in web videos.

Ever since the internet propelled Howard Dean's campaign to national importance in 2004, observers have expected the web would soon play a pivotal role in electing a president. As Obama makes history by becoming the first African-American presumptive presidential nominee, his campaign is also the first to fulfill that long-anticipated internet promise.  With an enormous internet-driven donor base of 1.5 million people, more than 500,000 of whom have accounts on Obama's social networking website, Obama is the first internet candidate to win mainstream success. His online supporters have created more than 30,000 events to promote his candidacy, some of which are still underway in the last primary states of Montana and South Dakota.

"It's impossible to imagine Barack Obama's rise without the modern methods that his campaign  used to organize itself, particularly around the internet," says Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the non-profit think tank the New Democratic Network. "This really was the most successful campaign of the 21st century."

"This is what happens is when you have a charismatic candidate, and you organize on a scale not seen before," he adds. "Literally, the size and scale of this is unprecedented in American political history, and it wouldn't have been possible without the money, and passion, and support of millions of American people."

The campaign came up with a number of innovations on the internet. It used wikis -- online collaborative software -- to coordinate and churn out precinct captains in both California and Texas. And it created a counter-viral e-mail campaign to combat the anonymous e-mail smears that question his religious faith and patriotism. It set up policy pages that solicited ideas from supporters, and at one point, the campaign solicited letters from supporters over the internet to lobby the undecided superdelegates.

And Obama's campaign constantly updated its YouTube channel to keep its supporters around the country up to speed on his latest speeches.

Obama's campaign spent significant resources on physical offices in battleground states. But those efforts often came to follow the informal infrastructure that his supporters built ahead of time by finding each other through my.barackobama.com and coordinating off-line to campaign for their candidate.

The most obvious area in which it led was online fund-raising. Just under half its record-level of $265 million raised so far came from donations of $200 or less, much of which flowed to the campaign through the internet. The Clinton campaign ended up tweaking its fund-raising approach after Obama's initial successes and began asking supporters for smaller amounts of money in online fund-raising drives following each primary victory.

In contrast to Obama's campaign, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has raised only $90.5 million during the same 2007 and 2008 period. Just over a third of his donations came from the $200-and-under crowd. Forty-two percent of it came through contributions at the maximum $2,000 level. For Obama, just under a quarter of his donations came from $2,000-level donations.

Obama's record fund raising enabled him to out-blast his chief rival through traditional television ads in battleground states during the Democratic primaries, as well as build out the physical infrastructure needed to organize volunteers.

But it was also savvy off-line campaigning that boosted the size of his online cadre of supporters, notes Rosenberg.

"One of the reasons that they have so many donors is that they were able to collect millions and millions of names through their rallies," he says, referring to Obama's stadium-sized political events, one of which took place tonight at the Xcel Energy Center, where the Republican National Convention is scheduled to take place this summer. "It was all part of an ecosystem where they made it clear that they wanted supporters to be at the center of the campaign."

See Also:

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• Obama Supporters Act to Clear FUD