Howard Dean: The Scream Heard Around the World

by Sheldon Rampton

Vermont governor Howard Dean only won a single state, his own, in his campaign to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. Nevertheless, his campaign was remarkable for its extensive use of the Internet to reach out to its supporters. Dean and his staff frequently "blogged" while on the campaign trail and even delegated important campaign-related decisions to the outcomes of polls conducted on his Web site. By soliciting contributions online, mostly in small donations from individuals, the campaign shattered previous fundraising records for the Democratic presidential primary. Dean has thus been credited with being the first national candidate to play to the strengths of the Internet, in particular by engaging the American public directly in the political process.

Dean began his bid for president as a long shot with few volunteers and little money. Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, notes that as late as January 2003 "the Dean campaign was still squirreled away in a cramped, 1,000-square-foot second-story office above the dark Vermont Pub and Brewery. There were six people - seven if you counted the governor - working for Dean for America, most of whom had been longtime aides in the governor's office."

"[O]ne year before the Iowa primary, while the other campaigns had built sophisticated political machines, raised war chests of millions of dollars, and compiled computerized lists of potential supporters in key states, the Dean campaign had none of these things, had raised only $315,000, and had spent two-thirds of it just remaining on life support," Trippi continues. "There was a computer in the Dean headquarters - and a relative of the governor's had set up an early Web site - but it wasn't even turned on. They had gathered about 9,000 names of 'Friends of Howard,' people who had, at one time or another, told the governor that they might be interested in helping if he ever decided to seek higher office. . . . But instead of being readily accessible for sorting on a computer database, these names, along with names of thousands of other potential supporters, were scrawled on business cards, contact sheets, and scraps of paper and stuffed in a few shoeboxes - not even one shoebox for each state. . . . In most polls, his 'support' was less than the margin of error of the poll: 2 percent here, 1 percent there. When I arrived in January, Dean had been campaigning in Iowa by himself for months, and yet he was tied there with the Rev. Al Sharpton at 2 percent, badly trailing the 'serious candidates': Gephardt, Lieberman, Kerry, and Edwards."

In Trippi's memoir of the campaign, titled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, he writes that Dean's greatest asset was "the candidate's refreshing honesty and lack of political guile, and the sameness of the other candidates," which "all gave Dean the whiff of a true insurgent. The challenge was finding some way to fast-forward the usual campaign building and, at the same time, skip over the dismissive TV media and appeal directly to the American people. . . . So right away we could see that our only hope was to decentralize the campaign, ease control away from the candidate and his handlers in Vermont (myself included), and let the momentum and the decision making come from the people - stop trying to control the river . . . just open the floodgates and see where the current took us. . . . Like someone whose entire life has been building to this point, I knew without looking what our only hope would be: the Internet."

Dean began his campaign by emphasizing health care and fiscal responsibility. However, his opposition to the U.S. plan to invade Iraq quickly eclipsed other issues, resonating with disillusioned Democrats. Harnessing the burgeoning anti-war movement's momentum, the campaign built an impressive online presence.

Meet Me in Meatspace

One of the first innovations that moved the campaign into motion was the Meetup.com Web site, which the campaign used to organize "Howard Dean Meetup Days" around the country on the first Wednesday of every month.

Meetup.com is a commercially operated online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world. It allows members to find and join groups unified by a common interest, such as politics, books, games, movies, health, pets, careers or hobbies. It operates as a free service; users enter their zip code and the topic they want to meet about, and the Web site helps them arrange a place and time to meet. Its primary revenue comes from restaurants and other facilities that pay $29 a month to be listed on the site as possible meeting venues. Participants vote where to hold a meeting, and venues pay a finder's fee if their establishment is chosen.

Meetup.com was founded in 2000 by Scott Heiferman, Matt Meeker and Peter Kamali. "The primary inspiration was the book Bowling Alone, which is by Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam about the decline of community in America and how people don't know their neighbors anymore," Heiferman explained. "The Internet does a number of wonderful things, but it treats geography as irrelevant. We still live in a world where the local level is extremely important. . . . We are providing a service that revitalizes the Internet for local communities."

"The founders of the company knew people were staying in front of their computers, DVD players and TVs more and more, and losing personal connections," explained Meetup vice president Myles Weissleder. "After 9/11, they started thinking they could help do something positive in the world by having people reconnect - not with people in chatrooms across the globe - but in their own communities."

Meetup's founders did not see political organizing as a particular focus for the Web site, but Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, who has worked for dot-com companies as well as political candidates, quickly grasped its potential. "On my very first day in the Dean campaign headquarters," Trippi recalls, "I offered up the closest thing I had to a strategy: 'We need to put a link to this web site, Meetup.com, on our campaign web site."

Trippi says he noticed Meetup.com because although Dean was "dead last among the Democratic candidates in almost every other meaningful measurement," he actually had more supporters on Meetup.com - 432 - than any of the other candidates. "After we put Meetup on the web site, I checked back, and suddenly there were 2,700 people who wanted to meet up for Dean. The number had taken one of those exponential leaps - what would turn out to be the first of many. The second-highest candidate, Kerry, had only gone up to 330 names. . . . And this burst didn't come from the campaign buying a TV spot or scheduling speeches - in fact, this wasn't the campaign at all. This was the people taking over."

Even with 2,700 members, however, Meetup had only begun to show its potential for political organizing. "Back then, the leading group on the site was a club for witches," reported Wired magazine's Gary Wolf. "Zephyr Teachout, Dean's director of Internet outreach, describes sitting across from campaign manager Joe Trippi in the early weeks and hitting Refresh again and again on her Web browser. 'I was obsessed with beating Witches,' she says. 'Witches had 15,000 members, and we had 3,000. I wanted first place.'"

"We fell into this by accident," Dean said later. "I wish I could tell you we were smart enough to figure this out. But the community taught us. They seized the initiative through Meetup. They built our organization for us before we had an organization." Dean's first personal realization of Meetup's potential occurred when he attended a New York City meetup on March 5, 2003 where he found hundreds of enthusiastic supporters waiting to greet him. "I've never seen anything like that, with no advance people, totally self-organized by a bunch of citizens," says Trippi. "It was a really great moment."

By March 2003, Dean's following on Meetup.com included 5,000 members, and the numbers grew rapidly from there. "His rivals grudgingly concede that Dean … has clearly tapped into something," the Washington Post reported in June 2003. "He is attracting the largest crowds of the nine Democratic contenders - which his staff attributes almost entirely to his campaign's Internet reach. His supporters arguably are the most intense for this early in the process, tens of thousands of them self-organizing in about 300 cities once a month." By the time Dean suspended his Presidential campaign in February 2004, there were more than 180,000 supporters signed up via Meetup worldwide.

After John Kerry and John Edwards emerged as the first- and second-place contenders in the January Ohio primary, the number of Meetups for Kerry and Edwards supporters spiked up dramatically. "Registrations for Edwards rose 44 percent to 3,949 people, up from 2,751. Kerry's registrations rose 22 percent to 22,076, up from 18,140," reported the National Journal.

Continuous Feedback

In addition to helping spread the campaign's message, the Internet served as a system through which the campaign received continuous advice from Dean supporters. "One of the simple things was we had signs up on our site," Trippi says. "You know, . . . 'Iowa for Dean,' 'Another New Hampshire voter for Dean' - that people could download. We put up all 50 states. And the first mention on the blog was, 'Hey, you forgot Puerto Rico. You screwed up.' And we immediately realized that, yeah, Puerto Rico votes for Democratic nominations, so we put up a 'Puerto Rico for Dean' sign within a minute or two and got a protest from a guy in London saying that he was an American abroad who was going to vote in the presidential and we didn't have an 'Americans abroad for Dean' sign. So we put that up immediately, and the thank-you came from Spain. All this happened in a 10-minute part of time that was an amazing exchange between us and our supporters, and they saw the mistakes we made and we plugged them."

The campaign even developed its own software, including Get Local, a program that let supporters organize local events independent of the campaign; DeanLink, a version of Friendster for the Dean campaign; and DeanSpace, a software package that allowed the many disparate, unofficial Dean Web sites to communicate directly with one another and also with the campaign. The campaign also used an innovative approach to keeping anti-Dean flames off Dean blogs, called "Troll Goal": "Whenever a troll flames a Dean blog, a Dean booster donates more money," explained Wall Street Journal reporter Lee Gomes. "The troll realizes he is only helping the candidate, and stops."

At the peak of the campaign, Dean for America employed three full-time programmers, plus a database team and more than 100 volunteers working on open source Dean-related software projects. The software, explained the New York Times, "allows any Dean Web site to reprint another's stories, images and campaign feed automatically, as if they have a collective consciousness. It also will provide a 'dashboard' for the people in Burlington, where the campaign can track patterns on its unofficial sites and observe which content is most popular." After the campaign ended, some of the programmers involved in developing software for Dean went on to develop CivicSpace Labs, which has developed an open source software package intended to serve as a powerful and easy-to-use grassroots organizing toolkit for people wanting to organize campaigns and connect with like-minded activists.

As the Washington Post noted, "experts also credit his campaign with developing savvy online fundraisers - essentially online telethons that posted their goals alongside urgent deadlines and icons counting the donations as they came in. It was a simple idea, employed by any number of public TV stations. But it was a campaign innovation, allowing Dean to turn otherwise mundane fundraising pitches into a high-tech call to arms. Experts said it was a significant improvement from how candidates had previously asked for money online - usually, by simply urging supporters to send a check sometime before the next election."

By the fall of 2003, the Dean campaign ranked first among the Democratic contenders in the raise to race funds. Its success at Internet fundraising and grassroots organizing even impressed Larry Purpuro, who organized the Republican Party's year 2000 online initiative, the e.GOP Project. Although Republicans out-hustled Democrats online in the 2000 election cycle, Purpuro said, the Dean and other efforts by groups such as MoveOn showed that the tide had shifted and Democrats were "ahead in the game. . . . Left of center organizations are showing more energy, innovation and more strength in numbers."

Defeat in Iowa

"Howard Dean had the best-funded, best-publicized bid to be the Democratic nominee; he was so widely understood to be in the lead that the inevitability of his victory was a broad topic of discussion," observed Internet consultant and writer Clay Shirky. Nevertheless, his campaign suffered a devastating blow in the Iowa caucuses, which represented the first votes cast in primary season. According to polls, Dean had been a strong contender in Iowa in the weeks leading up to the primary, but he actually finished third in Iowa, trailing behind John Kerry and John Edwards.

At a post-caucus rally in Iowa, Dean gave an animated speech intended to cheer up his supporters. For television audiences, however, the speech came across as loud, peculiar, and unpresidential. It became known as "Dean's scream," driving his poll numbers down and contributing to his losses in subsequent primaries.

After Dean's defeat, some people compared his campaign to the failed dot-com investors' bubble of the late 1990s. Shirky, who like many other observers was surprised by his loss, wondered if the campaign had actually been hurt by it use of the Internet, arguing, "Dean has accidentally created a movement (where what counts is believing) instead of a campaign (where what counts is voting)."

In a subsequent essay, Shirky argues that the Dean campaign's seeming lead was actually a "mirage" from the beginning. "We talked ourselves, but not the voters, into believing," he writes. "And I think the way the campaign was organized helped inflate and sustain that bubble of belief, right up to the moment that the voters arrived. . . . Dean's campaign was never actually successful. It did many of the things successful campaigns do, of course - got press and raised money and excited people and even got potential voters to aver to campaign workers and pollsters that they would vote for him when the time came. When the time came, however, they didn't. The campaign never succeeded at making Howard Dean the first choice of any group of voters he faced."

Campaign manager Trippi, however, believes that the remarkable thing was not that it failed but that it ever got as far as it did. "This was not a dot com crash," he says. "It was a dot com miracle. We started last January with almost no money and 436 known supporters."

The Dean campaign, he says, was "the opening salvo in a revolution, the sound of hundreds of thousands of Americans turning off their televisions and embracing the only form of technology that has allowed them to be involved again, to gain control of a process that alienated them decades ago. . . . [T]his revolution will not be satisfied with overthrowing a corrupt and unresponsive political system. It won't stop at remaking politics. And it won't pay attention to national borders. . . . It's the story of how to engage those Americans in a real dialogue, how to reach them where they live, how to stop selling to them and start listening to them, how to make better use of the most revolutionary idea to come along since the first man learned to light a fire. No, I'm not talking about the Internet. Or computers. Or telecommunications. I'm talking about democracy."