Dean's army goes offline

Aware that the computer-geek vote will not be enough to elect Howard Dean, the front-runner's supporters are fanning out to organize minorities, blue-collar workers and retirees.

By Farhad Manjoo

Sep 9, 2003 | Steve Chaffin, an attorney who is the unofficial coordinator of presidential candidate Howard Dean's campaign in Ohio, has been working in Democratic politics for about 20 years. He doesn't remember ever seeing a candidate attract the kind of people who come to Dean. "They're all intellectuals," Chaffin says. "They're lawyers, doctors, engineers, very creative people."

Chaffin considers this a generally positive thing, but he worries that because Dean has relied greatly on the Web as a campaign tool, the candidate's message has not been widely received by "blue-collar people" and minorities. This concern, which has popped up repeatedly in the media, is shared by many other Dean supporters, including Richard Hoefer, a San Francisco filmmaker who believes that the campaign has been too "blog-centric." Asked if he thinks there's a homogeneity to Dean's base, Hoefer responds, "You mean whitey?"

In June, when Howard Deam surprised commentators by beating his opponents in the second-quarter fundraising race, it became clear he was using the Internet like no other presidential candidate in history. By building connections with the Web's leading bloggers, the campaign created an online movement around Dean's bid -- and it used the movement to get cash, mainstream media attention, and dominance in the polls. Since then, the Web has been nothing but kind to Dean: The cash has come in faster (the campaign reportedly expects to collect more than $10 million in the third quarter, which ends on Sept. 30), the media has become much more interested, and Dean's poll numbers have skyrocketed.

But is Howard Dean's campaign too wired? Is Dean attracting too many people who hang out on the Web all day -- wealthy, Internet-savvy, mostly white people, including a healthy dose of what the New York Times recently called "the tongue-studded next generation" -- while failing to win over more traditional Democratic constituencies?

Some Dean supporters are starting to think that's the case. But what's remarkable about Dean's grass-roots organizers is that many already seem to realize that it's time to do something about minority outreach; the connected hive of Dean supporters, held together by blogs and hundreds of Yahoo groups, is, in a sense, self-aware, and capable of reacting to the shifting winds of a political campaign.

Online, there's a healthy debate over whether Dean's base really is less diverse than that of the other candidates, or if that's simply a view being advanced by the news media. "In case you haven't noticed, we've entered the 'they're all white' phase of the campaign," Rick Klau, a software executive who runs a blog devoted to the Dean campaign, wrote in response to the Times story. Reporters are eager to find a new angle on Dean, Klau suggested, and "many of them are observing that many of the throngs showing up to hear Dean speak are Caucasian. Uh, ok. Point taken. But as everyone else points out, we've got some time before the primaries. If the articles were pointing out that the missing minorities were attending rallies by one of the other top-tier candidates, I'd be worried."

The campaign itself does seem to think that Dean's lack of support among minorities is a problem, and it says it's trying to address it. In a live chat with readers of Washingtonpost.com on Aug. 27, Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, wrote that the campaign originally had few resources to make a special effort to attract minorities. "We determined that we had to focus on four things -- Iowa, New Hampshire, the Internet and fundraising," he wrote. "For the first six months of this year, that is all we had the resources to do. With the June 30th quarter surge, we have now been able to hire outreach coordinators in the African-American, Hispanic and Asian-America communities as well as others ... We expect you will be able to see significant progress in the next 60 days."

But many Dean supporters aren't waiting for Trippi to start a specific push for minorities -- they're doing it themselves. For their September Meetup -- the monthly, revival-like gatherings Dean fans hold in groups all across the country -- supporters voted to put outreach to minorities and senior citizens at the top of their agenda. At the meetings, they were given Howard Dean informational postcards to hand out to people in local communities; the cards, which include prepaid postage, can be mailed in by people who want to know more about Howard Dean but don't have access to the Internet. Online voting for the October Meetup is open right now, and it appears that minority outreach will again be one of the main topics discussed.

Some Dean supporters are planning an even greater push for minorities. Richard Hoefer, the filmmaker in San Francisco, is part of a small band of "creative professionals" called the Dean Media Team, and he says it's his goal to expand Dean's base beyond people who read and write blogs. Folks in the DMT intend to create slick ads and short videos aimed at attracting people who are being missed by the Dean campaign. The videos will be streamed over the Web, but members of another grass-roots group, DVDs for Dean, will also produce "tons" of physical copies to hand out to anyone who wants them. The campaign "only has so many resources and they have to focus their resources in Iowa and New Hampshire," says Bart Myers, another member of the DMT. "We can help them go beyond the Web and get the message out in other areas."

If Howard Dean's apparent failure to attract minorities indicates a shortcoming of the Web as a tool for creating a winning political campaign, the way his supporters are dealing with the failure points out one of the Web's great strengths: When you've created an online movement, thousands of people who are supporting your goal, it's easy to have them quickly adjust to the needs of the moment. Grass-roots movements are not unusual in presidential politics, but Dean's supporters seem to have a level of organizational, technological and media sophistication that is probably unprecedented; when they discover a problem, they're remarkably nimble in addressing it. Their devotion to Dean ought to scare many of his Democratic opponents -- and it should keep Karl Rove up at night, too.

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