My first reaction to the Ricochet story was admittedly idiosyncratic, whereas Dan Riehl takes a more practical view:
It’s a complex topic, but the Left tends to use new media tactically to generate specific results and win elections, not just nationally – but in states and districts, as well. OTOH some on the Right seem focused on creating, or simply recycling the same old same old, in hopes of creating new stars. There’s a need for both. But I suspect what the Left is doing is more likely to pay off, politically speaking.
I certainly agree, and have witnessed this phenomenon first-hand. I’ve been amazed at the difficulty in the past few weeks of getting conservatives to pay attention to the PA-12 special election. Here is a chance to take a seat away from Nancy Pelosi — to give the Democrats a good punch in the nose — and yet it hasn’t gotten nearly the kind of attention that Scott Brown got four months ago.
Some of us were discussing this Friday evening in Pennsylvania, and various explanations were offered. OK, it’s a congressional election — one of 435 seats — as opposed to a Senate seat. And there is not the kind “41st vote” factor here, as there was in Massachusetts in January. Neverthless, PA-12 is the only actually election (i.e., not just a primary) on Tuesday, and you’d think conservative New Media would be fired up and focused. But they’re not, at least not like they were in January.
It was suggested, in the discussion we had Friday, that perhaps the failure of the Lynch campaign in last month’s FL-19 special election had made people a little gun-shy about getting emotionally invested in PA-12, but that doesn’t make sense. Every election is a different election. FL-19 was a nearly unique situation — Michael Barone’s post-election analysis was insightful — and the demographics and political history of PA-12 are completely different.
If that explanation doesn’t work, what about Bill Russell’s relentless badmouthing of Tim Burns? Russell, who lost to Jack Murtha by 15% in 2008, is disgruntled over not getting the GOP nomination in the PA-12 special election. Russell has ostentatiously refused to endorse Burns in the special election, and Russell’s campaign — he’s still on the ballot in the GOP primary — seems focused entirely on tearing down Burns. (Russell’s spokesman smeared Burns as an “opportunist” in the Pittsburgh paper last week.)
It isn’t hard to imagine that those who supported Russell in 2008 share his disappointment, but the logic of being the anti-Murtha candidate died with Murtha on Feb. 8, and Russell never developed any other message. The “opportunist” smear against Burns is just that, a smear. Burns helped organize the first Tea Party in his community in April 2009 and his congressional candidacy was the result of grassroots supporters encouraging him to run. Yet I fear that Russell has used the connections he made in 2008 to discourage conservative New Media coverage of the Burns campaign.
As troubling as that scenario might be — one man’s vengeful spite damaging an otherwise promising prospect — there’s an even more disturbing possibility. Maybe the inattention to the PA-12 special election indicates that New Media on the Right simply don’t understand what’s at stake here. Maybe conservatives don’t realize that politics is about, y’know, winning elections?
A scary thought. Dan’s point about the Left’s tactical use of New Media stirred up that thought, which has been rattling around in my brain for a few weeks. Maybe the Tea Party phenomenon was a temporary fad, an ephemeral thing. Maybe all those people who turned out at rallies on 9/12 just got bored and lost interest when their activism didn’t yield immediate results. Now they want to go back to what they were doing before — bitching about liberal bias in the MSM, etc. — and so there’s no incentive for conservative New Media to pay attention to the mechanics of electoral politics. Why cover campaigns, if nobody wants to read about campaigns?
Scary thought, I say, because all these pundit projections of Republicans gaining 40 or more House seats in November — enough to recapture a majority — don’t mean squat, if people won’t pay attention to key campaigns this fall. Among the 253 House seats currently held by Democrats, at least 90 are plausibly winnable for the GOP. (See Jim Geraghty’s analysis at National Review.) If getting New Media focused on House campaigns is difficult when there’s only election in the whole country, what will it be like after Labor Day, when there are 90+ key races going on?
Most conservatives already live in Republican-held House districts. The GOP’s biggest New Media challenge for 2010, I believe, is to motivate and mobilize these people as activists, getting them to help out with congressional campaigns in nearby Democratic-held districts, so that Republican challengers in key districts have more volunteers to act as “boots on the ground” in these campaigns. While online fundraising is important, the money will follow if people get fired up about the candidates.
However, unless there is some greater effort to do what Dan Riehl talking about — using New Media “tactically” — I fear that Republican House campaigns will suffer unnecessarily from a shortage of enthusiasm.
