Running for Office: It’s Like A Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner
Sean Tevis’ innovative method of raising internet funds in his venture to oust and replace his current State Representative (basically equivalent to one of our State MPs?) in Kansas is an online comic strip.
When Sean Tevis decided to run for a seat in the Kansas Legislature, he faced a serious problem: money. Local political advisors warned the campaign novice that he would need a war chest of at least $26,000 to compete against his entrenched Republican rival.
Having calculated that if he could get 3000 people to donate $8.34 each, he would reach that target, he created the comic strip to garner attention from potential online donors. He’s sort of a one-man Get Up! campaign.
Apparently, no other candidate for State Representative in Kansas has ever had more than 644 donors, so there was a built-in news narrative if he could make it work. So did it? Well, there’s a bunch of news coverage online, as well as many bloggings.
How many similar efforts are we going to see in election contests in the immediate future, do you think?
H/T to one of my Best Mates on a mailing list (and crossposted on Hoyden About Town)
Have a look here for more info on how this plays out, with (I expect) a large proportion of his donor base. http://www.metafilter.com/73366/Information-Design-Politics-WIN-Hopefully
Sean Tevis posted on that thread a few times (as stevis), updating his immigration position in the process.
Thanks for that link, wilful. Quite fascinating.
I’m not one with expertise on the grassroots of campaigning, but I would imagine that a combination of good-old fashioned door-knocking and an online outreach like this could do wonders for a lot of candidates for local elections.
Somewhat OT…
The cartoon he copies XKCD is a great (geeky) read!
Indeed it is, Fozzy. We have, on occasion, posted panels here to provide LOLs all round.
One thing I did find very interesting on that MeFi thread, wilful, was the number of people who got very upset to not get an immediate response once the donations had racked up, without realising that it was the week before the primaries for that district, so that he was no doubt out and about knocking on doors and shaking hands and all that stuff to get out the vote before coming home to snatch some brief sleep. It’s understandable that monitoring internet threads wouldn’t have been his top priority at the time (although at some time a quick note along the lines of *wow - look at those funds - thank you all so much and will update my blog with details after the primaries* would have soothed oh so many ruffled feathers).
I can imagine that getting the balance right between face to face voting-base stuff and online fund-raising stuff is ultimately going to be the challenge that all such campaigns will face.