The Power of Political Campaigning on the Wireless Internet

With the 2012 presidential election in the U.S. on the way, many people expect wireless Internet and similar services to play an even bigger role in political campaigns than they did in 2008. Just as constant access to Internet service is facilitating commerce, social life, and making it easier to do many things that were once tedious and annoying, wireless Internet service has largely revolutionized political organizing and campaigning and will be an important force on both sides of the coming presidential campaign for several important reasons.

At first, many seasoned political professionals saw the Internet as a source of fundraising more than anything else. The political left in the U.S. was the first major group in the country to capitalize on this potential, raising massive amounts of money through this medium in the 2004 and 2006 elections. However, to many people who had been involved in early Internet efforts, the Democratic party infrastructure saw the so-called "netroots" as a cash machine more than a force that had to be reckoned with. However, just around the time that social networking was making itself into a force on the Internet, prominent personalities in the "netroots" realized that they could do more over the Internet other than raise money for their preferred candidates. Internet organizing efforts instead began to focus on "getting out the vote," writing letters to the editor, and many of the traditional activities of political campaigns.

Another place where wireless Internet service has irreparably changed the political scene is in the "tracking" function of many political campaigns. Since the growth of the modern media age, signaled even before the growth of the Internet by 24-hour cable television news networks, a key role of political campaign researchers has been "tracking" opposition candidates. Basically, at every public appearance of the opposing candidate, you can count on someone from the opposing campaign being there with a video camera ready to capture every misstatement or even grimace to turn into some sort of negative TV ad. However, the proliferation of mobile Internet service has eliminated the last major obstacle to comprehensive tracking of opposition candidates. In the past, tracking was limited by the reach of video lenses and microphones, along with campaign staffers from the opposing team who would strategically place themselves in front of trackers' video cameras. Now, candidates can be sure that every time they do something stupid, somebody in the audience, whether they are affiliated with the opposing team or not, has already used their mobile phone to record it. These days, there is truly no safe place for a gaffe-prone political candidate.

Campaigns have also become increasingly adroit at using Twitter, blogs, and other Internet-friendly services to get out press releases and other information about their campaigns and those of their opposition. With so much time before the 2012 presidential election, it will be interesting to see what as-yet-undeveloped Internet applications come to play a major role in who winds up being the next president of the United States.

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