April 7, 1999

Web Sites for White House Race Show Lessons Learned

By REBECCA FAIRLEY RANEY

n any page of Vice President Al Gore's new campaign Web site, the first words to show up in the browser window are "Get Involved." The opportunity to subscribe to the campaign's electronic newsletter is generally only one or two clicks away at any time. And throughout the site, users are asked for their opinions.

Like most of the Web sites of potential Presidential candidates, Gore's site, unveiled in Washington on Tuesday, subscribes to the latest theory in online campaigning: use the Internet to build support, one volunteer at a time. Political strategists see the Internet as a way to bring back the contact with individual voters that has been lost in the era of television campaigning.

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"I think we're leaving the age of television," said Michael Cornfield, an associate research professor at George Washington University. "I think we will see some grass-roots activity this year."

The Steve Forbes site offers visitors the chance to be an "e-precinct leader," recruiting volunteers and contributors. Former Vice President Dan Quayle's site offers "Quayle Net," an electronic mailing list designed to keep supporters up-to-date on campaign news. Pat Buchanan is re-enlisting his "Internet Brigade."

The experience of the 1998 campaigns produced the current tenets of online campaigning. The Internet is considered to have limited potential to sway voters in the same way that broadcast media like television does, because voters must already be highly interested to seek out campaign sites. However, campaigns that use e-mail to organize supporters could benefit the most from the medium.

Strategists for the Forbes campaign plan to rely heavily on an Internet presence.

"It's a key component of our strategy," said Bill Dal Col, the campaign manager. "What television was to John Kennedy, the Internet will be to Steve Forbes."

To shape its Internet strategy, the Forbes campaign hired Rick Segal, whose background is in electronic commerce, not politics. He speaks in the language of Internet business, about one-to-one marketing and chat, in keeping with the idea of selling products by driving Internet buzz. But to Segal, this type of buzz has a higher purpose.

"The Internet is going to reconnect citizens to the process," he said. "We're going to get people in the game."

Gore's site offers interaction and technological sorcery to promote the Vice President's image as a computer-savvy candidate.

In the "Town Hall" section, the candidate will post answers to two questions a day posed by site visitors. Sophisticated users who check the underlying source code for the site's home page will find a message from Gore and an invitation to Web developers to help build the site.

Roger Salazar, a campaign spokesman, said the Web site was designed to reflect the growth of the Internet as a medium to convey political messages. "We think our Web site is the most comprehensive, the most interactive," he said.

Observers agree that at this early stage in the Presidential campaigns, the online objectives should be to establish a presence and build supporters, and that most campaigns have fulfilled those objectives.

"Most of them are very solid," said Jonah Seiger, co-founder of Mindshare Internet Campaigns, a consulting firm in Washington. "We are seeing what we expected to see. The candidate that most effectively integrates the Net into the overall strategy will have the edge in this primary."

To Seiger and to several others who watch campaign Web sites, the weakest Internet presence is that of George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas, who has set up an exploratory committee but has not declared his candidacy. The site is reminiscent of the "electronic brochures" of the 1996 campaigns which gave little more than candidate speeches and biographies. It offers no opportunity for people to get involved in supporting Bush.

"Bush, I think, is missing an opportunity," Seiger said. "His site is amateurish. I think it's interesting in a candidate who is a front-runner and seeking support among the high-tech community."

Even though the strategists are touting the Internet's potential to spur a movement in grass-roots campaigning, they recognize that this theory is untested.

The thinking about grass-roots campaigning was largely shaped last year by the experience of Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota. With a total campaign budget of $500,000, and up against opponents who had more than $15 million combined, the Ventura campaign organized rallies across the state and kept in touch with supporters via e-mail.

The claim by Phil Madsen, who ran Ventura's online campaign, that the election would not have been won without the Internet created a great deal of controversy, but now few campaigns appear willing to ignore the Internet's organizing potential.

"You can build it, but can it work in the absence of a compelling character?" Seiger said. "The jury's still out on that."

Cornfield, as research director of the Democracy Online Project financed by the Pew Research Center, hopes to measure the effectiveness of sites in fostering grass-roots organization.

"We don't know how well any of these will work until we know how many volunteers they're getting and how much money they're raising online," he said.

Even so, despite its untested status, the Forbes campaign, for one, is placing its bets on the Internet.

"The political oddsmakers don't have a calculus on this," Segal said. "We're going to make history."

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Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.

• Vice President Al Gore's campaign Web site

• Steve Forbes campaign site

• Former Vice President Dan Quayle's campaign site

• Pat Buchanan campaign site

• Texas Governor George W. Bush's exploratory committee site

• Jesse Ventura Volunteer Committee

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Rebecca Fairley Raney at rfr@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.

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