Republicans prefer parties.  I actually found this myself among Democratic voters in 2004 when I was running a Voter ID program for Wes Clark in Washington State.  People signed up to do the calls willingly enough, but 3 out of 4 didn't do them.  I know I took from the experience that people needed more than the opportunity to volunteer, but needed the comraderie of having done so. Other campaign must have gotten better about providing those rewards.  I'd be curious to know what they did.

I think it has a lot to do with feeling disenfranchised and out of power.  During the last years of the Clinton Presidency, FreeRepublic was a large and well-trafficked website (for its time), driven in large part by right wingers who felt disenfranchised from the Clinton Presidency.

Once Bush won, and especially once Bush started pushing the Iraq war, the feelings of disenfranchisement among progressives were created.   Unlike the the Freepers in the late 90's, we didn't even have COngress . And we had a President who openly dissed progressives as part of his divide and conquer 51% strategy.  Those feelings of disenfranchisment, that there was no significant voice anywhere in government that represented your views, and also that you have a media that more and more frequently was failing to represent your views, led to the explosion of the Progressive blogosphere.  

The prgoressive blogosphere is now strong enough to transcend the disenfrachiment that led to its creation, Just like Talk Radio survived having a Republican president, and even grew, the progressive blogosphere will survive and grow with a Democratic President.  It is far too strong to kill.

On an individual basis, most Republicans are very nice people, and are just as progressive as Dems, except for a couple of hot-buttons.

If you were one of those Republicans, would you want to associate yourself with people whose spokesmen are Rush, O'Reilly, Coulter, and Robertson? Why would you want to toss money in that direction? Most of your values are being reflected by the Democrats, anyhoo.

"William Beutler, a smart right-winger who has been..."

Oxymoron.

so they don't depend so heavily on the net. Rush Limbaugh on the radio, Fox News on TV. Progressives and Dems have nothing really comparable.  Also our actual experience of being effective through online action -- the Dean explosion, the 2006 elections, MoveOn actions -- has cemented the relationship.

The right wing's online 'victories' consist solely of scalp collections: Dan Rather, Eason Jordan. Meanwhile, their party has collapsed through the effects of reality bigger than RedState.

There's also the actual structure of the Republican Party to take into account: Its funding and direction is very top-down. The local committees take direction from the state party, and those take direction from the national party to a much greater degree than among Dems.  So the unwillingness to trust their base is quite real, and will need to be overcome -- probably by a successful candidate rather than the party itself, on the Dean model.

Interesting to see the Bushies' analysis of things. There are a couple problems with Comment #2's take: (1) the momentum for Progressives started during Monicagate; the wingnut sites generated more hits, but a loosely collaborative set of sites quickly established themselves. Salon.com also was an important player--it exposed various hypocracies and  its bulletin boards were a breeding ground for participatory journalism (Bush & the national guard) and future bloggers like TBogg. (2) The structure of the right wing blogosphere is less participatory and more hierarchical and will remain so unless there emerges some movement to wrest control of the Right or at least the GOP from the Religious Right and the neocons. It's important to remember that the conservative Braintrust consists largely of people who have been a round since the 60s and are becoming quite elderly. The younger generation are  zealots with no real ideas of their own, but a dangerous amount of energy and authoritarianism. A lot of bad things can still emerge from the Right and further threaten our democracy. OTOH, the intellectual vacuum creates an opportunity for new forces to emerge. The less lockstep elements of the Evangelical movement might be the beginning of one group that fills this void. (3) Whether they are in power or not, the Right acts like an embattled minority. That behavior won't change. It was enough to fortify a movement in the 90s, but it can't grow a movement that has lost sway with people outside of its core group. The Right needs new blood to really mobilize the blogosphere and it will require new ideas and people and some openness to participation or--and this should worry us--a new threat that somehow energizes the authoritarian structure that remains.

they are there if you look for em and they have a very very private way of going about their business.  one such firm is campaign solutions located in alexandria virginia run by rebecca donatelli.  check out their client list, especially for congress....

If one takes the talk of the authoritarian personality seriously, it has a lot of implications for the republican's behavior on the web.  As followers who seek out strong authority figures, they don't use the web the way we do.  And at this point in the election cycle, where there is no clearly annointed leader, they do not know who to follow.  They may have preferences among McCain, Romney, etc., but they do not see their role to participate in choosing who should lead.  They are waiting to be told who to follow.  Hence their contributions to the repubs at this point are much lower.

are mostly morons.  The stupidity of the right-wingers today is just absolutely overwhelming.  Intelligent, high-tech persons are today overwhelmingly democratic.

Don't think that the Republican system isn't there. It's just a very closed system, with a different set of tools versus a very open system for progressives.

And remember that Republicans have extraordinarily effective ways of doing organizing through prayer groups, fundamentalist churches, local chambers of commerce, and robust local party organizations.

There is an incredible amount of messaging that gets out through forwarded emails, that are going to a local list of friends which constantly criticize Democrats, the liberal media, Hollywood, and gays, while supporting the troops and the President, and reminding us constantly that Muslims want to kill us all.

Republican fund-raising, by contrast, still seems extraordinarily wedded to direct mail, which has relatively high costs compared to the returns.

I guess it depends.  Are we just talking about raising money here?  Self organizing?  Media manipulation?

LINK

It also underscores earlier observations that Republicans don't have an online game like the Democrats. The reason for that probably has a lot to do with the fact that in 2004 there was no Republican scrum and hence no proving ground for online Republican strategists.

In 2004 there was indeed a Republican scrum, Arlen Specter vs. Pat Toomey.

I had moved to Pennsylvania right after the 2004 elections and had a chance to observe the Republican PA blogosphere.  Locally, they were light-years ahead of anything we had at that point, at least as far as manipulating local media goes.

They had PoliticsPA and GrassrootsPA, two sites that were far more effective than anything Democrats had at the local level.

Toomey had a TON of grassroots support in the state -- it was very much like Lamont/Lieberman in CT last year.

But they never really DID anything with it.  I certainly don't recall the Toomey campaign utlizing any of the tools available to them at the time.  Jerome concured:

But Conservatives shouldn't blame Bush for Specter's winning, a campaign should expect it's opponent to use every piece of its arsenal.  No, the reason why Toomey lost is that his own campaign blew it--they didn't use their entire available arsenal. Toomey's campaign didn't use the netroots that had coalesced surrounding his campaign. The decision-makers in the official campaign of Toomey profoundly under-utilized the internet, both in terms of in-state organizing, communication with supporters, and national fundraising. Toomey lost, and he could have won. They had the opportunity sitting here, and his campaign directors failed him by not grasping it.

As you recall, MeetUp was one of the big innovations during that cycle.  Toomey's campaign did nothing to embrace it.  Jerome noted "Pat Toomey's website doesn't even have a Meetup icon on the site."  Jerome's piece is a good read, especially as he continues into Toomey's use of the web (or lack of) as a communication and fundraising tool.

So what's the real reason we out-preform the Republican side of the aisle online?  I am not exactly sure.  Maybe it's technology.  With ActBlue, you can pick any candidate you'd like to fudnraise for.  The GOP's version picked the original candidates for you.  Maybe it's a trust of the tools?  Dem supporters online see candidates like John Edwards using ActBlue as their sole online campaign contribution agent.  There's a certain level of validation there.  Even in 2004 candidates were using ActBlue exclusively (Jeff Seemann was the first).

Maybe it's the fact that we have better "online story-tellers" and that Republican users as a whole aren't as crazy as Michelle Malkin.

Maybe there is more "buy-in" from our candidates/campaigns/bloggers/strategist s and we've done a better job of "closing the triange" than the Republicans.  

Maybe it's because our campaigns have really embraced and helped build (through campaigns) a thriving local blogosphere in many states across the country: most notable being CT and VA.

Maybe it's the team of 4, 5, 6 or more local bloggers that fill important niches on-the-ground: news consolidation, capturing video online, doing the hard work of getting video at events, community sites like MyLeftNutmeg and others that use SoapBlox?

Maybe it's the relationship between campaigns, the national party and large bloggers?

Maybe it's the relationship between campaigns and local bloggers?

Maybe it's firms like Blue State Digital who create the tools you see on Obama's website, or the tools necessary to pull off the 1 million door knocker canvass the DNC did last year?

Maybe it's because rank and file Republicans felt more complacent than Democrats faced down time after time by a unitary executive and do-nothing Congress?

Maybe it's because our "large bloggers" like Stoller, Markos and others have real life, everyday campaign experience?  Even excellent bloggers like Jane Hamsher lived a life on the trail in CT.

Maybe it's because of research intensive sites like ThinkProgress and Senate Majority Project that share vital information with other bloggers?

Maybe it's the Drum Major institute?

Maybe its BagNewsNotes?

Maybe it's pollster.com?

Maybe it's the way bloggers communicate with eachother in googlegroups?

Maybe it's all of those things that we just do a little (or a lot better) down the line?

Maybe there's more.

Tim

Like Alan S., I think the disparity has to do with the authoritarianism gap.  Republicans visit web sites and passively listen to today's talking points and marching orders.  Democrats visit web sites and interact:  commenting, arguing, questioning authority.

Ask any street musician.  Get 'em interacting with you, joking, making requests, etc., and their wallet's halfway out of their pocket.  Passive listeners pause a moment then go on their way.

It is precisely the philosophical difference that makes the donation difference. Today's Republican Party is an authoritarian, even neo fascist, organization and it is not open to discussion. You can get kicked off of any right wing site by disagreeing. The Democratic end of the web spectrum has, in contrast, grown more and more open and inclusive. When you can state your opinion without fear of anything more than a good argument, you participate. The country has always been left of center its just had a long run of corporate control of the flow of information. If they are going to get their mojo back, they've got to stop this conversation. That's why they are opposing an open web and trying to tighten control over journalists.

It's enthusiastic vs. unenthusiastic.  

We have no numbers on their on-line raising so we can't compare percentages.  But we can say that Barack had 100 thousand, Hillary 50 thousand and Edwards 40 thousand donors.

Assume for the moment little to no overlap and we 190 thousand donors a year away from the first primary.  Dems are excited so they are onlien talking about it, getting involved.

What were the numbers for the repubs? 30 thousand for Romney the leader in money, fifty thousand for McCain and I don't have Guliani's numbers, but they are less than Romney's I believe.

Will the Repubs catch up online?  Yes, when they start having idea that excite their base, ideas that can stand up to critical evaluation and discussion.    

The online gap is a symptom of the energy gap. It's a symptom of the fact that dems lead 50 to 35 in party id.  It's due to the dying of their party and little else.

It has to do with two factors.

The first is losing. The democrats lost a lot of races between 1994 and 2004 AND they kept moving right. That is a lethal, trust-draining combination. There was a hunger to reclaim the party from its spineless, clueless, triangulating corporate perch that has not existed on the right, because, well, they kept on winning.

Second, the personality of liberals and progressives meshes a lot better with the online format. Duh, right? Right wingers look for leaders to follow (see: authoritarian complex), and the left makes their own. We're protesters and activists at heart. They're rank-and-file by definition.

Is this really that hard to figure out?

Iraq. It's dragging every thing in the GOP down. The internet is a populist medium whose greatest strategic and tactical benefits go to rebels and outsiders.

Because they control the white house, they still see themselves as insiders. They still basically agree with Bush's Iraq agenda. So, they're still invested in the status quo. Look to the alienated quarters of the conservative movement to find the likeliest sources of a new conservative resurgence online. Matt's identified one possible group: the peroist anti-immigrationists (think Duncan Hunter). Another possible group is religious conservatives who still manage the always explosive mixture of growing power influence with self-perceived alienation and disrespect.

It is not process that rules on the web, but content.  For example, the Utube video of the Star Wars boy was about the content not about the process.  It got the exposure it did, because at the time it was unique.

It is really that simple IMO.  And that has great implications for the Democrats.  It also is very revealatory in that it exposes the process to close scrutiny in the Democratic side too.  

We believe in ourselves and in our goals for this country...and, for the most part, we are on the same page as our elected Democratic members of Congress. I agree that many Republicans are not well served or represented by the current leadership and they know it BUT fear saying it will be akin to claiming to be a Democrat! This current group of thugs has hijacked social issues so far to the right that mainstream Republicans have kept silent or quietly kept their distance. Our gain

I sensed the change in energy in early 2003. Prior to that seemingly every online poll was skewed toward the right. In 1998, 2000 and 2002 I was livid when CNN would use online opinion polls on the air and offer them as representative, when they obviously tilted hard right. My estimate was always about 7-8% from actual.

But it switched dramatically in 2003 and especially 2004, to the point online political polls were essentially ignored since progressives dominated them.  

Here in CT I'm seeing some conservative local blogs pop up, but no evidence of any cooperation between them.  As Tim points out cooperation is most likely to form around a particular campaign, and right now CT Republicans have no one locally or nationally to get excited about.  My best guess is that that's also the case for Republicans in most of the country.  

I think the basic formula for how grassroots political movements come about has stayed the same: Ordinary people with certain beliefs feel unrepresented in the government or public sphere. They then get organized based on their issues, using the tools of the day, and build a grassroots movement.

Liberals built a movement about workers' rights based on unions, that was later joined by one about civil rights using black churches.

The conservative grassroots movement came next, consisting of evangelical churches, the business lobbies, the NRA, etc., and used the technologies of the day, such phone banking, direct mail.

By this point the liberal movement -- based on unions and civil-rights groups -- fell into decline and was eclipsed by the younger, more energetic conservative movement.

We saw the peak of this dynamic during the decade of 1994 to 2004, when conservatives dominated the national (and to a degree local) agenda around the country.

Of course, this brings us back to the beginning -- ordinary people, in this case liberals, who feel unrepresented by our public institutions. The liberal movement had fallen. To change that, we created a new movement around our issues (environmentalism, anti-Iraq War, pro-civil liberties), using the technologies of the day (such as the Internet).

It's simply a matter of a specific group's needs occurring at a specific time in history. That's why we're better at using the Internet. Our needs weren't being served at the same time the Internet had come of age.

The Republicans won't develop a new model, one that's based around newer technologies, as long as their old one continues to work -- simply put, as long as they don't need a new one.

episty writes:

"On an individual basis, most Republicans are very nice people, and are just as progressive as Dems, except for a couple of hot-buttons."

That comment points up a major difference between the left and right sides of the blogosphere.  You just won't read anything like that being said of Democrats by someone on the right.  We're not just people with differing opinions, we're the enemy.

In 1990, Newt Gingrich wrote a GOP memo called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control", and it's been the GOP playbook for describing us ever since.  Democrats are "weird", "treasonous", etc.
And that began the death of comity.

Yes, I'm biased, but the rightwing blogs are full of hatred and the left, athough there is more juvenile name-calling than I'd like, seems more genuinely interested in what the truth is.  

Republican activists are driven by plain hatred of Democrats because our coalition includes blacks, feminists, gays, immigrants, and hippies.

It's the Republican Party of Nixon's Southern Strategy, Reagan's 60's Reaction, Gingrich's Rightwing Revolution, and Karl Rove's strategy of total Republican domination.

This kind of hate is immature - barely above grade school cooties. So other than childishly trashing our leaders with the latest FOX personal attacks, what do Republicans have to talk about amongst themselves?

The simple answer is that the left was desperate for a forum, any forum, that reflected our views.  That's why I found liberal blogs...there just wasn't anyplace for me to go.  

The right has been dining for years at the media buffet, and they still have any number of choices.  We are limited and perhaps for that very reason we  (and our passions and dollars) are concentrated online, the one place we can go to find the truth and like-minded people.  

Very interesting topic and article Matt. As in so many things, I disagree with Joe Trippi. But I agree with many of the comments. Interestingly enough, the authoritarian streak so many people cite is exactly consistent with what George Lakoff says. The way progressives are using the internet is collaborative because that's the way we tend to see the world and the way we work. It also happens to be a tool that's particularly effective for this type of thing.

I also agree that Republicans are dispirited and that it is because the Bush administration has been shown to be so incredibly incompetent. My mother last night made a comment about "the idiot George Bush has become." I was almost speechless. This is a woman who listens to Fox News and Rush constantly. She donated money to Bush. And, while I think he's always been an idiot, I couldn't help but agree. It's the first time we've agreed on politics in many, many years. Combined with the lack of a strong candidate, this--rather than any lack of technical savvy or late entry into online activism--is hurting Republican organizing efforts of any kind.

They need to hire some better technology transfer services because their problems could be solved if they had the right man for the right job, but at the moment they seem to be lurking in the outskirts of the internet potential and nowadays when internet is developing so much that could be a lethal mistake.