The grail in question is a new tools called “Dashboard”, meant to integrate voter contact, volunteer management, and activist social networking in one shared and accessible platform.

The campaign writes on their website, “for the first time ever, you’ll be able to join, connect with, and build your neighborhood team online.” (In other words, at this level of generality, it is kinda like MeetUp, DeanSpace, DFA-Link, MyBarackObama, National Field, etc, only different.)

It sounds great. Will it work? I have no clue. Neither do Pilkington and Michel, which they openly admit. As they write–

“[The campaign staffers] are keeping specific details about Dashboard heavily under wraps for fear that they might lose the substantial advantage they now enjoy over their rivals in the Romney campaign.”

So all we know about Dashboard at this point is that the Obama campaign has this new tool, that they have decided to promote its existence, that they say it will work (“substantial advantage”), but that they won’t tell us how, precisely.

In addition to the caveat quoted above, Pilkington and Michel’s article also includes all the usual buzzwords–Dashboard is “secret”, it is “sophisticated”, it is “powerful”, and it is being developed by brand-name “gurus” like Michael Slaby, Joe Rospars, and Jeremy Bird. (I’m trying to imagine a campaign that would let dimwits develop a feeble tool.) It’s already subject to speculation elsewhere, including on TechPresident.

Like other “Holy Grails” presented by “gurus” it is at this stage a question of faith whether you believe it will work (as a matter of fact, “Holy Grail” and “McCainSpace” was once mentioned in the same article).

I’m glad journalists like Pilkington and Michel are covering campaign technologies, because often-obscure back-end technologies like Dashboard increasingly matter for how digital politics works in practice, gives some campaigns a competitive edge, and structure how ordinary people can get involved and in what. But unless you are part of the team developing Dashboard or involved in testing it, at this point you won’t really have any evidence of its potential beyond whatever PR the campaign puts out.

I have every reason to believe that the people involved in developing Dashboard are smart, that they are very good at what they are doing, and that the tools they have developed will help them further rationalize, control, and perhaps even energize the Obama campaign’s voter contact program.

But I do get a little skeptical every time I encounter a heavily marketed new digital tool, whether it is being spun by a campaign wanting to assert it is ahead, or by a consultant peddling her wares. Is this another Demzilla, marketed aggressively by then-DNC chair Terry McAuliffe ( here in the Washington Post) but in practice a debacle–

“You could ask me about any city block in America, and I could tell you how many on that block are likely to be health care voters, or who’s most concerned about education or job creation [...] And I could press a button and six seconds later you’d have a name, an address and a phone number for each of them. We can then begin a conversation with these people that is much more sophisticated and personal than we ever could before.”

Sounds good, Terry. Shame it didn’t work.

Is Dashboard another heavily hyped tool that won’t work in practice? Or is it the real thing? As said, I don’t know. Very few do, and they are not going to tell us very much at this stage. They have good reasons to hold their cards close to their chests.

Every cycle we are presented with new revolutionary tools. And some tools that actually really do change how politics is practiced. Sometimes, the tools we are presented with before, and the ones that in hindsight turned out to have made a real difference are not the same ones at all.

2008 was supposed to be the Facebook Election  or the YouTube election. But a good case can be made that more specialized back-end tools like the Voter Activation Network that I write about in my book or the MyBarackObama site that Daniel Kreiss writes about in his forthcoming book were actually in many ways more important. My point is simply that at this stage, we don’t know, and since the proof is in the pudding, in a way we can’t know–to find out, we’ll have to do more than simply listen to the PR hype, but go have a look at how these tools are used in practice, on the ground, battle-tested on the campaign trail.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It has just been published by Princeton University Press and is available on Amazon.

I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today.  You guys will be the backbone of this campaign.  And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way — door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

This campaign is about people (that’s part of the framing). He wants you to join the Obama army (that’s also a substantial ask, because the campaign needs help to get out the vote). And if you join, you will be asked to walk door to door to talk to voters, make calls, organize your neighborhood etc.

That may sound old-fashioned, as the President suggests, but there is a twist to it. Field operations and volunteer efforts these days are completely intertwined with a whole range of digital tools that are anything but old-fashioned.

So you’ll also be asked to enter data into VoteBuilder, the Democratic Party’s digital voter file, whether you have a smart phone to keep in touch with the campaign, to do distributed phone banking from home via an online integrated platform, and to lend data and profile updates from your social networking profiles (Facebook, Twitter, etc) to the campaign.

This is the (new) old-fashioned way honed to perfection in 2008 and refined ever since rather than the (old) old-fashioned way, blending traditional organizing with various new digital tools appropriated from corporate marketing or in some cases developed for the campaign. Romney’s campaign will be working along the same lines, as they too will be worried about turnout amongst traditional Republican base voters.

I’d love to be on the ground to follow these campaigns as they are operating “between door-to-door and databases” (an earlier working title for my book Ground Wars). Ten months with two congressional campaigns in 2008 was absolutely fascinating, and to spend just a few with a Presidential campaign working with the same tactics on a much larger scale would be a blast.

That’ll have to wait for some later election, however, as I’m bound in Europe working on other stuff… Till then, I’ll stalk the campaigns via coverage from the usual sources, I’ve grown particularly fond of the Financial Times‘ Richard McGregor, who reports a lot from the ground and pays attention to campaign mechanics like few other journalists, and of course continue to follow Sasha Issenberg’s great work at Slate.com and various stuff from TechPresident to keep up on the technology side of things.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It has just been published by Princeton University Press and is available on Amazon.

(cross-posted to Politics in Spires)

I haven’t followed the campaign closely, but I’m intrigued to learn that the French center-left have been building a ground war of unusual proportions, invoking, as the Social Democrats did in Denmark, the ’08 Obama campaign as their inspiration.

Kim Willsher provides an outline of the effort in the Guardian

On the ground, the Socialists are attempting to rebuff the [Front National] vote by redoubling efforts to mobilise their own supporters. Inspired by President Barack Obama’s election campaign in the US, they launched an ambitious programme in January to get five million French voters to open their doors.

An army of 120 professional “trainers” are overseeing 6,000 canvassers and 80,000 volunteers. Before last Sunday’s vote they had succeeded in opening 3.8m doors in districts around 10,000 voting stations seen as a priority because of their high rate of abstention or support for the Socialists in 2007.

“In all the voting stations where we carried out door-to-door canvassing before the first round there has been an increase of between 3% and 5% participation. As we are doing this in what are essentially our own areas, we are getting people out to vote for us,” said Hamon. “It’s been very successful in boosting our results.”

In November, I’m heading to Paris to talk about my book Ground Wars at Sciences Po after Florence Faucher King‘s kind invitation. I’m looking forward to discussing American, French, and other experiences in a comparative perspective.

But that’s the main finding of a new RISJ Challenge, Survival is Success: Journalistic Online Start-Ups in Western Europe, written by the Italian journalist Nicola Bruno and myself.

Examining nine strategically chosen case studies of journalistic online start-ups from Germany, France, and Italy, we find that the economics of online news are as challenging for new entrants as they are for industry incumbents.

The competition for people’s attention is fierce, and though online advertising is growing rapidly, most of it goes to a small number of US-based giants like Google. This is a tough environment for start-ups, and the track record so far suggests that, as we indicate in the title of our report, survival is a form of success in itself.

Given the structural challenges that new journalistic ventures face, what can they do differently? In my view, one I’ve laid out in a bit more detail in a piece for Reuters Analysis & Opinion, they need to stop irrationally imitating the strategies of the (few) large US-based start-ups, like the Huffington Post, Gawker, and Politico, that many of the people interviewed for the report referred to as inspirations. Strategies that worked for earlier movers operating in a much larger US market are not necessarily going to work for start-ups entering smaller markets at a later point in time.

To survive—and to succeed—journalistic online start-ups in Western Europe need to find their own way, think beyond the dominant, and mostly failing, existing models of news production. I know this is a lot easier to say than it is to do, but it is worth saying anyhow. I wish all the new news entrepreneurs good luck. We need them.

A trio of highlights–one thing I did, a couple of things I attended, and one thing I did not attend but later caught up on.

First, doing–I had the pleasure of presenting some work in progress by Cristian Vaccari and myself, where we ask “What Drives Politicians’ Online Popularity?”  (the paper opens as a .doc here) on the basis of the same dataset underlying this previous paper. The panel, entitled “Campaigns, Elections & Technology” was one of those rare conference panels that had actual intellectual coherence to both the line-up of presenters and the discussion itself. Ben Epstein, Sounman Hong, and Christine B. Williams and Jeff Gulati all presented interesting papers. Betsy Sinclair did a great job as our respondent, and there was a good discussion with people in the audience afterwards, including Dave Karpf, Kevin Wallsten and others.

Second, attending–A couple of other panels I enjoyed were (1) “Mass Media and the Policy Process” were John Lovett and Frank Baumgartner presented a very strong paper asking when there is a single media agende, analyzing data over time, across issues, and between different outlets to show how media attention goes in and out of focus and (2) “Congressional Campaign Advertising” where a strong line-up examined various forms of strategic positioning vis-a-vis party brands, and the ways in which candidates and campaigns think about these choices and execute them.

Third, not doing, but catching up–I missed the presentation of a very interesting paper on “Career Concerns and the Behavior of Political Consultants in Congressional Elections” by Gregory J.Martin and Zachary Peskowitz from Stanford, but the paper can be downloaded here and it is a really neat piece of work that help advance our understanding of political consultants and the work they do.

What can the course of the campaign so far tell us about the challenges Romney will face and how he will try to tackle them?

The drawn-out primary has been a mixed blessing, forcing Romney to cater to a conservative base out of touch with many Americans, forcing him to spent time and money battling right-wing rivals when he would have preferred to train his guns on President Obama. It has also exposed some issues that Romney and his campaign will have to content with moving forward.

• Turnout has been mediocre and sometimes flat-out disappointing
• Romney has generally won only by pluralities, rather than majorities (compare the 2012 GOP primary with the 2008 Democratic primary)
• Many of those who have voted for Romney (and the other candidates) in the primary have done so without enthusiasm

In short, Republicans aren’t really fired up about their likely Presidential candidate, and some may not be bothered to vote for him. This is a problem in what may very well be a very close race.

Moving to the general election, Romney has to make his pitch to independent voters, but also do his utmost to build a platform and an organization that can help him bring out the conservative base. If there is one thing Karl Rove taught us about American politics, it is that you cannot and should not take the base for granted, but actively cater to it and work to bring it out (his so-called “base-strategy”). The idea that simply not being Obama will do this for Romney is dangerous. The President is certainly not popular on the right, but Romney will need to fight for every vote, conservative or independent, to win in the fall.

Romney’s well-funded and professionally managed campaign organization has been highlighted as one of his advantages throughout the primary. As he begins to re-tool for the general election (while still dealing with Santorum et al at the same time), it will need to expand its presence on the ground and built a network of active supporters in all the potential battleground states. A proper field operation capable of getting out the vote is hard to put together on short notice. It takes time and effort to cultivate the relationships that animate a good ground game.

One of the advantages of the fiercely fought 2008 Democratic primary was that it left Obama with an organizational presence and strong supporter base across the country that also helped him fight and win the general election. In contrast, it is not clear that the Romney campaign has managed to maintain its presence even in states where it won the GOP primary. As Ed Pilkington and Amanda Michel from the Guardian writes—

Romney until recently had three offices in Florida, all directed to his primary battle against Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. Yet despite the fact that no Republican has won the White House while losing Florida since Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Romney closed all three offices after the January 31 primary.

Calls to the main number of Romney’s Florida headquarters are sent to voicemail; the mailbox is full and will not accept further messages.

For all the talk about inevitability, it seems the Romney campaign is still mostly oriented towards winning the next primary states and has only just begun re-tooling for the general election. (I haven’t been able to find information on whether they remain active on the ground in Ohio and Virginia, it would be interesting to know.)

If they want to build an organization capable of fighting Obama for every inch in every contested state, they will need to maintain and continually expand a presence on the ground across the country. At the moment, they do not seem to be doing this. Come November, they may find there is a price to be paid for that.

My book, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, deals with how American political campaigns mobilize, organize, and target their field operations, using large numbers of volunteers and paid part-timer workers to contact voters at home at the door or over the phone. It has just been published by Princeton University Press and is available on Amazon.

(cross-posted to Politics in Spires)

(image from the Mitt Romney campaign’s Flickr stream)

The list is below, details TBA for a few of them.

• Monday April 9, 12-2pm, George Washington University, Washington D.C.
• Tuesday April 10, 11-12.30pm, American University, Washington D.C.
• Wednesday April 11, 10-12pm, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
• Thursday April 12, 4-6pm, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
• Friday April 13, 4:35-6.15pm – Midwest Political Science Association 70th Annual Conference (I’m speaking as part of Panel 55-2 on political anthropology)
• Monday April 16, 12-2pm, Columbia University, New York, New York (a comeback at my old school, in a colloquium series I used to organize)
• Tuesday April 17, 6pm-8pm, New York University, Institute for Public Knowledge
• Wednesday April 18, 12-1.3opm, Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Connecticut
• Thursday April 19, 4.30-6.30pm, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey

Then Friday April 20, I’m speaking at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Texas-Austin, but not about the book–though after nine talks, who knows, I may automatically start talking about political campaigns rather than the journalistic online-start ups I’m supposed to focus on…

It’s been great to present the book in the UK and Denmark over the last two months but this of course is something special, a chance to talk about American politics with Americans, including in at least one instance with people who have worked on one of the campaigns I deal with in the book–that’s going to be a blast and a great experience, I’m sure.

First of all, even taking into account the self-selection involved, people here are just really interested in and quite knowledgeable about American politics. That made for good conversation.

Second, we’ve just had a general election in the fall of 2011 where a few parties and trade unions worked with the kind of personalized political communication I analyze in the book, so obviously many people were interested in differences and similarities between US and Danish experiences. (I’ve written about that a while back.)

In April, I’m off to the US to give a string of talks in between two conferences, and I’m really looking forward to taking the book on the road and discussing it with people who really follow American political campaigns very closely—at the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers, where I’m speaking April 19, I happen to know several people who worked on one of the campaigns I studied are coming. It will be particularly interesting to catch up with them again and hear their perspectives.

Kallos has written a very nice review of my book that kicked off the discussion. Good reviews are of course always a joy to read, but I’m particularly happy that someone like him, with a rare combination of political experience, an activist pedigree, and very impressive academic credentials, likes the book. Here’s how he opens his review–

Ground Wars by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen is an essential new bible for political campaigns locked in the everlasting battle that has become modern American politics.

Look at the discussion too, many interesting points and questions raised, more than we could hope to answer in one evening.

Tuesday March 13, 7pm- at Frit Forum, Reventlowsgade 14, Copenhagen. Frit Forum is a Social Democrat-affiliated student organization. The Social Democrats were one of the party with the most ambitious “ground war”-type operations in the 2011 Danish General Election, so this will hopefully provide an interesting opportunity to hear about people’s experiences with field campaigning in Denmark.

Thursday March 15, 5pm-7pm at Operate (Jesper Brochmands Gade 10, Copenhagen), with Kommunikationsforeningen. This event is organized by the professional association for people working with communications, and also includes Rune Baastrup, who was one of the key people behind the labor union 3F’s work with personalized communication in the run up to the 2011 election and in terms of organizing and community-building. It should make for a great discussion.

Thursday March 29, 2pm-4pm at Copenhagen Business School, Center for the Study of the Americas. (Details to come.) CSA is one of the most interesting research environments in Denmark dealing with American issues, and I’ll be appearing alongside Niels Bjerre Poulsen who is a well-known Danish historian and expert on US politics, so it’s sure to be another interesting event.