The Hybrid Media System

by Andrew Chadwick

  The campaigns sent e-mails and text messages during the hours before each debate, urging supporters to share their views and donate online (Johnson, 2009: 12). Donations strengthen the ground campaign, but the donations that cluster around real-time televised events like debates are also a means of intervening in the flow of mainstream news. They are tangible signals to the mainstream media that the public is reacting. Campaigns try to capitalize on these new dynamics. The night of Sarah Palin’s network-broadcast vice presidential nomination acceptance speech in St. Paul, the Obama campaign received a large influx of online donations, as people sent in money while watching Palin’s speech. These real-time interventions also provide symbolic resources for the campaign press staff, who are able to generate authentically positive counter-narratives for the television and broadcast media that will inevitably become fixated on the big speech. Citizens are aware of this, and, acting in concert on the spur of the campaign e-mails, they now time their interventions carefully for the largest possible impact. It was these sorts of interventions during the televised primary debates that made it easier for Obama to actively consider withdrawing from public funding, not only because they provided a foretaste of the enormous sums that might be donated once the campaign entered its most intensive phase, but also because Obama’s decision, for all the problems it portended for the unconstrained use of money in future presidential campaigns, could be presented, and not without warrant, as an affirmation of concerted democratic action by a supportive public eager to make its voice heard by proxy. As Nick Anstead has argued, internet fundraising is now embedded within broader historical traditions of civic voluntarism in American political culture (Anstead, 2008: 289).

  Still, we must qualify these democratic aspects of online fundraising. Early reports made much of the claim that the amount Obama raised in small donations was only around the same as George W. Bush raised during the 2004 campaign and only marginally greater than McCain’s 2008 record (Malbin, 2008). More detailed analysis carried out after the dust had settled on the election revealed a more significant achievement for Obama. Not only did he receive a far greater number of small donations than all of the other candidates in the primaries, the 33 percent of money he raised from donors giving a total of $200 or less was quite significantly ahead of Bush in 2004 (26 percent) and far outpaced McCain in 2008 (21 percent) (Corrado, et al., 2010: 17). Obama therefore raised more in small contributions than any other presidential candidate since meaningful records began.

  And yet, these numbers do still mask a more complex picture. The sources of Obama’s “early money,” which is donated before primary voting begins and is the most crucial resource for demonstrating candidate viability, were heavily skewed toward large donors: 60 percent of donations between January and August 2007 were in amounts of $1,000 or more. Those working in the financial sector, pharmaceuticals, defense, and broadcasting featured prominently in the early money (Ferguson, 2008; Sifry, 2009). Like other recent presidential campaigns, Obama made use of “bundlers,” usually wealthy individuals who collected together maximum donation amounts from their business and social networks (Corrado & Corbett, 2009). Only 32 percent of Obama’s donations came from those who gave less than $200 in total. Many individuals made a large number of repeat donations. Indeed, they were strongly encouraged to do so by the campaign, and then to signal that they had done so to others in their online social networks by establishing online fundraising groups and displaying personal fundraising “thermometer” widgets on their MyBarackObama.com profile pages. These technologies translated the “bundling” principle into the online realm. There is a strong argument that the subscription model of fundraising enables poorer individuals to spread the costs of donating across several months. But there are other advantages for the campaigns. Not only does it avoid donor burn-out and secure steadier streams of income, it also allows the campaign to convey its grassroots credentials by targeting professional media and bloggers with stories about “small online donations” during key moments like televised debates.

  The War Room Meets Structured Interactivity

  It is easy to forget that Obama was an insurgent candidate in 2008. Hillary Clinton had been preparing for a presidential run for many years. She had a latent national network of activists and campaign staff, many of whom cut their teeth during her husband Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 campaign. Hillary was remarkably well-known, a political brand in her own right, and widely expected to activate a large-scale fundraising effort at short notice. An Obama victory would be a major political upset. While certainly not unknown after his much-reported 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama was an African American based in Chicago; a relative political outsider who lacked significant organization across the key swing states he would need to win to secure the presidency. Not only did Obama defeat Clinton, he went on to emphatically beat John McCain, one of the most experienced and popular Republican politicians of recent times, and, ironically, a man who had blazed the trail in online campaigning during a failed bid for the Republican nomination in the 2000 primaries.

  As befitting an insurgent, Obama’s campaign had to be built from scratch out of what were—initially—meager resources. The campaign’s early internal polls in Iowa had him trailing well behind not only Clinton but also Senator John Edwards (Plouffe, 2010: 19). The first goal was to present Obama as the main alternative to Clinton as early as possible in the primary season, well in advance of the first electoral test. The second goal was to prevent Clinton from gaining momentum from victories in the early primaries. Following that, the third goal was to “expand the electorate” by creating a pool of newly registered primary voters, including young people, African Americans, Latinos, and those Republicans and independents who could be motivated to participate in the Democratic primaries. The hope was that these groups would then continue their enthusiasm into the general election. In the Iowa caucuses, not only would this involve encouraging larger numbers of young people to attend events that are traditionally dominated by older citizens, it would also involve Republicans and independents reregistering as Democrats in order to show their support for Obama. Campaign director David Plouffe and the team planned to build what Plouffe calls “a grassroots movement” based on a “ragtag army” of volunteers and small donors who could be mobilized through interpersonal communication, both online and offline. Word of mouth would create a “permission structure” that encouraged individuals to become involved (Plouffe, 2010: 94).

  But the Obama campaign was also tightly controlled from the center. The internet was important for building momentum, but only in tandem with putting precinct captains and volunteers on the ground. Obama established a small, close-knit circle of senior advisers with whom he would issue the “big decisions” (Plouffe, 2010: 22). Avoiding leaks to journalists was a strong motivator of this approach, but so too was a widely held skepticism about the nature of recent internet-fueled presidential campaigns. While essential for pioneering the development of online campaigning (Chadwick, 2007), the memory of Howard Dean’s chaotic and ultimately unsuccessful primary campaign of 2004 weighed heavily on the Obama team’s collective mind (Kreiss, 2012).

  The initial inner circle included just three individuals: David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs (Plouffe, 2010: 22). This classic television-era war room model was sustained throughout the campaign and proved remarkably watertight. There were media spectacles and there were slip-ups, but there were no hugely important insider leaks. Unlike the Dean campaign, disunity in the war room was rare.

  In keeping with the electoral traditions of the last few decades, campaign resources were channeled ruthlessly into swing states. But by recent standards, these states were more numerous. Regions of the country previously regarded as out of bounds for the Democrats suddenly came into play (A. Berman, 2010). Rather than gamble on winning Florida and Ohio—a strategy that has developed into a mainstay of presidential campaigns since the 1990s—Obama’s staff began by treating s
ixteen states as potentially up for grabs. As we saw above, these states were pummeled with television advertising, but the multiple-state strategy also required a large-scale ground campaign coordinated by experienced staff. Obama used portions of his huge central fund to reinforce state-level Democratic parties’ ground efforts in the key states. The electoral penalties for being seen to be disengaging from even just one or two of the key states are severe. For example, when, due to lack of resources, John McCain announced his withdrawal from Michigan during the general election campaign, his poll ratings in the state quickly declined and he effectively conceded it to Obama. In Indiana, McCain did not even establish a headquarters and visited only once, for four hours in June (A. Berman, 2010: 170). As Obama’s ground and internet operations revealed growing levels of volunteering and support, the campaign used its resources to increase television advertising but it also increased physical “candidate time” for real-space speeches and rallies. As we shall see in the next chapter, physical presence, if those real-space events are coordinated online and then mediated by local and national news outlets, still matters a great deal.

  Obama’s campaign organization built upon established models but it also innovated. A press and communications department was established, but in stark contrast with the model that emerged during the first wave of internet campaigning of the 1990s, the press office was not granted overall control of the new media department. Managed by former Dean campaign worker Joe Rospars, new media was much more tightly integrated with field operations than had previously been the case in American campaigns. New media reported directly to the campaign’s chief, Plouffe (Kreiss, 2012). Unlike the McCain campaign, Obama’s online media staff also worked closely with the rest of the media and communications personnel and new media people played a role in influencing strategy across the board (Kaye, 2009: 5). This system meant that the norms and practices of the new media staff constantly interacted with those of the field division and the traditional press and communications team. However, overall control of campaign messages was firmly in the hands of the war room. Obama, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs channeled their commands through a network of press and communications, new media, and ground campaign managers.

  The tight integration of new media and volunteer coordination in the ground campaign allowed the campaign leadership to use its power to reach down into localities and challenge some traditional models of state politicking. South Carolina Democrats, for example, have a longstanding tradition of paid political organizing: a system of patronage in which, in return for payment, local political and church elites offer their candidate endorsements and the safe delivery of support. In a rejection of what it termed “old-school politics” and an affirmation of “organizing,” the Obama campaign tried to sidestep these traditions. Amid much criticism from local Democrats, it appointed Anton Gunn, a community organizer, as political director for the state. This would not have been possible without the online strategy. Gunn and Jeremy Bird from campaign headquarters recruited volunteers using a combination of Facebook and in-person trips to college campuses. The campaign’s videographer Kate Albright-Hanna and its blogger Sam Graham-Felsen were dispatched to the state to gather material for the website that would serve to illustrate how they were breaking the mold (A. Berman, 2010: 130–131). The campaign was successful in bypassing many of the South Carolina kingmakers and in mobilizing younger white voters and newly registered African Americans. It meshed online with offline, as internet content publicized thousands of house parties and a “barbershop and beauty-salon outreach program” (Plouffe, 2010: 161). Obama carried the South Carolina primary by 28 percent.

  The war room engaged directly with the new media team over the design of key elements of the online campaign. The best example of this in flow is e-mail. Building on new media director Joe Rospars’s previous experience in pioneering the genres of the campaign e-mail during his time with Howard Dean, Plouffe was able to test and calibrate the form and the content of this peculiarly powerful campaign medium. The tone and length of e-mails were varied. There were experiments with formatting and image placement, even font styles and colors (Kreiss, 2012). E-mails linking to video were more likely to engage supporters and the campaign knew quite precisely how much engagement was happening: “It was like having our own television returns,” said Plouffe (2010: 297). The biggest responses tended to follow e-mails that were signed by Obama himself, but to avoid diluting their impact “signed” e-mails were kept to a minimum. By the close of the campaign each state had its own team solely responsible for locally targeted e-mail messaging. In some cases targeting came right down to county level (Plouffe, 2010: 77, 329). E-mail became a talisman of the ground campaign. Among the panoply of digital media, it was long-established “mundane tools” like this that proved to be more significant in harnessing volunteer efforts to the broader goals of the campaign than newer environments like online social networks (R. K. Nielsen, 2011, 2012).

  E-mail took its place in a hybrid system of central managerial control and structured interactivity. This permitted only a relatively porous subsystem of netroots mobilization (Cooper, 2011). And unlike the Dean campaign, this subsystem rarely if ever threatened—or, rather, flattered to deceive—those whose command and control pushed the core strategic objectives. The Dean campaign was an organizational hybrid of social movement and election campaign: its social movement repertoires ended up acting as a drag on its ability to deliver electoral gains (Chadwick, 2007). The Obama campaign was a similar organizational hybrid. Indeed, the campaign staff often had a social-movement-meets-campaign model in mind as they went about their work (Vaccari, 2010). But with Obama, the social movement repertoires—the educating, the empowering, and the mobilizing—were tightly integrated with the repertoires of the electoral campaign—the recruiting, the training, the motivating, the monitoring, and the coordinating.

  Several examples illustrate this integration. Well in advance of the establishment of official state headquarters, local activists in Missouri used Facebook and MyBarackObama.com to establish a St. Louis for Barack Obama group. But when the campaign arrived in the state months later, it asked the St. Louis volunteers to make weekly road trips to Iowa instead (Plouffe, 2010: 175). Similarly, a supporter named Joe Anthony had established an unofficial MySpace profile for Obama in 2004, but in 2007 he was ordered by Obama’s new media team to close the 160,000-follower account because it distracted attention from the official campaign. When Anthony refused, Obama’s staff went directly to MySpace and asked the company to seize the profile (Sifry, 2007). MySpace, who no doubt saw Obama as a potential future president, quickly complied.

  The Obama campaign was, in the words of Jon Carson, its national field director, a “highly structured, accountable system …. ” “Despite this decentralized system” he says, “I knew every single morning how many phone calls had been made, how many doors had been knocked, where, by whom, and if there was anything funky in the data” (Carson, 2009: 42). All of this pivoted on an important distinction between distributed labor and distributed power. As former Dean campaign worker Zephyr Teachout put it: “some very smart people have figured out how to organize your excitement” (2007).

  From the outset, the Obama team had a clear strategy for online campaigning, the clearest since the internet first emerged as a force in American politics. The overarching aim was to develop the website into an important node in what they envisaged as a fairly tightly controlled network of nodes. Each node would ultimately belong to the campaign and would be designed to play a specific role. For example, live video of events and announcements on the main site were seen as a means of spurring people to log on to the social network site MyBarackObama.com to discuss these events with others.

  MyBarackObama (“MyBO”) ended up with more than two million user profiles and was the platform for organizing more than thirty-five thousand volunteer groups and two hundred thousand local face-to-face events across the country (Vargas, 2008). On its own,
however, MyBO was insufficient. The campaign had profiles on fifteen social network sites, including niche forums like BlackPlanet and AsianAvenue. There were more than five hundred pro-Obama groups on Facebook before Obama even announced his candidacy (R. Davis, et al., 2009). One of Facebook’s founders, Chris Hughes, was hired by the campaign for his expertise. It was no coincidence that when Facebook opened up its application programming interface in 2007 for all-comers to create new applications for the service, Obama’s campaign was the first to take advantage of the new platform (Baumgartner & Morris, 2010: 56–58).

  The approach across the country was to integrate and balance this often-spontaneous local organizing against central strategy: “When staff arrived bearing more resources and focused goals, followed by advertising and some candidate time, the foundational work of our supporters on the ground paid huge dividends,” said Plouffe. “We made sure to stress to volunteers that they had standing behind them a national HQ … and would make sure their work was strategically sound and received adequate resources” (Plouffe, 2010: 181, 256).