Twins Brett and Alex Harris bring their campaign for Huckabee to the Internet
By Katie Bolinger, 17, Millie Cripe, 15, and Hrishi Deshpande, 12, Y-Press
Published: April 3, 2008
Youth today often have unlimited access to multiple forms of communication and have been called the most connected generation. It is not uncommon, for example, for a kid to spend several hours each night instant messaging friends, creating and posting videos on YouTube or inputting information on Facebook or MySpace for (almost) all the world to see.
These communications venues are also playing a key role in the 2008 election. As the conventions near, presidential candidates are trying to get all the votes and funding that they can, and the Internet has become a gold mine for generating support, particularly from youth.
All three front-running candidates have invested maintaining online presences to raise money and find supporters. Democrat Barack Obama has outspent all other presidential candidates on online advertising and has maintained his own Web site as well as Facebook and MySpace pages.
Obama spent $2.6 million in February on Internet ads, compared to $198,000 for his Democratic challenger, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, and $111,000 for the Republican front-runner, Sen. John McCain of Arizona. In January, he spent $768,000 on Web ads, compared to $171,000 for Clinton and $151,000 for McCain.
Obama’s investment has paid off — most of the $91 million he raised in the first two months of 2008 came from small amounts over the Internet, according to The Washington Post.
This doesn’t surprise Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, authors of "Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics." For their book they studied the “millennial” generation, born between 1982 and 2003, who grew up fluent in the Internet, which has changed the way we do so many things, from research and reading to reaching out to others.
“The thesis of the book is that a combination of generational and technological change causes American politics to change dramatically every 40 years, and that the next time America will experience that change is in this election in the year 2008,” said Winograd, who from 1997 to 2000 served as senior policy adviser to then-Vice President Al Gore Jr. and director of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government.
The authors believe this change is under way, as young people rally to the campaigns, not only as volunteers but as voters as well. And part of what is galvanizing them is the Internet.
“The millennial generation has a certain set of attitudes, but they’re able to communicate with one another through the new technology that they use to spread the word, to mobilize their forces,” Hais said.
Winograd and Hais say Obama’s campaign is especially adept at using the Internet to reach young people, and not only to raise money. What is more valuable, according to the authors, is how Obama has used social networking technology to gain support and votes. “If you go to the Barack Obama campaign Web site, you will find that it’s not a typical Web site; it’s actually organized on the Facebook platform,” Winograd explained. “What they were able to do is use that social network system to get people to be able to talk directly to one another and mobilize or motivate each other without a lot of day-to-day direction from the campaign.
“The result, of course, has been the tremendous turnout in caucuses, where you know, young people text messaged each other, IM’d each other, let each other know through social network messaging the where, how and what to do in a caucus. And he’s been able to translate that into further organizational, get-out-the-vote activity in primary states as well.”
According to Winograd, it’s this social networking component that sets the Obama campaign apart from the other campaigns in reaching young people. The only other candidate who has made such widespread use of the Internet is Republican candidate Ron Paul. However, Paul’s message has not connected with young people and therefore has not “made the rounds” like Obama’s.
“Paul has used a lot of the very same technologies on the Internet to try and organize his campaign, and he’s attracted a great deal of interest on the Internet, and he’s raised money on the Internet, but he hasn’t been able to get anybody out to vote for him or get any delegates out of all that,” Winograd said.
But Paul has reached some young people through the Internet, including Nik Ritchie, 21, a Paul campaign volunteer in Orlando.
“I wouldn’t have even known about Ron Paul if it weren’t for the Internet,” Ritchie said.
The University of Central Florida student doesn’t believe he’s unique in turning to the Internet to find information and then acting on it.
“Us young people, we grew up around the Internet, so we’re comfortable with it, we know how to use it and we can find all sorts of information with it. I think that’s drawn a lot of young people into the process,” he said.
Obama isn’t the first candidate to make use of new technology. The last candidate to take advantage of new technology was John F. Kennedy, “whose use of television and his understanding of it helped him to get elected in 1960,” Morley said.
In general, Republicans are more skeptical of new technology than Democrats, and that certainly is true of the Internet.
“Many of them felt that it was a passing fad, that the young people’s interest and involvement here would never turn into votes, ’cause in their mind young people don’t vote,” Winograd said.
Though Republicans have since jumped on the technological bandwagon, they are still struggling to gain support from young voters.
“The problem they have is that they then use the technology to promote a candidate who’s not particularly appealing to this new generation, and the older generation isn’t using the technology, the new generation is. So it tends to fall on deaf ears. They’re doing the right thing, but nobody’s paying attention to them,” Winograd said.
While the Republicans may be struggling to reach young people, two conservative youth have been successful rallying support for one GOP candidate. Alex and Brett Harris, 19-year-old twins from Oregon, used their Web skills to launch www.hucksarmy.com, a grassroots volunteering campaign in support of Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential nominee.
They didn’t start with the Web site, though. Long interested in politics, the twins were looking at likely presidential candidates last year and were struck by Huckabee’s demeanor and beliefs. Realizing that he wasn’t well-known, “we sent out a bunch of e-mails to people, telling them ‘Check out Mike Huckabee, watch this video,’ and we made a little video and updated it to YouTube of different clips of him from the debate,” Alex said.
One of the e-mails found its way to a friend of the actor Chuck Norris, who then became a champion for Huckabee.
Soon thereafter, the Harrises started the Web site in an attempt to gain support for Huckabee, who lacked the financial and political party support of the other major nominees.
Brett explained that they were drawn to Huckabee’s spiritual message and knew other young people who felt likewise.
“We really saw that there were a lot of other people who were excited about him and they didn’t have any place to connect with each other, to talk together and to just basically strategize and come up with ideas to help him. And so we decided we needed to start a forum or a place online for people to interact,” he said.
Huck’s Army shows the power of bringing young people together over the Internet. “By the end of the campaign, we had over 20,000 grassroots volunteers in the 50 states with 49 state coordinators, regional coordinators and national campaign, a national campaign committee. We basically were able to build a whole national campaign infrastructure all online,” Alex said.
The Harrises are still active in politics. They and about 50 friends volunteer on various campaigns in Oregon, making phone calls, going door-to-door, talking to people.
They also maintain another Web site, www.therebelution.com, which encourages youth “to exceed low expectations” and to try to make a difference in the world despite their age.
They are big believers in youth and in the power of the Internet, especially in the hands of young people. “Now any young person, even if they’re too young to vote, can have a profound impact on the election just right from their home on their computer,” Alex said.
