Netroots focus for 2008?

I am a netroots activist with an interest in acquiring and using political power to further political goals. I am interested in effective strategic action to further accomplish this goal, and I want to maximize the power of people with my same general outlook to impact policy and politics. I do not believe that the netroots as an amorphous entity with minimal direction should be actively involved in any of the major Democratic presidential campaigns as this will be an inefficient system of influence. Several months ago I expanded upon this idea:

Where should we be directing our energy and attention? Should the netroots embrace a Presidential strategy of winnerism, or send our energy, efforts and cash elsewhere where the general progressive outlook can gain greater sources of power?

I think netroots efforts should be directed primarily towards lower level races as no matter what the netroots as a trackable entity can commit in cash, volunteerism and media messaging, it will be swamped in the $500,000,000 spent by the successful candidate between the primary and general election campaigns. Traditional sources of moblization and volunteers will be called to run the coordinated campaigns that are not particulary focused on local candidates. Since any individual contribution is a marginal contribution, ....

If netroots activism continues to focus on the lower level races where a sudden infusion of fifty volunteers, or $200,000 is a deal maker, our influence will increase. Netroots candidates have demonstrated an ability to win with [nationally] comparatively minor investments. Additionally, activist candidates seem to do best when the voter pool is comprised of disproportionally high information voters. Presidential elections are the domain of the low information/gut feeling voters; primaries, and down ballot races are where the low information voters drop-off. We can and have won here, and will continue to win here.

The first quarter fundraising reports are in, and the numbers are staggering in all aspects for the top tier Democratic candidates. However one hope that I had was not fulfilled. Small donors were swamped by large and maximum value donors in all campaigns. The Campaign Finance Institute has done a great job of working the crosstabs and I am stealing some of the data from Adam B at Daily Kos as the information is in a great format. I am only including Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Richardson in these numbers as these candidates are the ones with either significant real world support, significant netroots support, or a combination of both on the Democratic side.



Remember in this graph that maximum dollar donors are a subset of large dollar donors. All four candidates' high dollar donors ($1,001 to $2,300) dominate the rest of the campaign and dwarf the value of the small dollar donations. Some candidates have a higher proportion of their cash from small donors than others, but the best performance is still an anemic 22% from the Obama campaign. The small donors are not the base of the campaigns' fund raising nor does it seem like they are all that important of a marginal component in the fund raising of three of the four candidates, Obama is the exception.

I know that the netroots as a controllable entity is a joke on the same lines as a cat that lacks self-esteem, so I do not expect to see a significant shift in individual actions. Leading netroots blogs have a demonstrated capacity to highlight races and see a significant increase in donations and activism efforts for the selected races. I encourage these opinion leaders to think strategically if one of their goals is to increase the collective power of the netroots. I think that the best strategic use of the netroots distributed information and activism model is not to support centralized presidential campaigns.