Patrick Wages Politics Online

On Tuesday, the Deval Patrick campaign announced that they're forming Team Patrick Communities from their web site. As someone who is interested in the idea of online politics, I decided to check it out, and what they are on a basic level is fundraising pages that supporters can create themselves and keep track of how many dollars and supporters they can bring to the campaign. They even have a leaderboard to see who's brought in the most money. The Bush and Kerry campaigns both tried something like this in 2004, I believe, but I think this is the first time we've seen something like this in a Massachusetts election. Two days after launch, around 125 users have created community pages, bringing in over $5500.

There are two things about this effort that I'm interested in seeing. One is how people use these pages. I exchanged emails with some people involved with Deval Patrick's campaign and they said that their hope is that people will take this opportunity to be creative and make these pages their own. It was refreshing to hear that while the fundraising aspect of this was important to them, it was not intended to be the sole focus of the community. They also mentioned that while the sites are to be simple at first, they're planning on adding features as they figure out how people are using these pages. When you combine these community pages with the website's calendar, you can imagine a very empowering organizing tool that Patrick can take advantage of if he's not afraid of decentralizing his campaign a little.

As far as the fundraising goes, though, this also tells me that the Patrick campaign believes in the power of small donors. True, he almost doesn't have a choice with the campaign finance limits here in Massachusetts, and the state of his own warchest, but it's ultimately the number of people Patrick has convinced that will matter, not the number of dollars. Patrick is so far behind in the money race that he almost can't afford to not take these kinds of risks, particularly against a Reilly campaign that has shown no signs thus far of being innovative.