Lower the cost of discovering potential donors. I'm not the first person to say this; many people have said that the best thing the Internet has done is reduce the cost to a campaign of identifying supporters willing to give their time and money.
Push donors towards competitive elections. Voters contributing hard money online have access to a wealth of information about which races are competitive and which are not. And while there may be some bias to pick candidates who you agree with, or who are in your home state, it's reasonable to suspect that funding drives on the internet can largely be funnelled to campaigns that need them most.
Since the Democrats generally trail the Republicans in hard money contributions, it's important that this scarce resource go to the place it's needed most. Evan Bayh is a terrific fundraiser, but he's never going to need the millions of dollars he can raise. Find someone who needs it, like Barbara Boxer, Inez Tannenbaum, or Tom Daschle, and give to them instead.
Here's another example: there are two Democrats running for GA-12, a district that encompasses the small cities of Savannah and Athens, plus a slew of rural counties in between (if this seems like a goofy district, you'd be right; Georgia has been one of the victims of crapulent post-2000 re-redistricting). One of them is Doug Haines, and the other is John Barrow. Haines has $60K cash on hand, while Barrow has $360K. On top of that, Haines has earned some bad blood locally, while John Barrow is serving on the Clarke County commission relatively well. Now, Haines is doing more blog advertising, on the theory that blog readers are more liberal than the general electorate. But do you want ideological purity? Or do you want to win?
Mobilize letter to the editor drives. I'm amazed that this hasn't happened already. Let me give you an example of the Republican party already doing this with great success:
On Februrary 10th, the Portland Oregonian ran an op-ed piece panning the new prescription drug benefit.
On February 23rd, an HHS administrator sends a letter to the editor repeating talking points on the drug plan.
Now, I know most newspaper readers don't read the op/ed page, but some important people do. First of all, I suspect that almost everyone who reads the op/ed page votes. Second, someone on the newspaper staff has to read the letters to the editor, so they'll be more likely to print both sides of the issue the next time it comes up. This sort of coordinated response, complete with sanitized language, is missing on the left. And it could easily be accomplished, and the Internet is a perfectly good tool to help mobilize this sort of effort.
This does nothing to reduce the cost of elections per se, but it does increase the amount of "free media" that progressives get. The Right is already in on this game, so why shouldn't the Left join in? The most important aspect of having a broad reaching set of activists interested in writing LTEs get the right people to send the letters, either (a) local citizens served by the newspaper, or (b) bigwigs with the relevant organization who will get a good byline "Joe Smith is the Director of Communications for the League of Conservation Voters". Having every LTE volunteer give their zip code and the organizations they're affiliated with is a perfect start.
Scrub the language on both sides. Paul Waldmen of the Gadflyer has a good article on this subject. This is another game that the right Right plays that the Left doesn't. The Right Wing Media Machine (TM) have done an incredible job keeping disciplined use of the best terms on any cause, at least the one that best suits conservative purposes. "Intact dilation and extraction" became "partial-birth abortion". The "inheritance tax" became the "death tax". "Giving tiny tax cuts to the working class, plus massive tax cuts to millionaires" became "broad tax relief". "Universal health care" became "socialized medicine". "Affirmative action" became "quotas". "Opposition attacks" became "research reports". And so on. There's no equivalent effort on the progressive side. I know, we like to think that politicians should all be geniuses, but if they're that smart, they should be able to distill their message into language that the swing voter -- who is often not college educated, of modest means, and does not always live in the city -- can understand.
What language changes are needed? I don't know, I'm not a speechwriter. But if enough people put their heads together, I'm sure there's a solution here somewhere. I suggest starting by turning "federal deficit" into "future taxes, plus interest", which has the advantage of being 100% true. Start with that and go from there.
Update: Kerry has beaten me to the punch, and it's a better sound bite! The deficit is now the "birth tax". I love it!
Develop feedback mechanisms to discover what works and what doesn't. I have vague memories of channel surfing through MTV and seeing a segment on their "Rock the Vote" tour, a combination of summer concerts and voter registration drives. With about 1,000,000 concert goers, I think they had registered something like 10,000 voters. That's pathetic. We should be able to figure out which voter registration, contact, and turnout initiatives are working, and which aren't.
