Have conservatives turned a corner?

The annual Politics Online conference is this week. This is definitely a conference for the sausage makers and is aimed at those working in nonprofit, government or political technology. When I first attended in 2006, this conference helped my thesis come together, so I’ve always been grateful for it.

As I sat through the sessions yesterday, something seemed off. It seemed…flat. The panels weren’t insightful, and I’d heard most of the case studies. Honestly, the energy felt deflated.

While the conference is nonpartisan, about 20% of attendees and panelists are right-of-center. I’m not complaining because up to this point, the best people were on the left. The developers and strategists that I wanted to see belonged to the other side of the aisle.

After I sat through the pre-lunch talk with Joe Trippi, it hit me how much the online situation has changed.

Trippi did a lot of really cool things…back in 2004. I highly recommend his book, The Revolution Won’t Be Televised, but now it’s part of history. It shouldn’t be viewed as a current strategy piece.

Over and over, he kept discussing MoveOn, Meetup and the resistance of the GOP to the web. He and the other speaker, Rod Martin from Paypal, were interesting, but I got the overall impression that not much had changed for Trippi since 2007. I wouldn’t discount his career since you can influence politics in DC from beyond the grave (i.e. Reagan, FDR and JFK), but it was sad.

When was the last time that MoveOn made the news? Oh, they still send emails. I’m on their list. But they’re formulaic and boring. Online email strategy has evolved (disclosure: email fundraising is primarily what I do professionally), and they seem stuck in the anti-Bush frame. How much longer will that message resound? At some point even MoveOn will need to move on.

Then there was the Q&A from the audience during various sessions.

Since the overwhelming majority of the audience were Democrats or left-leaning nonprofits, almost all of the questions surrounded the Obama election.

The Obama election? That was 17 months ago. In the online world, that’s practically a lifetime. Everything that can be studied has been analyzed and dissected.

Then it hit me. After years of self-flagellation and bemoaning (and I was one of the many bloggers doing the moaning), the right has actually achieved success on web. Note that I didn’t say Republicans, but the right. There are still pockets of resistance, especially among standing members in Congress and state legislatures. I’m not the only one to notice. Look at these stories at The Hill and The Weekly Standard.

Since 2008, conservatives have seen McDonnell, Brown and Tea Parties. All of which were fueled by the web.

The Bob McDonnell and Scott Brown campaigns expanded on lessons learned from the Obama campaign and took it to the next level. Just look at online ad spending. Obama’s people spent 4%. McDonnell spent 10%. (Correction: McDonnell spent 8%, Brown spent 10%.) Google is now advising all campaigns at least spend 10%.

Without the technologies that liberals and Democrats used in 2006 and 2008, the tea parties wouldn’t exist. Ironically, the liberal developers are the ones who gave those crazed masses their tool box.

This post isn’t to mock the left or proudly announce that we won. We haven’t, and we’re far from it. As Rod Martin declared, the web has made politics more and more volatile.

The internet embodies populist politics. Since populism swings back and forth from left to right depending on the economy, foreign policy, wars and other factors, our political cycle could resemble a roller coaster going forward.

In other words, the web is the tool of the angry and upset. In 2006 and 2008, BDS ruled the interwebs and motivated the folks agreeing with that message.

Now the tables have turned, and the formerly silent majority has literally taken to the streets.

I would argue that tea parties are slightly different. Polls show that 25% of Americans identify with those values. At no point in history has one-fourth of our population marched with liberal or progressive movements.

I would also argue that tea parties are the first truly grassroots movement that we’ve seen in decades. Grassroots movements are marked by chaotic order, widespread issues and are leaderless. Those are three attacks that the media has repeatedly made on tea partiers.

Yes, Obama had millions of small dollar donors. Yes, he got 53% of the vote, but most of them now disapprove of his performance. Further examination of his fundraising shows that traditional big dollar donors were the backbone of his election machine. It’s a nice Alinsky-esqe story to say that Obama appealed to the little guy–the $5 donor–but his muscle came from the established monied left.

The fate of Organizing for America serves as further evidence that the Obama campaign was just grass-washing. What happened to them? Much like MoveOn, when was the last time you heard from them? Even the overall netroots haven’t done much. The plot to infiltrate the April 15 tea parties bombed. What ever happened to the plan of getting OFA members to call talk radio?

:::grasshoppers chirping:::

While the left may have convinced themselves that they created the first “grassroots” energetic movement online, the evidence suggests that it was still a very top-down campaign that Democrats have always run. Now that the powerful are in charge, they can ignore the little people they leveraged to get there.

I saw this firsthand last fall. The project that I was working on was the subject of a high-profile story from an arm of Center for American Progress. Overnight, our hate mail quadrupled and our traffic certainly increased. However, when I drilled down and studied the blog posts that were complaining about us, I noticed that they all copied one of the major liberal blogs, primarily Think Progress. And by copy, I literally mean copy. We got hundreds of hits from small bloggers who cut and pasted the Think Progress post.

I had never seen anything like it on the right. Almost all of the posts lacked attribution. I think this example highlights the very hierarchical nature of the netroots that is symptomatic of the entire left.

But what about the success stories on the right? The Politics Online conference did highlight those. As I listened to the the case studies, I realized that I had already heard them. Through sheer desperation, the right has organically built ways to communicate. Blogs such as The Next Right, weekly events like Heritage’s Blogger Briefing and annual conferences like Americans for Prosperity’s RightOnline communicate activities and educate members about emerging technologies.

Last year, I taught a couple of sessions at RightOnline and was shocked to see 80 year-old grandmas in the audience. They recognized that technology had changed, and they as individuals, needed to change in order for the conservative movement to win.

The morning after election day 2008, the establishment also started listening. We know that Red State has become influential on the Hill, and CPAC has done a great job of incorporating digital media and bloggers into the conference. Also, The Heritage Foundation has integrated digital media into every aspect of their activities. Their hard work should be applauded. Like their policies or not, their work is always imaginative. Do you get much more old-school conservative establishment than The Heritage Foundation and CPAC?

A telling comment at Politics Online captures the state of the liberal netroots. During a panel on social media apps, an audience member asked what it would take for more people to embrace smart phones. Since the next wave of technology is mobile, it’s dependent on individual users to voluntarily opt-in.

The panelist replied, “subsidized smart phones.”

That’s right! In order for the left to reach the next level, the government needs to subsidize smart phone adoption for the average tax payer. Unlike adoption on social networks, which only required a computer and an internet connection, mobile adoption requires the average user going to AT&T or Verizon and forking over $100 or more a month to access Facebook on the road.

I was floored. Cost is an issue, and I hate how phones are attached to carriers. But expecting the government to subsidize smart phones so that someone under the poverty line can become the Mayor of Taco Bell on FourSquare is too much.

This is another area where the right may have an advantage. Since polls show that tea party members make more money, they’re more likely to adopt new technology and use smart phones.

With recent court decisions making a national broadband plan and Net Neutrality a giant question mark, I think momentum has finally shifted right. This isn’t accidental. Conservatives at every level, from executives at think tanks to frustrated mommybloggers, have gotten involved and fought to get here.

As I mentioned earlier, we still have a tremendous amount of work ahead. If Republicans are lucky in November and regain control of both Houses, they need to enact swift fiscal reform and dramatically cut spending and taxes. Conservatives have the message, but the biggest question remains–has the GOP learned?