Dean’s Dot Com Bust
It looks like Dean’s vaunted internet bubble is going to burst, or at least it has peaked out:
The buzz says Democratic front-runner Howard Dean is king of the Internet – but in some ways, President Bush has trumped Dean at his own game.
Dean’s Web site yesterday boasted of 564,000 Internet supporters, but the Bush-Cheney campaign says its e-mail list is 6 million – a 10-1 lead. That includes 400,000 who have signed up for an active role as “team leaders”.
An ABC News poll last month raised eyebrows by showing that Bush wallops Dean among Internet users as well as the tech-averse – the president tops Dean by 18 points in either case.
Deanforamerica.com is way ahead in Internet fund-raising – campaign manager Joe Trippi says about $20 million of Dean’s $41 million cash haul came over the Web, where Bush raised just $3.1 million. But Bush supporters say they’re now using the site georgewbush.com to reach more small donors – the average Bush Web donation is a modest $140.
Indeed, after all the gee-whiz wonder about Dean’s pioneering use of the Internet, it could be that he has hit a ceiling. Trippi predicted exponential growth in ‘Net supporters to 900,000 by the end of 2003 – but Dean is still short of 600,000.
Team Dean boasts of using the Internet for 21st-century organizing, but as of yesterday a mere 758 Iowans had used the deanforamerica.com site to pledge to go to the Iowa caucuses.
For months, Dean quickly topped or doubled every cash goal he set on the Web – but not last week. He set a $700,000 goal for Friday midnight and claimed he barely met it with $701,000 by then. The deadline actually was put off two days and the target raised to $800,000.
This a good trend — one we should accelerate to remove all doubt of who is winning the internet war.
Make a donation to the Bush-Cheney ’04 re-election campaign and then sign up to be a team leader. If you are a blogger then sign up to be on the Blogs for Bush Team and go to Hobbs’ place to download the latest Blogs for Bush blogroll.
More to come on Wictory Wednesday (which you should also sign up for).
it would be a fairer stat if you compared the combined traffic for ALL of the democratic candidates to bushes traffic
I had to take down the list of all the Bloggers for Bush, as per the request of Matt at the bloggersforbush blog. He wants B4B to be the central repository of that information. Still, if you want the list for easy transferring of some or all of them to your blogroll, email me (email address on my blog) and I’ll send it to you in a Word document.