shouting loudly

YouTube’s impact on electoral politics was probably most felt by Senator George Allen (R-VA).  In an unguarded campaign moment, he pointed to an Indian-American supporter of his opponent, Jim Webb, at a campaign rally and called him “Macaca.”  Allen maybe didn’t know about YouTube.  The resulting firestorm contributed to his plummenting poll numbers and is widely credited as a decisive moment in Webb’s eventual narrow victory.

Political scientists with an interest in online politics have been widely discussing the impact that Youtube will have on the 2008 election.  There will be a conference on it in April, which will culminate in a special issue of the Journal of Information Technology and Politics.  I expected to stay out of the fray with this one, myself, because my stance generally is that YouTube is just one in a whole suite of new tools that take advantage of the conditions of online information abundance and ridiculously low transaction costs to produce a new political environment. I would classify studies of “YouTube and the 2008 election” of running the same risk as studies of “canvassing and the 2008 election” or “phone banking and the 2008 election.”  Yes, it’s important.  But isolating it as a variable can be a tad bit weird.

That said, 2008′s “Macaca moment” pretty clearly just happened on Friday, and color me interested in the results.  Michelle Bachmann (R-MN06) was playing the role of loyal McCain surrogate on Hardball with Chris Matthews when the following exchange occurred:

MATTHEWS: So you think Barack Obama may have anti-American views?

BACHMANN: Absolutely. I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views.

[...]

MATTHEWS: How many Congresspeople, members of Congress, are in that anti-American crowd you describe? How many Congresspeople that you serve with?

BACHMANN: Right now —

MATTHEWS: How many are anti-American in the Congress right now that you serve with?

BACHMANN: You’d have to ask them, Chris. I’m focusing on Barack Obama and the people that he’s been associated with and I’m very worried about their anti-American nature.

MATTHEWS: But do you suspect there are a lot of people you serve with — well, he’s the United States senator from Illinois, he’s one of the people you suspect as being anti-American. How many people in Congress of the United States do you believe are ant-American? Is he alone or are there others? How many do you suspect of your colleagues of being anti-American.

BACHMANN: What I would say what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would be — would love to see an expose like that.

Wow.  “The news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look… into whether people in Congress are pro-America or anti-America.”  Wow.  On a scale of zero to stupid, Bachmann pretty much just broke the meter.  Of course, so far this is a cable tv effect — the 24-hour news networks need to be fed, they need a ton of surrogates, and that means that someone, somewhere, is going to eventually say something stupid.  Once they do, that becomes the topic of discussion for the news cycle.  It’ll be replaced and forgotten in a few days.  Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment is already such old news that I can barely remember it.  By April, that reference will basically have disappeared from the radar.

Ah, but the magic of YouTube.  Or, more specifically, the magic of embedded YouTube clips in the hands of elite progressive bloggers.  Like I said, YouTube is just one of many tools.  It contributes to a pervasive media environment in which information is nearly frictionless, and filtering is the dominant challenge.  The elite progressive blogosphere showed immense interest in this topic, seizing on it as the latest example of claw-your-eyes-out desperation on the part of the Right.  Did she just call for a renewed House Unamerican Activities Commision?  Joe McCarthy called, he wants his schtick back.

I argue in a totally-unpolished chapter of my dissertation that in the new online media environment, the central challenge to effective collective action is no longer the Free Ridership.  Wikipedia is a great example of a pure public good that, contrary to four decades of political economic theory-building, is anything but underprovided.  With transaction costs as low as they are, the overwhelming challenge to collective action lies in filtering.  The power law distributions that have been noted elsewhere as defining web traffic help to solve this mass coordination problem, leading to overwhelming hubs such as DailyKos and HuffingtonPost.

Bachmann has just become the latest example of what happens when a politician essentially volunteers as the coordination point for outreach and action from online activists.  Over the course of the weekend, Bachmann’s opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, received over $700,000 in online donations.  Visitors to DailyKos and OpenLeft were pointed in the direction of his ActBlue page, helping to funnel $300,000+ through that portal alone.  To put those numbers in perspective, Tinklenberg apparently raised roughly $1,000,000 for the entire 3rd quarter of 2008.  That’s simply a massive, game-changing tide of money.  The Cook Political Report reponded to all this action on Monday, moving the MN-06 race from “Leans Republican” to “Toss Up” status.  We’ll have to see in two weeks whether it bears electoral fruit.

Kos provides some great insight into the scuffle here.  In short, he points out that many elected officials have not adapted to the new information environment in which their attempts at spin can be placed directly next to their original words.  Bachmann has tried to claim that the liberal media is twisting her words.  That’s a lot harder to do when her words themselves are placed prominently on display, in context, at a moments’ notice.  The online information environment is one where data doesn’t dissipate into the ether.  Instead, it lies there in the soup, waiting for an elite actor with a giant audience to dip in and rescue it from obscurity.  And in this environment, losing the news cycle can have much greater consequences than it used to.  $700K in a weekend.  Game-changing money, and a potential change in electoral outcome, all because of a stupid TV interview.  That, my friends, is the effect of YouTube (looped in with a suite of other tools, and placed in the hands of an emerging set of new interest group elites) on 21st century electoral politics.

[And yeah, if Tinklenberg pulls this thing off, you can pretty much count on seeing this blog post, in updated form and with plenty of data behind it, as a conference paper submission from me in April.  For any other internet & politics researchers out there, this is me calling dibs!]