Evidence that Slatecard, bootstrapped project of Republican consultant David All (and web developer Sendhil Panchadsaram), is “the Republican ActBlue” can be found throughout mainstream political coverage over the past six months. Here are just a few:

Campaigns and Elections:

Then why the development of small donor online vehicles, including the Democratic ActBlue and Republican Slatecard, that aim to raise small donations on the congressional level? Both tools are growing substantially, and several candidates for Congress are highlighted on those sites.

USA Today:

“Your average online donor is an impulse buyer,” said David All, a Washington, D.C.-based consultant who last year founded Slatecard.com, which he hopes to be a Republican answer to ActBlue. So far, the site’s donors have raised more than $5,000 for GOP presidential candidates.

Wall Street Journal [$]:

Mr. All, the Republican consultant, started a rival site last October called SlateCard.com. It has raised just $300,000. “What I’m finding is a lot of Republican campaigns are just hiring college kids or using their son who has a Facebook account,” said the 28-year-old Mr. All. “They don’t understand what this is all about.”

Human Events:

Slatecard aims to raise money for Republican candidates in the same way that ActBlue has for Democrats. Slatecard lets users create profiles (“slatecards”) for candidates they support and then raise money by donating to that candidate and passing it on to friends, family members, co workers — anyone — through blogs, emails, and social networking groups.

Wired:

“If you read the statute, the result is not surprising,” said Don McGahn, an attorney who advises Slatecard, the Republicans’ answer to ActBlue. “However, when they passed the statute, there wasn’t even the internet … what it really shows is that the way to fix this is to pass legislation to update the Matching Payment Act .”

While Slatecard is more elegant, interactive and transparent than its counterparts, it seems that All’s sometimes controversial self-promotion has made the lion’s share of difference, especially as he has succeeded in persuading local congressional campaigns to use his site, sometimes making it their exclusive online fundraising platform.

But if you need further evidence that Slatecard is the take-all (no pun intended) winner of the online GOP fundraising tool primary, consider the image at right, taken from the sidebar of leading Republican activist site RedState. It’s a Slatecard widget encouraging contributions to the McCain camapign.

It’s noteworthy not just for being there but for what it replaces: Nearly a year ago, RedState announced it was backing one of the future also-rans, Big Red Tent:

Patrick Ruffini has said more than once that the right needs to stop building what the left already has and instead build the next big thing. As part of heading in that direction, please let me introduce you to the Big Red Tent. We didn’t build it, but we’re actively supporting it.

There is more irony here: Ruffini is chiefly responsible for the other runner-up, Rightroots, and RedState’s Erick Erickson was party to a minor internecine fight with All during the Republican primary season. To back All’s Slatecard over Big Red Tent may have been a difficult choice, but considering how the other two have languished, it may have been no choice at all.

Update: David writes to say that 48 candidates now have used Slatecard exclusively for online fundraising, though some have already lost their primary or special elections. That’s impressive, especially for a site not yet nine months old.

A hearty congrats to all featured, and I think my colleague the Virginia delegate to QandO may be quoted in the piece. Yet the pay wall leaves me wondering. As a resister of all things Star Trek (and sympathizer with K-Lo at The Corner on this) I’m not sure if I should be envious; Matt Lewis’s Town Hall commenters are pretty harsh, and not just the Ronulans.

But the article isn’t public, so I can’t judge for myself, nor can bloggers or their commentariats. C&E publishes much of its content on the website, but right now there is a little symbol next to the one article that’s actually about bloggers. Who are the ad wizards at C&E who came up with this one?

I also wonder if the falling out between David and Erick (and others) from a few months back gets any inches. My guess is not, and even if I’m wrong, it makes me think it’s too bad Wonkette doesn’t report on its city’s industry in the same depth as Valleywag (retooled in early 2007) or even Gawker (retooling, but not pulled).

Certainly the Beltway and the District is as much a company town as the Silicon Valley/Palo Alto, so where’s the 100-word-version? Someone, please, quote the key grafs in a blog post. Make it so.

And to tell the truth, I probably watched ST:TNG on afternoon television for at least thee years in middle school.

Update: I have now read the article, and I am pleasantly surprised that the kerfuffle noted above is indeed covered, and that author Walter Alarkon even used the word “kerfuffle.” Aside from the annoying Star Trek motif and an embarrassingly lame pull quote, the article does a reasonably good job of explaining the current challenges Republican web strategists face. If the piece brings a wider awareness to these issues, it’ll have done all it needs to.

You can read the article here in the original layout; thanks to Theodora in the comments for bringing it to my attention. Still, the snazzy NXTbook software (which doesn’t even live on the C&E page) features no plain text, so it’s next to invisible to search engines. Likewise, it doesn’t let you copy and paste, so it’s next to useless for blogging.

Updated again: In the comments, it has been pointed out that there is an XML page running in the background, so it’s not a total SEO disaster. Meanwhile, Rob Bluey is weighing in…

I wasn’t going to post it, but I feel the need to set the record straight. For starters, I hate Star Trek.

Had the Republicans lost their two special election contests to replace deceased GOP House members, one would see the papers filled with analyses of the coming debacle for Republican hopes in 2008. Now that they have won both handily, expect most to either ignore the races altogether or chalk up the wins to local Republican strength.

Indeed, about the closer-watched Ohio election the Washington Post merely ran an AP story on A02; the Viriginia story ran on B05 in the Metro section. Neither buried, but neither featured. Had Weirauch had won, the anti-Republican mood of ‘06 would seem to be continuing. So it’s kind of funny where the Post chose to cut off the wire report:

But Democrats had high hopes about Weirauch’s chances against the younger Latta. This was her third run for the House, and last year, against Gillmor, she received the biggest share of the vote — 43 percent — of any Democrat in the district’s history.

I noticed the same dearth of barking from the blogs, too. Here’s everything the Memeorandum algorithm deemed significant this morning:

And the whole story was off the page by the beep of twelve.

Daily Kos featured just one recap of the special election, which seemed very bitter even after explaining how the NRCC had spent a big chunk of its cash on hand:

The Republicans are still trying to pretend that 2006 was an aberration. Yet they have to go all-out, it seems, to hold the ground they already have.

Yes, I was hoping for a better performance in this district. Yes, I’m disappointed.

Meanwhile, the RNC’s Jason Richardson said nyah in a post for GOP.com and at RedState, focused not on the party committees, but on the extra-party support apparatus:

Weirauch had heavy support from the DCCC, Daily Kos, Act Blue, Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, Harry Reid, and EMILY’s LIST. We were severely out-manned in Ohio and Virginia and this is what they have to show for it? We came to the game to win. All in all, the liberal blogosphere should take heed: You’re not as powerful as you think and it’s about results not PR.

To be sure, these were retentions and the Virginia election was never much of a contest. But the Ohio race between Republican Bob Latta and Democrat Robin Weirauch was a focal point of both parties in recent weeks, with both parties’ house committees pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into the district. Online, Slatecard and Big Red Tent both spotlighted the race and sent out fundraising pleas; Slatecard raised $1,908 from 21 supporters. Meanwhile Weirauch apparently collected more than $93,000 from ActBlue, some $15,600 raised by the Daily Kos/Open Left-backed Blue Majority and $12,300 by Wesley Clark’s WesPAC.

One race was obviously a dud and the other would prove to be one, too. It’s hard to nationalize a special election, and there was no Paul Hackett. In fact, there was barely an Iraq debate — though the Democrat in the Viriginia race, Philip Forgit, was an Iraq veteran. So the leftroots raised more money, but the rightroots (if not Rightroots) ended up with the win. But neither the leftosphere nor rightosphere owns this win or loss. This race just wasn’t won or lost online. And if it was a status quo election, Republicans have to be pleased with that.

Update: I somehow managed to miss Eric Pfeiffer’s understated observation, posted just after the beep-beep of twelve-thirty:

Bloggers Respond With Restraint to Yesterday’s OH/VA Special Elections

At least.

On Thursday I gave a somewhat-impulsive thumbs-up to RedState’s call for CNN to sack their political director. National Review’s indispensible Jim Geraghty has outlined eight editorial oversights (four quite serious, four merely problematic) in CNN’s vetting of the televised questioners. One or two would be enough to generate a blogswarm, but eight looks like malicious negligence, and it subseqently became a full-fledged blogstorm. Worse, CNN’s statement didn’t even attempt to be a “non-apology apology” — they’re digging in their heels and claiming:

The issues raised during last night’s debate were legitimate and relevant no matter who was asking the questions. The vested interests who are challenging the credibility of the questioners are trying to distract voters from the substantive issues they care most about.

Did somebody say “fake but accurate”? As QandO’s McQ notes, the hubris implicit in that statement is galling:

Says who? Says CNN, that’s who. It is the network that chose the questions that would be aired. Consequently what aired had nothing to do with what voters found to be the substantive issues of the day, but instead had everything to do with — say it with me — what CNN decided were the substantive issues of the day.

I stand by my initial judgement — in fact, I am all the more sure of it — but I realize it isn’t going to happen. (FWIW, CNN’s political director is Sam Feist; one wonders if indie rock/iPod Nano darling Feist could do any worse). And the truth is it wouldn’t make up for the debacle, so I concede that a change is not imperative. What would be better is a pro-active solution — that is, another debate. And so I am very intrigued by a new proposal, this time issued jointly by RedState and Human Events (both subsidiaries of Eagle Pubishing), for a “do-over debate”:

We have a base of readers who represent the Republican wing of the Republican Party. You — and the Republican Party — deserve to face the questions posed by undecided Republicans, not Democratic activists. We will solicit and obtain YouTube videos from those people and vet each questioner to establish that they are — really — undecided Republicans. We hope to include soldiers in the field in Iraq, Young Republicans, and others who still have not decided among you.

Today, allow us to make you this offer: We will organize a debate at a time and date amenable to you all. We will work with a national broadcaster to broadcast the debate as well as offer it online. We, not the liberal drive by media, will ensure the questioners are who they say they are. And we will choose them based on criteria that will be fully disclosed to you all which ensure the questioners aren’t activists for any Democratic candidate.

I think this is a terrific idea. The MSM no longer has a monopoly on campaign coverage, so why should they have a monopoly over organizing candidate debates? The only good answer is because they control the airwaves. Could Fox News be persuaded to air it? Possibly. C-SPAN would certainly set up a camera, it could be simulcast on the web, and it would obviously be made available on YouTube. Heck, put it on the History Channel. I bet more people would watch it.

And if so desired, Google/YouTube (GooTube, if you will) need not formally be involved. Eagle’s online outlets could independently create a YouTube account, put RedState’s Erick Erickson and Human Events’ Jed Babbin in a short video soliciting questions, and anyone could post their videos as responses. Eagle could narrow them down, submit them to a hand-picked group of conservative bloggers to identify the best, and blog readers would be invited to vet the questions themselves. The ultimate decisions should still be made by the organizing consortium, but the crowdsourcing would be a substantial (if not bulletproof) way to head off complaints from conservatives. Necessarily, this would aso give the campaigns time to study the questions and prepare well-thought out answers — this too would be different from the “gotcha” element that annoyed so many in the CNN/YouTube debate.

Of course, the last point hints at the major reason why it wouldn’t happen. Here I’ll note: I cannot formally join the call for such a debate; as I point out whenever relevant, New Media Strategies consults for the Fred Thompson campaign, and I won’t put the campaign or my employer on the spot. Same goes for the other campaigns, though — the Iowa caucuses are now a month away and no campaign should be pressured to join a debate in a time frame this limited. The CNN/YouTube debate required months, not to mention a “Save the Debate” movement by Republican bloggers, to happen at all. So don’t hold your breath, and save your Facebook campaigns. But it’s a terrific idea.

To address another issue: A few commenters on the above-mentioned post here, including some friends of Blog P.I., apparently read my criticism of the debate as a complaint about tough questions. If I understand them correctly, they feared a not-yet-proposed alternative would result in “softball” questions. I replied that they were mistaken, and pointed to a prediction by Patterico following the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate in July:

The Democrat debate was dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?” And the Republican debate will be dominated by questioners asking: “Why can’t you be more leftist?”

That pretty much nailed it. The problem is not that the issues CNN is so pleased with itself for raising were illegitimate or unfair. They were not. It’s that those Dem-leaning questions asked by Dem-leaning YouTubers were general election questions, and the general election audience generally (as it were) was not watching. Certainly Republicans should keep an eye toward next November, but a debate for a Republican primary should focus on issues that matter to Republicans. Say what you will, but “don’t ask, don’t tell” just isn’t one of them, and it doesn’t help Republican voters make up their minds. It does no good when Google flies a publicly-identifiable Hillary Clinton supporter in to berate the candidates about their position on the issue. (One which, I would like to point out, is unlikely to be a major factor in the general, either.) In fact, it rises to the level of farce when Anderson Cooper asks said Hillary supporter to rule on whether or not the candidates answered his question and the guy says “no,” yet anyone who was paying attention knows they did answer his question honestly, but he just didn’t like their answers.

True, CNN did air questions about illegal immigration, gun rights and religion. But RedState/Human Events would query those subjects, too. They might even include a question about the Bible that doesn’t conform to slack-jawed yokel stereotypes (sorry, Joseph Dearing, whomever you are, but when you assert that your question tells us “everything we need to know” about the GOP hopefuls, that’s how you come across). Although various writers at RedState and Human Events have evinced support for various candidates (Erickson most notably in favor of Fred Thompson, I can’t help but note), I would argue they have a greater interest than CNN in a strong, fair debate that includes difficult questions for all the candidates, because (as Erickson and Babbin point out) it’s their audience who will be deciding which Republican goes on to the general election.

In short, RedState and Human Events would be better curators of a Republican debate than CNN.

Because I am confident that this do-over debate will not come to pass, I encourage both to organize similar debates for Senate and House candidates, whose primaries mostly will not be decided until further into next year. This would give them time to work out the kinks, gain experience appealing to local television channels for airtime, and give them credibility in proposing such a debate in 2012 (er, 2011, but you know what I mean). I call on Pajamas Media, NRO, Heritage or any other independent, webbish, GOP-leaning organization to do the same. Now that I think about it, I call on Josh Marshall’s TPM empire to do the same for Democrats.

You know what would be awesome next fall, sometime after the conventions and before the general election, Commission on Presidential Debates-permitting? A RedState/Daily Kos YouTube debate.

Ahead of me already?

For most of the 20th century, the color red was associated with Communism, and for reasons that scarcely need explaining, it carried a decidedly negative association in the West: Better dead than red, after all. The American left certainly had its share of Stalinists, and anti-Communists on the right didn’t hesitate in extending the term. When I lived in Eugene, Oregon, the town daily Register-Guard was sometimes referred to as the Red Guard.

Likewise, the color blue is sometimes associated with nobility in Europe and the upper class in America, particularly in the Northeast — I refer to the term blue blood. The stereotype of rich, right-wing industrialists who cannot identify with regular Americans has probably been used against every Republican candidate since Lincoln. The recognition that this can be a political liability is what led Mike Huckabee to recently descrbe himself as “a blue-collar Republican, not a blueblood Republican.”

Meanwhile, witness the rapid adoption of the terminology. One of the rightosphere’s best-known websites is RedState; an online political firm founded by former Howard Dean staffers is called Blue State Digital.

It’s worth remembering that in elections prior to 2000, the colors were not standardized across the television networks, and they also switched colors between the parties. In 2000, chance might have had red assigned to Democrats and blue to Republicans. The prolonged attention to the electoral map might have given rise to opposite definitions for the terms, but would they have stuck?

I don’t think so. The vice versa could never have become political shorthand in this country because neither side would allow it. Reversed, the colors would draw attention to negative aspects of each party’s intellectual and sociological histories.

Therefore, the switch is serendipitous — by adopting the other side’s derogatory colors, each cancels out the other, and in the 21st century can accrue all-new (and perhaps more positive) political connotations.

Democratic candidates for federal office have seen more than $25 million come through the web site ActBlue — some of which will eventually flow to the Democratic National Committee for use during the general election. Republicans, meanwhile, have seen just a tiny ripple of activity on the ABC PAC web site — $385 raised for the presidential candidates to date — which is supposed to be ActBlue’s direct competition.

Sure, at one time it was supposed to be. But as this blog and other blogs have pointed out, it’s never had the kind of support such that it should actually be spoken of in the same sentence. Not to mention that several journalists, including Mosk’s colleague Chris Cillizza, have (apparently ignorantly) misrepresented what ActBlue means to different Democratic candidates.

Mosk’s brief report is of a piece with this, not knowing or bothering to differentiate between the two websites. Is it fair to point out that Democrats are doing better with their independent online fundraising tools? Absolutely. Is it fair to compare ActBlue’s total fundraising figures over three cycles compared to ABC’s (admittedly underwhelming) year in existence? Not without explaining the situation, it’s not.

But it gets worse:

Now there is a new effort to change that. R. Rebecca Donatelli, a pioneer of Internet fundraising who help raise some of the nation’s first online dollars for John McCain in 2000, has revealed she and partner Michael Palmer are working on a new, and she hopes improved, version of ABC PAC to launch this fall. While she continues to work on behalf of McCain, she said she is optimistic the improvements to ABC PAC will help all of the Republican candidates. Given the numbers they are posting on the site right now, it would be tough to make things worse.

This “new effort,” as Mosk doesn’t adequately explain, is a second go at the same operation by the same person responsible for ABC’s ineffectiveness. Worse, though, Mosk is apparently unaware of other new ventures by GOP activists in the same space. Even before Mosk’s posting, there were two new efforts gearing up to do same thing:

• Big Red Tent, created by a couple of Austin GOP consultants, supported by RedState
• Slatecard, created by DC GOP “modern media” evangelist David All, still yet to launch

Both sites have yet to prove themselves, sure. But considering that Mr. Mosk was moved to write a post about ABC PAC, isn’t this worth an correction? Or better yet — another post?

But there is a growing realization, in some quarters, that they need an answer to the Dem-leaning netroots, and that it won’t happen by itself. This is exemplified by a recent diary user-submitted blog entry — “The Difference Between Daily Kos and Red State (hint: Not favorable to Red State)” — asking whether conservative bloggers would organize to support a candidate for retiring Rep. Marty Meehan’s Massachusetts seat:

This is why the Left Netroots are killing us. They actually mobilize and work to get their candidates elected. Whereas on most Conservative sites, all you get is the same-o same-o. … The Dems and Left Netroots have no fear of supporting (quite strongly) candidates in the reddest of seats.

We need to contest this special election.

The commenters were certainly responsive, and it’ll be interesting to see if they actually carry through. As of now, Republican bloggers have no game plan and few connections to state and local parties. Their predicament resembles that of the Democratic netroots circa 2003 — and they famously went oh-and-something before backing a slate of winning candidates in 2006.

All of which raises several interesting questions, most of which I’m not prepared to analyze here. But the thread following the post raises a few. One is whether the online right is willing to make ideological concessions in the name of winning seats. Here’s one comment to that effect, from the blogger behind My Election Analysis:

For all their many, many faults, Kossacks are actually willing to accept a significant amount of ideological diversity in their caucus to win these types of districts. This is actually one of Kos’s main points. Stephanie Herseth has a lifetime ACU of 49. That’s in the range of Arlen Specter’s rating, but they would never dream of primary-ing Herseth with someone from the far left of the party.

Sure they primaried Lieberman in blue Connecticut, but they wisely let the Nelsons (lifetime ACU 53 (NE) and 41 (FL)) of the world have a pass. If a Republican is going to win this seat, he or she is going to have to be a fairly liberal Republican. There is simply no way that a pro-lifer or a candidate who isn’t pro-civil-unions at least is going to win a federal election here. And he or she will probably have to be a Christie Whitman wishy-washy personality overall. But are we really going to tolerate them, or are we going to have a Club For Growth candidate challenging them after their first term?

That is an excellent question; after all, it was only a few months ago they were going about unseating liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee (and hounding the NRSC for supporting him).

This leads to another question: The Dem-leaning netroots have a much more contentious relationship with their party’s existing operatives than do the nascent rightroots (aside: eventually today’s netroots should be called the “leftroots” and “netroots” can become a catch-all term for online political activists, but we’re not there yet). But if online Republicans do step up and ask for a bigger voice in their party’s campaigns, will there be similar acrimony to what happens on the left? Here’s R.E. Finch, in the thread:

I’ve harped. I’ve cajoled. Last January, I worked for a couple of weeks to develop a really sharp template proposal for a Conservative-based netroots program, then tailored it to the needs of some GOP candidates. I had it looked over by some of my more campaign-savvy associates, then tweaked it and pitched it.

What happened? … [T]his idea was a non-starter.

I sensed a strong aversion on the part of the GOP apparatus to engage any people-intensive tool over which it cannot exercise complete control. The thought of adding a netroots coordination section to a GOP campaign plan scares some of these people in a herding-cats sort of way. Maybe right now that isn’t an unreasonable position to take. … But for the long-term I doubt the GOP can shun coming up with its own ways to use this new medium’s people resources to its advantage.

Surprising? Not hardly, especially if you take Mike Turk’s experiences with Bush-Cheney ‘04 and the RNC into account. Maybe it won’t be acrimony per se — for example, it’s hard to imagine Erick Erickson and NR getting into it like Markos Moulitsas and TNR — but estrangement instead. That’s the status quo, and there are few signs of change ahead.

Ultimately, it may be up to Finch, the RedStaters and their allies to take on Internet party-building projects themselves; the Republican establishment will only “get it” once everything has been done for them. That seems to be David All’s conclusion:

I continue to read about the success of ActBlue, and I’m tired of waiting for something to emerge organically which will help our guys out in the field.

If you’re interested in being a part of a Republican counter-part, send me an email.

I will head up the development/implementation effort if you will financially support its development. Only serious replies. We don’t have much time.

It’s a start, maybe. Republican bloggers can build an infrastructure without Republican consultants. But that brings us to another question: Can they do it without Republican money?

Rarer still is for a group blog to be bought out — but this past month, that’s just what’s happened at RedState. If anything, that deal less resembles those mentioned above than the Washington Post’s acquisition of Slate from Microsoft two years ago.

In mid-December, the conservative community group site announced it had agreed to be purchased by Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, Regnery Publishing, Evans-Novak Political Report, the Conservative Book Club, among other movement conservative publishing enterprises.

RedState already had undergone several changes since its launch in 2004 as a 527, including a switch from RedState.org to RedState.com in 2005 to create a for-profit entity that could accept advertising. This was followed by a major redesign and relaunch in the middle of last year, whereupon founding director Erick Erickson was hired/stepped up to run the site full-time. Most of the ad revenue went to him, which was just enough to get by on. But it brought RedState to another crossroads: Paying Erickson stretched the site’s resources too thin to develop and expand the site further.

About a year ago the site’s directors — Erickson plus Clayton Wagar, Mike Krempasky and Ben Domenech — started looking ahead once again, this time with an eye toward a merger. They entertained offers from a few different entities — whose names, alas, I was not told — but questions lingered about whether those groups and individuals understood the site.

The first talks with Eagle, in late spring or early summer of 2006, started out no more serious than those with suitors who had come and gone. But that soon changed. Chiefly, Eagle promised to:

• Respect the brand and not change it fundamentally
• Invest in the property long-term, with an eye toward financial viability
• Keep Erickson and hire Wagar as a consultant to make sure of it

As Erickson told me: “They made it clear to us, we see you as your own brand.” And Eagle’s Group Publisher Stephen O’Connor confirmed, they didn’t “want to break something that’s fixed.”

The formal process began in mid-summer, and sometime in the fall an agreement was hammered out for an undisclosed sum. RedStaters themselves earned a share of the proceeds — and not just the site’s directors, either. About 20 contributors overall, including site co-founder and former director Josh Trevino, did as well. (Some were unable to accept the money on account of job-related ethical considerations.) “Nobody’s going to afford a Bentley,” said Domenech. More like “a few car payments.”

So what will change? For one thing, Erickson now has a boss in Eagle’s e-business head, Stuart Richens. Upon the initial announcement, the plan was for Human Events online editor Robert Bluey to be a liaison between RedState and Eagle/Human Events — mostly to rope Erickson into their editorial meetings. However, as noted here recently, Bluey will soon depart for Heritage. Now Erickson will work directly with Richens, who like himself and Wagar, is based in Georgia.

Although Krempasky and Domenech retain no official oversight of the company, they will remain with Erickson and Wagar as directors — along with recently-elevated directors Jeff Emanuel and Thomas Crown — but only for making editorial board decisions, not running the business. Erickson wrote in a subsequent announcement, “In the past, we’ve used the terminology ‘Directors’ and we will probably continue to do so.” The titles will remain the same, though it won’t carry the same legal meaning.

When I spoke to principals from Eagle and RedState in mid-December, there were no existing plans for writers from the Human Events site to cross over to the other, but already that’s been the case: Human Events has a regular feature, “Today on RedState” which sends traffic in that direction, while Bluey had a post on RedState just yesterday.

Is there overlap between Human Events and RedState? Both sides believe there is not: While both are obviously online conservative group efforts, they see Human Events as news editorial content whereas RedState is user-generated. Eagle is a publishing house with different labels, and RedState would just be the newest addition.

For a long time, RedState was thought of as Daily Kos for the right, in terms of being a community politics site, down to using the same content management system. And they too were conscious of this debt, although where dKos is a purely grassroots site, RedState aimed to be more tightly organized. Their mid-summer move from Scoop to Drupal could be seen as one step in that direction. However unintentional, their acquisition by Eagle seems to represent another.

Eagle assures me that RedState members will not start getting regular e-mails (if you’re on their list, they can send a lot) but their interest in RedState is related: RedState has a database of registered users, and they’re always picking up more.

Eagle’s business model is similar to other ideological publications with a limited, but highly self-selected subscriber base. That base of members (with contact information) is valuable, and candidates, campaigns and organizations will pay good money to rent them. Subscribe to the Washington Monthly, wait a few weeks, and in addition to each monthly issue you’ll get the occasional fundraising plea from the William J. Clinton Foundation. Likewise, Eagle rents its lists to such groups on the right, and with more than 20,000 open accounts at RedState, that’s not a bad place to start looking.

Based on their own data, RedState claims their readers skew “a good decade and a half younger” than those at Daily Kos, and certainly younger than those at FreeRepublic. Often ex-military, married with kids, RedState sees a traffic uptick after work hours, perhaps suggesting their readers include a large number who don’t sit in front of a computer all day. While online demographics are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, it seems plausible they have a unique political audience. On the other hand, if they are younger, they might not have quite as much money.

Yet now, Eagle’s resources enable RedState to do move in new directions. More than just a wannabe Daily Kos, by now it’s in a new category: a reciprocal relationship between new media and old. This kind of thing is not entirely new — AOL paid Jason Calacanis some $25 million for Weblogs, Inc., while the New York Times Co foolishly plopped down more than $400 million for About.com — but those have more in common with dot com-era gambles rather than synchronistic strategic acquirements.

Those companies just wanted ad revenue, but Eagle’s acquisition actually strengthens its brand — again, not unlike the Post and Slate. So if at some point in the future (let’s say) the New York Times Co. decides to buy Huffington Post, it will owe less to any success with About.com and more to deals like Eagle-RedState.

P.S. Human Events has found its new editor, replacing both now-at large Terry Jeffrey and Bluey in his online capacity: NRO contributor and Bush 41 dep. Undersec of Defense, Jed Babbin. U.S. News’ Washington Whispers whispers:

One of Babbin’s first tasks: Beef up the paper’s website and capitalize on Internet holdings like RedState.com.