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Archive for the 'Republicans' Category

Let’s Just Admit Slatecard is the Republican ActBlue

Published by William Beutler on May 26, 2008 in Blog Consultants, Fundraising, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, RedState, Republicans, Startups, Technology, White House '08 and William Beutler. 4 Comments

In the past week or so, two online GOP operatives (neither of whom is David All) have separately suggested to me that the competition among the three Republican Internet fundraising websites is effectively over. Even I doubted the separation would happen this quickly, but as of now even a late push by one of the two laggards would have a hard time catching on.

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.

RedState, former backer of Big Red Tent, now supports SlatecardBut 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.

527 Reasons John McCain Should Watch Out

Published by William Beutler on February 13, 2008 in 527s, Advertising, Campaigns, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Republicans and Television. 2 Comments

By process, Republicans have eliminated the probability (if not possibility) that anyone but John McCain will be the party’s nominee. Meanwhile, the Democratic contest now appears certain to last several more weeks at least. As little as two months ago, the prognosticators had the Democrats deciding early with the GOP going to a brokered convention, yet the opposite is occurring.

The conventional wisdom right now seems to be that that this is going to hurt Democrats and help Republicans. McCain now has time to win over disaffected conservatives, raise money for the general election and hone his positive message. Meanwhile, the Democrats may not know who their nominee is for sure until a month hence, and whomever emerges victorious will not only have these disadvantages against McCain but may also have to deal with more-serious-than-usual intra-party divisions. That is, a long hard slog between Cinton and Obama could leave the losing faction demoralized and slow to rejoin the fray.

I’m not sure this is correct, at least not overall. Sure, McCain will be better prepared and the Democrat will have to mend fences late. But we’re only talking about the campaigns and party apparatii. This is the age of the 527. And it cannot go without noting that this is true in no small part to McCain’s own campaign finance legislation which, by limiting soft money to the parties, weakened those institutions and, by leaving open a “loophole,” allowed issue-advocacy 527s to replace them.

Certainly, a pro-McCain 527 could launch anytime now, and I assume at least one will. But 527s are less effective at building up than tearing down. Whereas a party must build a governing coalition to succeed, 527s are often driven by a narrow faction or collection of issues. Because coordinating between a campaign and 527 is illegel, they can’t share strategy or resources, and likely won’t know the others’ targets. It’s almost designed to waste resources.

But a negatively-focused 527 doesn’t necessarily need to know whether Obama will be nominated in order to start hitting McCain. So far, we’ve been told that McCain will keep the U.S. in Iraq for 100 years, will start more wars in the meantime, and that he is very old. We will undoubtedly hear more soon. And once the key themes are worked out online, we’ll start seeing them on television.

Meanwhile, Republican 527s can’t be sure that targeting one candidate or the other won’t be money or resources wasted. The RNC just rolled out an Obama Spend-o-Meter, which does in fact play to a McCain strength, especially as the GOP itself has lost credibility on the matter. On the other hand, talking about big-spending Democrats is a pat response. It could just as easily have been the Clinton Spend-o-Meter.

Unfortunatley for McCain and the GOP, a candidate-specific strategy will just have to wait.

There are Two Things Wrong With this Picture

Published by William Beutler on February 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Republicans. 0 Comments

F7 with Huckabee and Romney and Obama

If the question doesn’t make sense, then read this:

At Rightroots, we have built a way for Republicans to rally behind their new nominee right out of the gate. We’re asking all Republicans to donate online to the new nominee next Thursday, February 7th. …

On February 7th, we’ll set up a page on Rightroots for you to give to the nominee and show you our community’s results in real time. …

If the nominee is McCain, we still have to do this. His campaign especially is running on fumes financially, but they’ve shown they can be effective with an even a small amount of money.

You can’t read the fine print on the screen shot above (well, you could if you squinted) but here’s what’s relevant:

The Super Tuesday primaries are over and February 7th is here. On Tuesday, Senator John McCain established himself as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, with Governor Mitt Romney and Governor Mike Huckabee winning primaries and caucuses throughout the nation.

Please give generously to the major Republican candidates who remain active contenders for the nomination…

It’s fair to point out that Romney did not officially suspend his campaign until a few hours after the page went live, but it’s also fair to point out that by February 6, McCain was the only realistic nominee. Also fair, Romney was still there as of the last revision of this post. My own initial coverage of the February 7 effort was quite favorable, so I would be derelict if I failed to follow up and say that anyone who bought into the initial pitch — let alone gave money — should feel misled.

CPAC: I Exit the Room, Romney Exits the Race

Published by William Beutler on February 7, 2008 in CPAC, Metapost, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Tech Blogosphere and Twitter. 0 Comments

I’ve lived in Washington for a good half-decade now, but today is the first time I’ve attended the event that everyone who asks “Where’s the conservative Yearly Kos?” should remind themselves of, CPAC. Luckily for me, this year New Media Strategies secured three-day passes to the event, and even luckier, this year it’s just across the bridge (in Woodley Park) from me (in Adams Morgan). But this is about where my luck ends.

I hopped a cab with the author of CQ’s Ground Game and made it to the Omni Shoreham a little after 10:30. In the Senate Room, I picked up my designer neckwear designating me as a “CO-SPONSOR,” then started looking for the Regency Ballroom in hopes of seeing Vice President Cheney’s 11:00 a.m. speech. I wandered around the labyrinthine Omni Shoreham for fifteen minutes before finally finding a short line leading up to the ballroom. The inertia of said queue informed me that I wasn’t getting in, while the avalanche of Romney signs, placards, stickers, thunder sticks and foam “mitts” informed me that I would see Mitt Romney speak.

That was fine; I was at CPAC to schmooze and even get a little work done between speeches. So I located an aisle seat, ejected my trusty MacBook Pro out of my backpack and sat down to get some typing done. I wasn’t able to get online, however. The free wifi at the Omni wasn’t taking, and AT&T’s EDGE network wasn’t available in the basement. Little did I know, @briandevine, my colleague referenced in the last post, was sending me this Twitterdirect message:

bloggers are saying you have a really good chance of watching Romney drop out at this speech

Alas, I didn’t see it until earlier this evening. And at 1:00 p.m., as Romney’s seemingly generic speech continued, I glanced at my pass schedule to see Mark Steyn was to speak in the Ambassador Ballroom starting now. So I folded up and made for the door in a hurry. At two checkpoints I was told, like the freshmen in Dazed and Confused:

If you leave, you can’t come back.

My response was more polite but no more apprehensive. And after a few more minutes of peripatetic perlplexedness, I realized the Ambassador Ballroom was in fact directly across the hall from the Regency Ballroom, and was the room where I’d spied an overflow crowd watching Romney projected on a large screen.

As soon as I went back upstairs to figure out where to go next, the tweets started flowing. I think the first was from Dave Winer, RSS inventor and not exactly a political blogger:

Romney is withdrawing. Giving speech at conservative group in Washington.

Damn.

Later, I rationalized my foolhardy decision to bolt the ballroom: If I’d seen Romney drop out of the race, I would have witnessed history, of a kind. I was never a supporter — obviously, or I would have remained. Meanwhile, I am a big fan of Steyn’s — his monthly obit feature in The Atlantic was my favorite part of that magazine while it ran.

Skipping out early, on the other hand, gave me a story to tell, and now I’ve told it.

Return of the Smoke-Filled Back Room

Published by William Beutler on February 7, 2008 in Democrats, Elections, New Media Strategies, Republicans and Seriously. 1 Comment

My colleague Brian Devine, a good Democrat even though he once sported a Fred Thompson sticker on his car (next to one for Mark Warner), is not enthusiastic about where the fight for his party’s nomination is headed:

The point of all this is that since the primary is so close, one of these two groups composed of the Democratic leadership — the superdelegates or the credentials committee — will be the body that decides who will become the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nominee. And not the voters. Prior to today, I believed that the largest flaw in our electoral system was the leapfrogging of states for earlier primary dates. But now it is clear that I was wrong. The Democratic Party can’t get much more undemocratic than not letting the people decide.

There’s more to it than that, and if you’re unfamiliar with the situation he quotes enough to give you the full background.

Meantime, I’m left more than a little amused that the Republican Party nomination process — which features no superdelegates and dealt with its state parties’ “earliest” one-upsmanship in a less extreme manner — is actually more democratic than that of the Democratic Party.

The February 7th Sign or: Stop This Train, I Want to Get On

Published by William Beutler on January 31, 2008 in Barack Obama, Blog Consultants, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Twitter, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Patrick Ruffini has announced a new Rightroots-branded initiative called February7.org. The premise is simple: Republicans are likely to have a presumptive nominee by the morning after the morning after Super Tuesday (Tsunami Tuesday for you First Read fanboys and girls). This primary has not been as ugly as the Democrats’, but it has been ideologically dispiriting, mostly featuring candidates who fell short of conservative ideals. An early fundraising push could help rally the GOP while the Democrats are still fighting amongst themselves.

That nominee is most likely to be John McCain, while Ruffini has switched his support from “Rudy to Romney,” as he put it Tuesday night. Therefore, the most likely scenario is he will have to grudgingly switch again in about a week. If the move is a painful one for many, better then to get it over with. But there’s more to it, as he explains in the announcement on his own site:

You can probably tell that I have strong views about this nomination contest. Win or lose, I’m equally convinced of the importance of getting behind the eventual winner. A nation at war cannot afford Hillary or Obama in the White House. …

Beyond just showing support for our nominee, we’re doing this to help solve a concrete strategic problem for our Party during the month of February.

The simple fact is that when it comes to contributions from others, our candidates are broke. They’ve spent it all on Florida. No one is up on TV in any February 5th state, while Hillary and Obama have money to burn (I saw Clinton ads in California last weekend). Based on the fact that they have money to play with and have held a fundraising advantage throughout the cycle, there is a chance they could start pummeling our candidate with negative ads right away.

If we fundraise the same old traditional way — with fundraising events and direct mail early and banking on Internet enthusiasm late — we will lose. There is no way we’ll be able to get the money when and where we need it. On the Internet in particular, contributions come in late, often too late for the money to be spent effectively. We’re hoping to help frontload some of this money so that the candidate can use it against Hillary/Obama right away. When it comes to giving, early is the new late.

Well said. But for my money, the best part of the website is that one can toggle between “Stop Hillary” and “Stop Obama,” not unlike a blog that lets you change the background color:

Stop Hillary at February7.org             Stop Obama at February7.org

Please notice that no “Stop Edwards” version was created.

P.S. I first heard about this through a Twitter account Ruffini set up last week: Twitter.com/February7. I followed the account back, but of 111 users Ruffini followed, only 13 followed it back. That 11.7% rate would be terrific if it was direct mail, but it isn’t that. Twitter marketing has been the focus of much discussion over the past year, but here is some evidence that the medium strongly favors established personalities — Ruffini is one, but @February7 is not. And setting up new Twitter accounts is fun, but not all that effective.

Meg Whitman’s Trial Balloon, Or Mitt Romney’s?

Published by William Beutler on January 28, 2008 in California Governor, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Tech Blogosphere and White House '08. 3 Comments

Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, released to the web on the evening of Jan. 25, outlined recent developments that could propel retiring eBay CEO Meg Whitman into the Republican primary to succeed term-limited Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010:

As she prepares to depart from EBay after a decade at the helm, Chief Executive Meg Whitman appears to be investigating a new career — in politics.

eBay logo smallWhitman has talked with top Republicans about the possibility of a run for California governor in 2010, according to three operatives who have had discussions with her. Whitman is said to be asking detailed questions about the logistics of a run and the effect she could have as governor, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to reveal the conversations. …

The source close to Whitman, however, downplayed the seriousness of the conversations, saying that Whitman was still new to politics and that California Republicans, not Whitman, were the ones driving the discussion.

“This thing has come to her,” the source said. “She hasn’t given it all that much thought. It’s not, ‘I’m going to run. Give me a game plan.’”

The tech blogs reacted quickly, and with enthusiasm. Valleywag went with “eBay ex-CEO considers run for California governor” and Mashable asked: “Could Meg Whitman Be The Next Governator?”

It only took another few hours before Mashable returned to the subject with “Meg Whitman NOT Running For Governor, After All.” Valleywag, whose reporting claims to knock down this rumor, this time floated another: “Meg Whitman quashes governor rumor, but could she serve under Romney?”

So that’s what this is all about! is what I first thought upon reading this. Now, if you think I’ve been holding back mention of Whitman’s role as a finance co-chair for the Romney campaign on purpose, you’re right. I have no evidence, let alone proof, that this story was pushed on the LAT by Romney’s camp. But I’m thinking it.

Meg Whitman, Mitt RomneyeBay is one of the few survivors of the dot-com era, one of the great business success stories of the Internet, and Whitman has been on board since it went public in 1998. Before that, she worked with Mitt Romney at Bain & Company. Her professional credentials make her “supremely well qualified” for the job, quoth Henry Blodget, and in fact this is something she has in common with Romney.

Her Republican credentials, however, are thin. The Times reports she only recently changed her party registration from “decline to state” to GOP, and Whitman’s politics are assumed to be moderate. Very possibly she is too moderate for the California GOP, especially one annoyed by Schwarzenegger’s “post-partisan” policies, but then Tom McClintock is probably too conservative for the state. This reminds one of Romney as well, although in a less salutory manner. Romney has been a Republican since 1994 at the very least, but if we believe him that he was an “independent during Reagan-Bush,” not much longer than that.

Now, the California primary arrives on Feb. 5, and the RealClearPolitics polling average puts Romney in solid second place, albeit solidly behind John McCain. Whitman is fairly popular in the Valley, as the blogs cited above indicate. If she is considering a run for governor, that could reflect well on Romney. (I’m undecided whether to trust Valleywag’s reporting; other news outlets have yet to follow suit, but the life cycle of a trial balloon is usually longer than 24 hours, so we’ll see.) If she is not considering a run, then even better! If you’re in the California primary, this is just the time to float the idea of a respected Bay Area businesswoman as a member of your cabinet.

Or if she ran for governor and won, Whitman could be the first of what one might eventually have to call “Romney Republicans.” It’s obviously way too early to seriously start talking about such a thing — but do you really suppose that Romney’s supporters haven’t already?

Iowa Caucus 2008: The View From My Laptop

Published by William Beutler on January 3, 2008 in Barack Obama, Democrats, Election Night, Fred Thompson, Iowa Caucuses, Joe Biden, Metapost, Mike Huckabee, National Politics, Republicans, Technology and White House '08. 5 Comments

For the record, besides cable television (MSNBC and FNC), here’s how I’m keeping up on events tonight:

Feel free to recommend something in the comments; I’ll add anything that I end up following.

For the record, I’m hoping for a strong third-place finish for Fred Thompson, and a Huckabee win to keep Romney from getting one. For the Democrats, I’m hoping for a persuasive Obama (not Edwards) victory to keep things interesting. One thing I am definitely rooting against: respectable wins by Romney and Hillary; that is to say, I’m rooting against Iowa.

8:58 update: It’s not even 9:00 Eastern and Fox News is calling it for Huckabee, with Thompson third: 36-23-14. Haha, only if she’s 5'3".

9:28 update: Half an hour later, MSNBC calls Iowa for Obama first, Fox follows close behind. Things will get more interesting.

9:32 update: The Google Maps Iowa caucus page still says:

Come back tonight for live results!

9:45 update: You know, the Dem results came back a lot faster than expected. So much for Edwards’ momentum, though it seems to be playing as a Hillary loss. Meanwhile, Jim Geraghty guessed correctly this morning in a piece that should get a second look.

10:28 update: Back and forth between the non-concession speeches [updated: and in 2OT, victory speeches] on CNN and the down-to-the-wire Blazer game on TNT. For once I need picture-in-picture. [Final update: “115-109, THE HOTTEST TEAM IN THE NBA GOES TO 20 AND 13!”]

11:58 update: Looks like Chris Dodd already had his throwing-in-the-towel banner ready to go:

Chris Dodd drops out

Whereas it appears that Joe Biden did not:

Joe Biden drops out

No great surprise, Mike Gravel’s website hasn’t been throwing rocks into the lake since December 31. [Update: Gravel is still in the race, eh? That’ll teach me to believe what Keith Olbermann says.]

12:37 update: Not to pile on Dodd, who wasn’t the only sub-1% Democrat tonight, but the best headline of the night belongs to Eric Pfeiffer:

Chris Dodd .08!

12:52 update: While the most unlikely reportage is Isaac Chotiner’s:

TNR friend Charles Barkley writes to say that Obama winning Iowa is a “great start” and he hopes it leads to Obama “winning it all.” And who wants to argue with Sir Charles?

1:01 update: Calling it a night.

No, wait. One last update: If you’ll allow me to indulge, via Twitter:

Fred Thompson on Twitter

To Boldly GOP Where No… The Blog on the Edge of… Sorry, I Got Nothing

Published by William Beutler on January 3, 2008 in Blog Consultants, Blog Fights, Entertainment, Gawker Media, MSM, Online Campaigns, Publishing, RedState, Republicans, Seriously, Tech Blogosphere, Technology and William Beutler. 9 Comments

Via Buzz Brockway on Twitter and Peach Pundit, artwork from a new article in Campaigns and Elections:

Campaigns & Elections artwork featuring Erick Erickson, David All, Patrick Ruffini and Rob Bluey in Star Trek uniforms

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 C&E dollar icon 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.

Blog P.I. Gets Results! Plus, More Thoughts on GOP Online Fundraising

Published by William Beutler on December 9, 2007 in Midterms '10, Online Fundraising, Religion, Republicans, Rhetoric, Terrorism and White House '08. 1 Comment

In a post evaluating the three competing GOP online fundraising tools last weekend, and I criticized the “Defeat Radical Islam” issue badge on Slatecard for overlaying the Star and Crescent with the Universal No symbol. This weekend, Slatecard’s David All has updated the badge. Replacing Islam’s holy symbol is now a pair of crossed AK-47s. Old and new:

Old “Defeat Radical Islam” badge               New “Defeat Radical Islam” badge

I suppose it is possible the good people at Izhevsk Mechanical Works will object, but I doubt it would matter if they did. Not that the old badge necessarily ran the risk of inciting politically-motivated riots in the Arab street (although one never knows) but it sent the wrong message. The new one is also unlikely to move the NRA. Good thing they have a sense of humor, and good thing All made the change.

Meanwhile, during the week I discussed the three utilities — Slatecard plus Rightroots and Big Red Tent with a smart conservative who argued that a) the movement needs to settle on just one, b) social features are not all that important, and c) what does matter is enabling state-level fundraising.

To take the last point first, I couldn’t agree more. Just as building state-level blogs is crucial to conveying information, so too is it important to lower the barriers to making financial contributions. State governments rarely make news here in DC, but decisions that matter to most people’s lives occur at that level, there are simply more of these races, and winners of those campaigns often go on to compete in federal elections. Making this happen 50 times over is a formidable challenge. ActBlue didn’t always do this, but now they do. My guess is that whomever on the right does this first will emerge as the go-to website.

Moving backward to the second point, it’s a fair point that people are unlikely to visit these sites with money burning a hole in their pocket, just looking for a candidate to support. Including a great deal of information about the candidates is not the most important thing these websites do. Those decisions will be made offline and influenced by bloggers who already command an audience. Yet I still think a fundraising widget would make such donations more likely, that good information and cross-referencing between issues and candidates can encourage more political giving. If you are primarily motivated by winning the Iraq war or promoting federalist solutions, you may be likely to throw a bit of money at candidates you hadn’t planned on — but only if you know to do so. How about a feature, similar to Amazon.com’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature? How about “Donors Who Gave to This Candidate Also Gave To”?

First point last: I said before that I think different mechanisms could be adopted by different segments of the party, but I cannot deny the logic of consolidating support behind just one of them — efficiency matters, and I think reinforces my second point. That said, I do not think there need be any rush to get behind just one. Competition among them should eventually produce one that’s better than the others. Maybe that happens in 2008, but I think the separation will occur during the ‘10 midterms.