Blog P.I.

Note: Post updated below.

I’ve been anticipating the GOP answer to ActBlue for some time now — a year now, at least. But when it finally arrived on my laptop Tuesday morning, I was a little confused. I had pictured something that blatantly (and wisely) lifted ActBlue’s concept wholesale. But that isn’t quite what it is — not yet, at any rate.

What we see now is a site named ABC PAC and a small group of privately-organized bloggers billing themselves as the Rightroots. ABC does the actual bundling for the slate of candidates endorsed by the RightRoots. The analogy is to ActBlue hosting pages for the Netroots Candidates or Blue America slates, each sponsored by a different set of bloggers. The immediate difference is that ABC/Rightroots debuts as a closed system. If you want to sign up and create your own slate, well, patience.

The ABC principals are ex-RNC eCampaign director Mike Turk, the prime mover; former Reagan adviser and McGuire Woods consultant Frank Donatelli; Jason Torchinsky, formerly an attorney at DoJ; and Chuck DeFeo, who recently bloggified Townhall.com and mostly just lent his name to this project. Turk hired Becki Donatelli’s Campaign Solutions to host the site and process credit cards, and through her, Frank and his old PAC became involved. An entity called the ABC PAC has existed almost exclusively on paper (and FEC.gov PDFs) since 2004. Republican operatives Donatelli, Craig Shirley and Charlie Black used the name to petition the FEC when BCRA was still being sorted out. Turk tells Blog P.I. they liked the name because “ABC” telegraphs ease of use, and indeed convenience was another reason to take an existing committee out of mothballs rather than filing as a new one.

Once they went live, John Hawkins from Right Wing news approached Turk about combining their efforts. Comprising the Hawkins-led Rightroots bloggers: Ed Morrissey, Kevin Aylward, Robert Bluey, Mary Katherine Ham, and Pat Hynes, each of whom posted their own announcements yesterday.

As of this writing [update: Danny Glover has more] the blog-friendly Rep. Jack Kingston and Senate Maj. Leader Bill Frist have added their names to the Rightroots group. Kingston — who has put more stock in his blog guy, David All, than pretty much any other GOP member of Congress — has promised to donate $14,000 if the Rightroots can raise $26,000 by Friday midnight. With $12,070 raised so far, Kingston might not have to follow through on that — although a late-night arm-twisting session reminiscent of the 2003 Medicare vote wouldn’t be too surprising.

According to this Dave Weigel snark, half of the listed House candidates are already NRCC-supported. In other words, they seem to be hedging their bets against finding themselves in the uncomfortable situation I alluded to yesterday, and as Weigel puts it, of backing “their own loser candidates.”

But will it work?

Turk calls ABC and Rightroots a “proof of concept,” to see if the rightosphere will respond to online fundraising appeals like the leftosphere has. Thanks in large part to blogs like MyDD, Eschaton and Firedoglake, ActBlue has raised $1.2 million overall since it went online 26 months ago, with 11 of the many ActBlue “slates” (some are for just one candidate, such as Paul Hackett) surpassing $100,00 in donations each.

But conservative bloggers have never truly had campaign politics in their bloodstream like the liberal bloggers do. Their highest-traffic bloggers are busy sparring with Cindy Sheehan and watching the Middle East, while the left’s highest-traffic blogs have been raising money since their earliest days. The GOP does well in direct mail and telephone fundraising, but the RNC’s MyGOP project is dead in the water just months after its debut.

Polls tell us there are more self-identified conservatives in the general population than liberals, so this should mean conservatives should be able to raise more, even if not right away. But do blog demographics match up? MyDD netroots expert Chris Bowers, for one, doesn’t think so. As a veteran number-cruncher, he estimates that warm bodies in the left-blogosphere outnumber right by as much as 3-1.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bowers is gloating about the slow start. He characterizes it as “failing,” and is already using past tense:

There was no way for people to start their own fundraising pages or create their own slate of candidates. Instead of being able to give to every candidate for federal office, every party committee, and to candidates in several states not running for federal office, the only options available to people not in control of the page were to give to a fixed slate of around 18 candidates. Further, there were no links available to local blogs covering the race, candidate websites / official blogs, volunteer pages, or lists of campaign events. In short, this page offers only one way to become active in the 2006 elections: donate to their officially endorsed candidates.

As previously noted, Rightroots is the only slate available; other interested parties have been told they’ll just have to wait. I’m told that eventually it will be brought up to parity with ActBlue: Bloggers will have a personal ID with the site to track their accounts, and ABC PAC will make it possible to donate to any federal GOP candidate (right now only high profile candidates are listed).

The other problem the project has right now is a lack of transparency. While digging around I was able to discover that there is no overlap between ABC and the Rightroots membership, but for those outside the circle, it isn’t obvious where one ends and one begins. ActBlue offers an extensive FAQ and other information; ABC merely offers an under-written About page.

It turns out that Campaign Solutions is doing the back end at cost — the only overhead is site development and FEC reporting — but right now there’s no way to tell they aren’t taking a cut. Turk says transparency documentation is in the works: “As an independent PAC, we want to be fairly transparent so people will trust the donation will get to the candidate.”

Still, it’s perfectly obvious that they launched it before they were really, actually ready to go. I’m told that ABC is hoping to roll out tools comparable to ActBlue’s before November, but nobody is giving a date for when it will actually happen.

As yet, a proof of concept is really all it is: It’s more like a shareware demo that only lets you play the first level. Yes, it’s a big step for the conservative blogosphere in terms of catching up to the liberal netroots’ activist infrastructure. But only that. If the leftosphere is (I apologize in advance for using the term) Web 2.0, then the rightosphere is still figuring out 1.0.

P.S. If they wanted to be ActRed.org, they would’ve run into one obstacle: ActBlue’s Ben Rahn owns it. Bonus fact: ActRed.com is also taken, apparently by someone in France.

Update: Machiavel is right — the fundraising did pick up today, and Kingston will definitely be chipping in the 14 grand, and crawled the first day or so. Rightroots jumped over this bar — and in August, so not too shabby. So I withdraw gibes. While Bowers clearly doesn’t want it to work, I’m only saying the PAC site must improve to work over the long run. Also in my defense, I watched the Rightroots fundraising total inch slowly upward on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, and the the Rightroots ABC page says “(Candidate Totals Updated Daily).” Sounds like “once daily.” So how about a fundraising bat?