In January of 2007, a year before the Iowa caucuses would begin, Illinois Senator Barack Obama met with Betsy Myers, soon to be the chief operating officer for his campaign. Obama was widely viewed as a rising star within the Democratic party, and he had won fame for a charismatic national convention address he had given back in 2004 for Senator John Kerry’s presidential bid. But Obama was relatively unknown to the general public. New York Senator Hillary Clinton was the presumed favorite to win the party’s nomination in 2008. If Obama were to win the nomination race, he would need to swiftly establish a broader network of voter support.
Obama knew that using the Internet could help his bid in 2008. The Internet would allow his campaign to communicate more easily with large numbers of voters, and it would allow his supporters to more efficiently register and encourage new voters. Still, the strategy succeeded beyond his expectations. Looking back after his primary victory over Clinton, Obama reflected how he had not realized “how effectively we could use the Internet to harness that grass-roots base…. That, I think, was probably one of the biggest surprises of the campaign, just how powerfully our message merged with the social networking and the power of the Internet.”
Register to Vote Online
Not so long ago, in order to register you needed to travel to a physical location. Today there are many websites that will handle the registration costs for you.
The League of Women Voters (www.lwv.org) is one such nonpartisan organization devoted to voter service and to citizen education. Go to http://www.lwv.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Register_To_Vote to register (or, if you have recently moved, to re-register) and to learn more about the deadlines and requirements for voting in different states.
Other websites with registration services include Rock The Vote (www.rockthevote.org), the Hip Hop Action Summit (http://www.hsan.org), or the League of United Latin American Citizens (http://www.lulac.org/).