When Americans Elect launched, a certain kind of person got very excited about it. A new, centrist political party that would let people vote on the Internet for a presidential candidate, who would then be on the ballot in all 50 states! David Brooks could finally have his President Bloomberg fantasy enacted! Well, they were super good at making money, but not so good at attracting, like, people - a problem that will not be surprising for anyone who’s ever been involved with a political group. After holding the online primary, no candidate met the vote threshold set by the group’s rules, and so they have, essentially, folded.
That failure is less interesting to me than who was almost their candidate. At the time they closed, the leading declared candidate was Buddy Roemer, and the leading undeclared (“draft”) candidate was Ron Paul. If you’re familiar with comment boxes on political blogs, you will recognize those two candiates as ones who are Big on the Internet. But they’re not so big in real life. Paul was running at a steady 12% among Republicans, while Roemer looked more like a statistical error. Those results mirror what happens when you ask people to vote online on what the most important political issue is today. Guess what? It’s almost always legalizing pot. Some people have taken this to mean that the Internet has disruptively revealed this issue to be one criminally under-covered by the media and the political system. And sure, we could probably be talking about it more, though it’s talked about plenty in states where it’s an issue. But to say it’s the most important issue of our time is just fundamentally disconnected from the reality of human existence. So is the idea that Ron Paul would be a better candidate for president, especially since he’s losing by 8 points to Obama in a hypothetical head-to-head. The Internet tells us something, but it doesn’t tell us something about everything.
Like I said in that Twitter post, the Internet encourages the illusion that the existence of the web provides access to the universe of ideas and people, a comprehensive portal into the totality of information that exists. But as Twitter and Americans Elect show, you instead tend to get a portal into the kind of people who use the Internet a lot, and in particular ways. We know who those people are, and we know what those ways look like. And yet we keep proposing that the Internet is everything. The ultimate irony of the Americans Elect fiasco is that it promised universal access but got the level of turnout associated with a mid-year runoff. The far more arduous task of getting to a polling place is, due to everything about it that isn’t just where it’s located and how you get there, far more likely to produce robust results. The possibility of universal access is not the same as universal use. Building a new road won’t necessarily make people use it. You have to give them a reason to get there - and to do that, you have to make sure you don’t end up looking like a niche concern.
