The Netroots Hit Their Limits

By By Perry Bacon Jr.

You've heard the story: the Netroots, the Democratic Party's equivalent of a punk garage band--edgy, loud and antiauthoritarian--are suddenly on the verge of the big time. The gang of liberal bloggers and online activists who helped raise millions of dollars for Howard Dean's presidential campaign two years ago are now said to be Democratic kingmakers. Last month in Connecticut, they fanned anti-incumbent and antiwar flames and were widely credited with the primary defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman, leading him to run as an independent. After they relentlessly derided Senator Hillary Clinton as calculating, overly cautious and lacking true liberal bona fides, she hired an adviser just to deal with them and even demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resign. Coincidence? Moderate Democrats say it with remorse, conservatives with glee, but the conventional wisdom is bipartisan: progressive bloggers are pushing the Democratic Party so far to the left that it will have no chance of capturing the presidency in 2008.

Or maybe the Netroots aren't all that. Make no mistake, these online activists are having a profound impact on the Democrats and on politics in general. But the phenomenon is in its infancy. Compared with established interest groups like organized labor and conservative Christians, the Netroots play a small role in national politics. Even their most ardent players now recognize that you can't create a true movement using nothing but modems and instant messaging. "The Netroots cannot elect someone alone," says Matt Stoller, a blogger at the popular group site MyDD.

So they're branching out. Beyond posting exhaustive pieces about bias in Fox News coverage and uploading videos of presidential wannabe George Allen making a fool of himself, they're adopting the old-school tools of electoral politics, like canvassing their neighborhoods and calling their member of Congress. They're getting nitty-gritty in their focus too. The liberal online fund-raising group ActBlue, for instance, is trying to get activists to donate serious money to state-legislature campaigns that bloggers once considered too unsexy to care about. The goal is to put Democrats in control of state governments, where many key decisions are made.

The Netroots phenomenon began in 1998 when two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs circulated an online petition demanding that Congress, in their phrase, "move on"--that is, stop trying to impeach President Clinton. Thus was born MoveOn.org which now has 3.2 million members. Most of the bloggers who have become Netroots leaders can trace their influence back only a couple of years, to 2003 and '04, when the growth of partisan liberal online activism was spurred by a strain of antiwar, anti-Bush fervor and frustration with congressional Democrats for not standing up to the President. Blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD grew rapidly. Today their combined readership (more than a million people weekly) dwarfs that of the dead-tree versions of established purveyors of liberal thought like the New Republic, which has a print circulation of about 62,000. The conservative Rightroots movement is only just getting started.

Because the Netroots are bound by a medium and not by geography, they have been able to nationalize fund raising for congressional and Senate races more effectively than other groups of their size and relative inexperience. They are also the liberal rival to conservative "noise machines" like the online Drudge Report and talk-radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh. When Allen called an opponent's political operative by the racial slur macaca at a recent rally, the blogs touted the video, and the incident became a national story, contributing to a troubled campaign that has shrunk Allen's lead in his Senate race from double digits to 3 points.

Yet a coarse estimate of the Netroots' numbers shows them to be something less than a groundswell. The readership of the largest liberal blogs and the membership of MoveOn suggest that the Netroots could total 6 million people, and that assumes blog audiences don't overlap, which they do. That's only a small fraction of even the Democrats in the U.S., who number more than 70 million. While 5 million people can elect the Governor of California, the Netroots are dispersed all over the country. Even in Connecticut, one of the most liberal states, Ned Lamont, Lieberman's primary nemesis, couldn't rely on just the Netroots to get him elected. MoveOn has 50,000 members in the state; Lamont got 146,000 votes to win the Democratic nomination. Netroot strength is even less potent in a general election, as Lamont is discovering; he trails an independent Lieberman in the polls.

When it comes to money, the bloggers are still playing with Monopoly dollars compared with groups like Emily's List and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The top several liberal blogs together have raised about $1.2 million over the past year, which isn't enough in most districts to run a successful congressional campaign. To be sure, MoveOn has more money; it plans to spend $25 million this election cycle, targeting 40 key congressional races with television ads and a get-out-the-vote operation.

No one recognizes the Netroots' limits more than the activists themselves, which is why they are changing their tactics. First of all, they're becoming pragmatic about policy goals. There's little demand from the Netroots for Democrats to support gay marriage, for example, even though 91% of the people who gave money to or worked on Dean's campaign back it, according to a 2005 Pew poll. "We're not asking anyone to commit political suicide," says Eli Pariser, executive director of MoveOn. If the Democrats win the House, it will be on the strength of moderate candidates in places like Indiana, many of whom don't support one of MoveOn's top priorities, a timetable for withdrawal of troops from Iraq. And the bloggers are actively supporting and giving money to many of these more centrist candidates. Virginia Senate candidate Jim Webb was encouraged to run and has received more than $280,000 from the Netroots, even though he served in the Reagan Administration as Navy Secretary and was a Republican until recently.

What's more, the Netroots are, paradoxically, attempting to maximize their effectiveness by going off-line. MoveOn is organizing its members to make a combined 5 million phone calls before Election Day, asking people to vote for Democrats. Markos Moulitsas, who runs Daily Kos, is talking about building real, bricks-and-mortar gathering halls where progressives can meet and organize political activities in person. Jane Hamsher, who runs the piquant online hangout Firedoglake, and other bloggers have started the "roots project," in which they employ nonweb political tactics like writing letters to the editors of their local newspapers. "We can hammer the New York Times and the Washington Post forever," Hamsher said, but "candidates are more influenced by what we're doing in their own backyards."

Even with these changes, the Netroots won't be kingmakers. The fact is, day-to-day campaigning in 2006 is not very different from how it was in 1996: candidates call a few very rich people to ask them to give money so the campaign can run ads on television and hope soccer moms catch them between cooking dinner and driving to practice. If the Democrats win in the fall elections, the roots of that victory will not be on the Net.