2004

This chapter examines the practices of the 2004 presidential campaigns. This election cycle exhibits an important shift from the mass media campaigning paradigm to the networked media campaigning paradigm. Howard Dean’s remarkable rise in the polls and financial largesse came after capitalizing on the affordances of DCTs for two-step flow. The best illustration of this paradigm shift, though, is in the candidacy of Wesley Clark, which started as a “netroots” movement and eventually became a frontrunner campaign. The clash between the netroots and a new way of campaigning and the historically professional way of mass-mediated campaigning illustrates the paradigm shift. In the meantime, George Bush continued to build a comprehensive data file of offline and online voter behavior for microtargeted messaging. And John Kerry conducted analytic testing of website design and e-mail messaging features to maximize effects. Both practices were harbingers of future election cycles.