Democrats' growing dominance over GOP in securing online contributions is reshaping '08 elections

NYT: Democrats Take the Lead in Raising Money Online
By MICHAEL LUO
Published: July 13, 2007

The Democrats have established a commanding and growing dominance over Republicans in securing contributions online, reshaping the fund-raising landscape heading into the 2008 elections.

Online donations are emerging as a cornerstone of the fund-raising efforts of Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards, who have raised roughly a third of their money through Internet contributions, mostly in small-dollar amounts. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been aggressive online as well. Their efforts have paid off with a rapidly growing army of small donors, many of whom have demonstrated a willingness to give again and again.

Newly released data show that for the first six months of the year, the three leading contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, Mr. Obama of Illinois, Mr. Edwards of North Carolina, and Mrs. Clinton of New York, raised more than $28 million online, a figure that does not include second-quarter results from Mrs. Clinton, whose campaign declined to release them. In contrast, the three top Republican candidates, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Senator John McCain and Mitt Romney, raised about $14 million over the Internet....

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Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, showed fellow Democrats the power of online fund-raising in 2004 when he harnessed support from liberal bloggers and grass-roots donors to mount an insurgent campaign. Now the party’s leading candidates are making the Internet increasingly central to their campaigns, capitalizing on early interest in the contest by shoring up efforts to draw in voters and their donations through Web sites.

The Democratic dominance in online fund-raising appears to have widened in the last three months. The disparity online is even more pronounced than the overall fund-raising gap for the first two quarters of the year, in which the leading Democrats raised almost 50 percent more than the leading Republicans, $144.3 million to $101.7 million.

David All, a Republican online strategist, said his party was being beaten badly online. “We need to have a revolution just like the Democrats did,” he said.

Just as George W. Bush took “bundling,” the practice of relying on wealthy donors to reach out to their own networks of the rich and powerful for large contributions, to new heights in the 2000 and 2004 elections, the Democrats are transforming the fund-raising environment for 2008 by drawing mostly small contributions from tens of thousands of people online. Their success over the Internet is made more significant by the fact that small-dollar donors have long been the strength of Republicans, who wielded sophisticated direct mail operations....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/us/politics/13internet.html?hp

Not content.

Your vote will go into a black box, and we'll have to depend on Diebold/EDS/whoever to TELL US who won the election.