The Internet's Role In The 1992 Presidential Campaign

Since the early 1990’s, when Tim Berners created the “World Wide Web”, the Internet has developed into an important part of life and a tool in political campaigns. And with the rise of social media more interaction is possible with voters. Some of the tasks that Internet has brought are fundraising, interacting with voters, organizing and mobilizing supporters, and gathering data. Since 1992 each presidential campaign has used the Internet as a part of their campaign strategies.
In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign first used the Internet to talk to the voters. But the Internet didn’t play a major role in this election. Clinton’s campaign created a website that had the candidate’s biographies, their views or positions on the issues, and copy
Around 73% of Americans at the time reported they had used the Internet, and were using the Internet to get news. In 1996 a few candidates created websites to provide campaign information. According to Hendricks and Kaid “A lack of interactivity was evidenced by candidates’ websites only linking to pages within their own site instead of providing hyperlinks to external resources.” Sen. Bob Dole, the Republican candidate in 1996, brought the Internet some attention when he mentioned his campaign website during his closing statement in a presidential debate against President Clinton. Dole’s website ended up crashing after this because the website’s server was not prepared for the amount of traffic his closing statement would produce. Although candidates’ websites attracted attention from voters, the lack of engagement still caused problems. 10% of voters said they received some of their information about the election from the Internet. And only one in four said the information was helpful. Also in 1996, online fundraising started to grow into a small campaigning role of the Internet. The Clinton campaign was able to raise $10,000 through the
It was a new technological voter identification tool used first by President Bush’s campaign in 2004. With micro targeting, a voter model is created using consumer and polling data to find out the issues that voters care about most. The Bush e-campaign director said they based predictions of voters preferences on commercial data for example magazine subscriptions The model would state that a possible voter has a certain % chance of being pro-life and voting for candidates who support pro-life policies. So then a candidate would target that voter on pro-life issues. This resulted in greater contact with likely Bush voters, which helped in states like Florida and Iowa. Young voters normally use new technology, but also have not been active in politics. Many campaigns such as Rock the Vote use celebrities to promote voting among young voters, but campaigns using the Internet can gain supporters without spending to much. Nearly half of all 18-29 year olds went to the polls in 2004, with was a 9% increase from the 2000 election. Also 29% of voters used the Internet to get election news compared to 18% in