Dem. Campaigns Look to Virtual Primaries
By WILL LESTER, Associated Press Writer
story.news.yahoo.com
WASHINGTON - No matter who finishes first in the online presidential primary, the Democratic candidates are counting on thousands of potential volunteers, donors and campaign dollars from the Internet event.
By the time voting ended at 1:15 a.m. EDT Thursday, more than 317,000 people voted in MoveOn.org's first presidential primary, 54,730 had pledged to volunteer for their preferred candidate and 77,192 authorized MoveOn to pass on their e-mail address to their favorite candidate.
Final results of the vote and details about financial commitments will be released Friday.
"This could be the biggest volunteer day of the entire cycle," said Wes Boyd, co-founder of MoveOn.org. "The primary benefit for candidates is to broaden their base of support, put new supporters on their rolls."
Several candidates have grumbled about the online event being skewed to favor Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who has aggressively used the Internet to mobilize support. But the campaigns saw benefits to participating.
"We've never believed that we would win this," said Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for John Kerry, the Massachusetts senator who bought an online banner ad at the Yahoo! Web site to encourage voting. "We always believed this was a made-for-Howard Dean primary.
"We saw it as a chance to increase the number of people interested in the senator's campaign, a way to increase the number of donors in the campaign and a way to bolster our long-term online communications capabilities."
A spokesman for candidate Joe Lieberman (news - web sites) said the Connecticut senator's campaign sent an e-mail to supporters asking them to participate, as several other campaigns did.
"We would have done that for any online forum, we recognize that enough questions have been raised about MoveOn.org and its supposed primary, that it calls it into question," said Jano Cabrera.
The threshold to win the primary and get MoveOn's endorsement is 50 percent, and Dean supporters acknowledge that it's not likely they will get that much support in a nine-candidate field.
Those who voted were offered the option to donate to their preferred candidate. MoveOn raised $3.2 million for congressional candidates in 2000 and $4.1 million for candidates in 2002, Boyd said.
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