Gigabyte grass roots grow for Obama campaign
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Supporters are turning Facebook into face time in a Web-driven effort to rally young voters.
By JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS
The Washington Post
Posted on Sun, Feb. 18, 2007
WASHINGTON - Late on the day that Sen. Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, announced that he was forming a presidential exploratory committee, Farouk Olu Aregbe logged on to Facebook.com.
Facebook is the popular online community where college students post profiles, share photos and blog.
On a whim, Farouk created a group called “One Million Strong for Barack.”
“I remember thinking: There’s got to be more supporters out there,” said Farouk, 26, who advises student government at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Farouk’s group had 100 members in the first hour. In less than five days, 10,000. By the third week, nearly 200,000. Last week, a month after he created the group, it had 278,100 members.
There are more than 500 Obama groups on Facebook. One of the first, “Students for Barack Obama,” was created on July 7 by Meredith Segal, a junior at Bowdoin College who first heard of Obama when he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.
Instead of starting “a petition or something” to encourage the freshman senator to run for president, she turned to her Facebook page, created a group and invited people (first her friends, later strangers) to join.
Now it’s a political action committee with nearly 62,000 members and chapters at 80 colleges, the most structured grass-roots student movement in the presidential campaign so far. There is a director of field operations, an Internet director, a finance director and a blog team director.
“Young people are on the Web,” said Segal, 21. “That’s how we’re organizing.”
Obama’s Facebook supporters post photos of Obama on their pages alongside snapshots of birthday parties, nephews and girlfriends. They link to the latest Obama news, talk about their favorite Obama quotes and engage in a 24-hour conversation about their candidate.
A few weeks ago, Segal’s group staged a rally at George Mason University that drew an estimated 3,000 students — and an appearance from Obama himself. Last Sunday, her group’s Iowa State University chapter helped promote a rally that attracted more than 5,000.
While Obama’s presidential campaign has outpaced those of his rivals in the enthusiasm it has generated on Facebook and other social-networking sites, no one knows whether such online excitement can translate to votes.
Ask former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a Democrat, the Web candidate of 2004. He raised millions of dollars on the Web, generated huge amounts of buzz and then learned in the Iowa caucuses that online excitement did not guarantee offline foot soldiers.
Meetup.com helped energize the Dean campaign, but more sophisticated social-networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace were not a factor in the 2004 election. A recent Pew Research Center poll, however, reported that 54 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds have used them. And Joe Trippi, who led Dean’s e-campaign, is among those who think the Web will play a significant role in the current race.
“It took our campaign six months to get 139,000 people on an e-mail list,” Trippi said. “It took one Facebook group, what, barely a month to get 200,000? That’s astronomical.” |
