How the Web Will Decide Elections

How the Web Will Decide Elections

Dick Morris
Friday, June 21, 2002

This is the sixth in a series by Dick Morris based on his latest best-selling book, "Power Plays: Win or Lose – How History's Great Political Leaders Play the Game." You can get "Power Plays" free or at a reduced price. Part one in the series: Bush Stands on Principle. Part two: Hillary Will Run for President. Part three: the Clintons Accountable for Their Crimes. Part four: Why Reagan Became a Giant. Part five: Memo to Bush: What You Must Do to Win.

By 2006 and 2008, political campaigns will be waged online.

Television will join radio and newspapers as has-beens in political advertising.

Voters will have deserted the prime-time network commercial programs in sufficient numbers that it will no longer pay to pursue them with 30-second advertisements.

The voters will be online, and politicians will migrate to follow them.

Here’s what the campaigns will look like:

E-mail will be the central way of reaching voters.

Each day, each campaign will send out bursts of millions of e-mails prospecting for votes.

To avoid having their e-mails deleted, the mailings will be customized to each voter’s specific areas of interest.

College students will find e-mails headed "Hillary on Student Loans.”

Voters in their late 50s and early 60s will get e-mails headlined "Bush (Jeb?) on Social Security.”

Young parents will open mails featuring "Colin Powell on day care.”

In the closing days of the election, massive, hundred million e-mail barrages will cross each other's flight as each campaign, every hour, launches a broadside at the other.

Candidate Web sites will become like search engines.

Just as people now enter "auto repair, mufflers, inexpensive” on Google.com, so they will probe each candidate’s Web site for their specific positions on issues such as "immigration, illegals, amnesty” or "welfare reform, work requirements, time limits.”

Candidates will answer the inquiries with streaming video of them speaking over the computer directly to the voter on his or her subject of interest.

Campaigns will be less dependent on money because the cost of buying television advertising will be reduced markedly in campaign budgets.

Because access to the Internet is free, the emphasis will be on attractive, customized, humorous e-mails and Web sites rather than on expensive time buys.

Get Dick Morris' blockbuster "Power Plays" free or at a reduced price.

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