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2006 Congressional Elections Chris Bowers launched two activist campaigns during October 2006 on MyDD.com: 1) A campaign, called "Use it or Lose it" to prompt "safe" Democrats to give 30% of their campaign funds to other Democratic causes and 2) A Googlebomb campaign to raise the site listings for negative news articles on a set of Republican congressmen. Use it or Lose it This campaign* had Bowers calling on bloggers and Democratic activists to call up safe Democrats to ask them to give at least 30% of their campaign accounts to the DCCC or to Democrats in competitive congressional races (subject to FEC limits). "Safe" Democrats was defined as those who were either running unopposed by a Republican, or whose Republican opponent raised less than $10 000 (and thus were not considered serious opponents). The lists of such Democrats were pulled from FEC filings. It drew media attention** and also brought MoveOn.org on board with their own page promoting the campaign. GoogleBomb Almost immediately after starting the Use it or Lose it campaign, Bowers began a campaign* to increase the search results of a set of negative articles about endangered Republican congressional incumbents. The idea was to reach less-informed voters who might use Google to search for information on candidates, most often by simply entering the person's name. Taking advantage of the Google indexing algorythm, having many people link to these articles using the candidates' names, would raise their prominence in the search results. The articles chosen were to be from non-partisan news sources, and factually negative about the chosen Republicans. Local news sources were preferred over national news. The chosen list* included mainly such sources, but also a smattering of Wikipedia pages. The candidates chosen were culled from an initial list (chosen by Bowers) of 70, down to 52. The candidates cut were those whom a suitably credible and negative article could not be found. The concept drew criticism from right-wing bloggers* despite the right wing using this strategy themselves (John Kerry in the 2004 election and "waffles") and interest from mainstream media**. | ||||||||||
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