The Presidential Contest as a Nationwide Viral Marketing Campaign

Continuing on the observation that roughly 20% of Obama's Oregon voter universe went to the Portland rally on Sunday, it's worth pointing out that he's changed the rules of the campaign, at least in the primary. Obama can get enough people to see him in person that most of his voters are at most two degrees of separation away from him; that is, either they've seen him directly, or they know someone who has seen him directly. Almost all of his voters are certainly within three degrees of separation.

This is, I think, powerful and unprecedented, at least since the days of William Jennings Bryan, and something that Team Obama seems to have grasped that Team Clinton did not. Turnout has averaged somewhere around 90,000 votes per congressional district in the primaries. To win, then, you need about 45,000 votes per district, a bit more than one-quarter of the vote goal for a general election. At that scale, a couple of rallies in basketball arenas can get you face-to-face with enough of your electorate that if they go tell their friends how awesome it was, you win the nomination. Amplify that message with unmediated youtube clips, a giant canvassing effort, free media appearances, and ad

Will the large rally technique scale to the general election? It's unclear. Roughly 30% of the country's population live in states that are in play in the general, taking a very wide view of "in play" that includes everything from North Carolina to Pennsylvania. Obama will need half the votes in those states, which, if we use 2004 turnout as a baseline, means he needs the support of about 18 million residents. One fifth of that total is 3.6 million, roughly double the number of Obama donors and about five times the number of active MyBO users. But it also averages out to just over 20,000 people per day of campaigning, meaning that Obama would have to fill two college basketball arenas every day, or have one week of small events followed by one week of rallies in pro baseball or football stadiums. That presents a second problem, which is that the scale of the massive rallies tends to drown out the rest of the message in subsequent news coverage. On top of that, we're assuming that Obama will spend 90% of his time in the current swing states, rather than do something outside the box like try to put North Dakota or Mississippi or Texas into play. So unless the Obama campaign has someway of really ramping things up for the next six months, they will probably have to keep relying on TV, radio, and newspapers to reach enough voters.