The Inevitable Demise of AmericansElect.com

AmericansElect.com got off to as good a start as any startup can hope for: they got written up in the New York Times. Their goal: run an online primary in order to nominate a credible third-party candidate who will make it onto the ballot in the 2012 election.

They’ve gotten a few things right:

• Their initial PR is great.
• Their site is slick.
• They’ve raised a credible sum—$20mm to $30mm, depending on which reports you believe.

There are a few insurmountable problems with their plan. First, they’re looking for a moderate candidate. That’s not terribly interesting. A look at the recent debt ceiling debate shows that political differences are more cosmetic than practical (it’s Hotelling’s Law in action!). When a stunning victory for the small-government party means growth in government—just more slowly than expected—it’s hard to argue that these two parties are all that different. On some issues (e.g. gay marriage, drug restrictions), the US public is far to the left of either party. On other issues (immigration, deficit spending), the public is far, far to the right. AmericansElect has done the equivalent of imagining some kind of hidden, latent demand for a compromise halfway between Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

And they’re hoping it will market itself.

At their optimistic $30mm level of fundraising, Americans Elect has about 3% of the budget that Obama’s 2012 campaign wants to spend. Obama has a couple advantages beyond mere funding, though. Name recognition, for one. His party also has some name recognition; there are more registered Democrats than registered Americans Elect-ers. And force of habit: no American alive has memory of a credible third party. Meanwhile, most Americans are used to the usual pageantry of primaries and formal debates. The billion dollars Obama intends to raise is a tiny fraction of the value of the airtime that the campaign will get during late 2011 and throughout 2012; there may not be enough commercial airtime available to match how much attention the Republicans and Democrats will get for free merely by virtue of their party affiliation.

This is the trade that smart, ambitious people make when they get into politics late in life. Bloomberg, an obvious Democrat, registered as a Republican. Ross Perot, a principled outsider, tried the third party route. Now, Bloomberg is a political force (the organizers of Americans Elect flirted with a ‘draft Bloomberg’ campaign in the last election), and Perot is most often used as a punchline.

The Internet can be a tool for political activism, but it’s not very useful as a way to revolutionize some aspect of the political process by playing by the rules of that process. The Internet wins political fights all the time—in the last few years, broadband plus Bittorrent has drastically weakened copyright in a way that no lobbyist could imagine, for example. But the best the Internet can do in terms of working within the system is somewhere between Obama and Ron Paul: notable, but not revolutionary.

(Full disclosure: Digital Due Diligence’s founders’ previous employer pitched Americans Elect on their web design and online marketing campaigns, but argued strenuously that the idea was unrealistic. Americans Elect selected a different agency.)