The New Republic

Everyone tells their own version of how Walter Mondale won

the straw poll at Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in 1983,

but they all go something like this: In early October, a young

Mondale aide named Joe Trippi shows up in Des Moines to check on

Mondale's Iowa field operation. What he finds there horrifieshim. Somehow the Iowa team has allowed the rival campaign of

California Senator Alan Cranston to nearly corner the market on

tickets to the JJ dinner, an annual affair designed to raise

money for the Iowa state Democratic Party. This is, to

colossally understate things, a problem. The dinner's

traditional straw poll is an important barometer of public

opinion in the state that hosts the nation's first caucuses.

Mondale is a former vice president from neighboring Minnesota.

Not only is he expected to win the straw poll; he is expected to

win big. But the way you win is by packing the convention hall

full of your own supporters. And the way you do that is by

selling them tickets or buying tickets for them.

Trippi is nearly hysterical when he calls Campaign Manager

Bob Beckel and Deputy Manager Mike Ford in Washington. "He

speaks so fast, it was hard to keep up," Beckel recalls. "I

said, 'Joe, What's the bottom line? What do you need?' He said,

'I just need permission to do whatever I need to do.' ... I just

said OK." But there isn't a lot Trippi can do. He can try

to get the Iowa Democratic Party to sell him more tickets. But

there's no way they're going to sell him $275,000 worth, which

is what Trippi estimates Cranston has bought. And, even if they

would, there's no way he can afford to drop that kind of cash on

an off-year event. When it comes down to it, Trippi is going to

have to get his hands on tickets that have already been sold.

Cranston tickets. Lots of them. And yet, once he accepts that

proposition, the solution is almost elegant in its simplicity:

What's to stop him from just marching right up to Cranston's

people and asking for them?

"We started really early in the day," Trippi remembers,

reflecting on how he and an Iowa colleague named Tom Cosgrove

solved their JJ problem. "They stopped about three miles out

[from] the staging area--the Mondale buses coming from Minnesota

or wherever they were coming from." What follows is one of the

most ambitious political makeovers in history. A team of Mondale

aides, led by Cosgrove, plasters the bus with Cranston

paraphernalia--stickers, posters, buttons, everything. Three

miles down the road, the bus pulls up to the Cranston tent,

where a Mondale/Cranston supporter gets out and tells a real

Cranston aide he has 52 people on the bus. The aide looks up at

the bus, surely admiring the military-like discipline that has

brought a busload of Cranston supporters from "Los Angeles or

wherever" out to the middle of Iowa this early in the day, and

quietly congratulates himself. He promptly hands over 52

tickets.

And it continues like this, through bus after bus of Mondale

supporters: Stop three miles up the highway, lather the bus in

Cranston paraphernalia, drive on to the Cranston tent, claim

your tickets. And the Cranston campaign just keeps forking them

over. Happily. Hell, the more buses that show up, the more

impressed the Cranston people are by their own handiwork. Never

does it occur to them that these busloads of supporters aren't

the genuine article. At least not until the real Cranston buses

start showing up. "Twenty buses pull up, and they're out of

tickets," Trippi says, still amused at the spectacle almost 20

years later. "More Cranston buses keep pulling up, and they

don't have the tickets anymore." Score one for Walter

Mondale.

Joe Trippi has been called a lot of things during the eight

months he has been managing Howard Dean's campaign for

president. To rival campaigns, he's an overgrown computer geek,

playing around on blogs and chat rooms until all hours of the

night. To the most die-hard Dean supporters, he's an almost

messianic figure, the man who helped catapult an obscure Vermont

governor to the front of the Democratic pack. And, to the press,

Trippi is the kind of uninhibited quote machine most reporters

drool over--tossing off quips that are part campaign insider,

part pundit, and part pure bravado.

There's some truth to all these claims. But Trippi is first

and foremost an organizer--a man who has spent much of his

career making sure the right number of bodies turn up on

Election Day. "That's the way [organizers] think," says Beckel.

"They think about moving votes. In his case, where do you find

[the votes]? Who are they? Where do they stand? If they're with

us, get them; if they're not with us, forget about them. If

they're undecided, badger the hell out of them." And for good

reason: In the Democratic primaries, where turnout is extremely

low, the better-organized campaign almost always wins.

Of course, Dean's rivals realize this as well. Their

campaigns are all staffed by seasoned veterans who collectively

have been through dozens of primary contests. What these rivals

didn't realize at the onset of the 2004 campaign is that the

Internet is the ultimate organizing tool. In fact, the reason

they're all now staring up at the bottom of Dean's shoes is that

no political operative had ever realized it before Joe

Trippi came along.

Trippi was 24 when he joined his first presidential

campaign, as an organizer for Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy

in the 1980 Arizona precinct caucuses. The challenge facing

Kennedy in Arizona was that the Democratic establishment in the

state--as in most states--was behind the incumbent, Jimmy

Carter. And, while there were large pockets of Kennedy support,

primarily in the state's poorer Hispanic communities and on its

Indian reservations, the Carter-friendly establishment had

arrayed the polling places so that they would be nearly

impossible for Kennedy-backers to get to. "What they had done is

they had only nineteen polling places," Trippi recalls. "And

they were put as far away from the minority community and

[Indian] reservations as they could put them."

Trippi was already a veteran of multiple organizing efforts

in his native California. That experience paid dividends when

California Governor Jerry Brown decided not to challenge Carter

for the Democratic nomination. Brown, a longtime supporter of

Cesar Chavez's farm-workers union, would have instantly had the

farm workers' backing in Arizona had he entered the race. His

decision not to run created an opening for Trippi who, on the

strength of his relationship with Cesar's son Fernando, helped

convince the farm workers to mobilize their shock troops for

Kennedy. "They came in like a swat

team in Arizona," says one Kennedy campaign official. "In the

[Latino] community, the farm workers are tremendous heroes. They

had enormous credibility." On Election Day, Trippi and the farm

workers went up and down the so-called Phoenix-Tucson corridor,

a population hub in the southcentral part of the state, piling

voters into rented vans and shuttling them to polling places.

"These nineteen polling places had lines for hours," Trippi

remembers. Kennedy won Arizona by ten points.

After Arizona, Trippi loaded his most loyal lieutenants into

his ailing, gold Pinto and drove nonstop for nearly 1,000 miles

to Austin, where Bill Carrick was running Kennedy's Texas

operation. Texas was the next major Southwestern primary state

on the calendar, and Carrick was adamant that he already had it

fully staffed. But Trippi, undeterred, pointed to a splotch on

the map in the northeastern part of the state and asked if it

was available. "Well, we're still working on that," Carrick shot

back, trying to suppress a guffaw. Trippi had stumbled onto the

single most conservative, pro-Carter area in the state: Dallas-

Fort Worth.

At the time, Texas had one of the more convoluted methods of

allocating its delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Once every four years, voters would show up for what looked like

a typical primary--the wrinkle being that the primary didn't

count for anything. To actually win delegates, you had to make

sure your supporters turned out for the state's caucuses, which

took place at eight o'clock the same evening. The catch was that

you couldn't attend the caucuses without having voted in the

primary, since it was your primary stub that got you in the

door. It was, in short, a nightmare for political

organizers.

Trippi figured Carter supporters outnumbered Kennedy

supporters in the Dallas area by something like four to one. At

that rate, there probably weren't enough Kennedy partisans in

all of East Texas to make a Dallas win likely. But, in

principle, it didn't really matter. Because all you really had

to do to win delegates was to get enough of your voters to

attend the caucuses. Of course, to this point, no one had quite

figured out how to do that. "Headquarters had us doing this

weird thing where you call people up and say, 'Who are you

[supporting] for president?'" Trippi recalls. "If they say, 'I'm

for Ted Kennedy,' you say, 'Great, make sure you vote.' Then,

after they said OK, you said, 'Now, you're going to get this

sticker, you're going to have to wear it, you're going to have

to go to Charlie's house ... .' And we weren't getting through.

People were just hanging up on us."

A couple of hundred phone calls in, it occurred to Trippi

that it would save everybody a lot of time and aggravation if

there were some way to get your supporters to come to you rather

than seeking them out yourself. Trippi thought about it a little

more, and pretty soon he had an idea: What if, come Election

Day, you set up a little lemonade stand with a sign that read

kennedy supporters: free lemonade

here outside every Dallas-area polling station? On the

one hand, no one in his right mind was going to pass up free,

cold lemonade in 100-degree heat. On the other hand, Carter

supporters weren't exactly in their right minds. They were, in

fact, exactly the kind of people who'd deprive themselves just

to spite Kennedy, even if it was 100 degrees out. Which was

exactly the idea. Because, once you were sure you had your own

people throwing back free glasses of lemonade, you could make

your case. As Trippi explains it, "You'd say, 'See that stub you

got? Let me tell you what's going on. They've been hoodwinkin'

you, dude. This thing that you just went through? It's bullshit.

It's a beauty contest. Eight o'clock tonight is where [the real

event is].'" It was that easy.

Carrick, needless to say, wasn't pleased to learn that the

fate of his Dallas operation lay in the hands of a couple-dozen

hastily assembled lemonade stands. And, when Trippi tried to

circumvent him by calling national political director Karl

Wagner in Washington, Wagner cut him off before he could get a

word out: "Joe, you're not doing the lemonade stands." So,

according to Trippi, "I hung up the phone and walked into my

staff and said, 'OK, don't tell anybody, but we're doing

lemonade stands.'" The results spoke for themselves. The Kennedy

campaign won most of the national delegates in the Dallas area

and got wiped out just about everywhere else in the state. "It

was very effective," Carrick concedes.

It's not much of an overstatement to say that political

organizing didn't change a whole lot between the mid-nineteenth

century and the 1960s. As early as 1840, according to Daniel

Shea, a professor of political science at Allegheny College and

author of Campaign Craft: The Strategies, Tactics, and Art of

Political Campaign Management, voters were organized in two

phases: The weekend before an election, party activists would go

door-to-door or drop leaflets in supporters' neighborhoods,

reminding them of the upcoming vote. Then, on Election Day, the

party would place a representative at each polling site to

record the name of every voter who showed up. Every so often

throughout the day, a runner would grab the list and take it

back to the local headquarters, where the names would be checked

off a master registration list maintained by the party. The

people whose names remained on the master list by the middle of

the afternoon would receive a visit from an activist or, in

later years, a phone call urging them to get to the

polls.

Partisan affiliation began to decline in the '60s, creating

a new class of swing voters and a new problem for political

parties. When the universe of a candidate's supporters

overlapped almost entirely with the universe of party members,

as it had for the previous hundred years, winning elections was

mostly a function of turning out the vote. Now the parties had

to spend time and resources winning over unaligned voters--even

members inclined to vote for the other side. Demographic

characteristics that correlated with voting behavior--such as

age, income level, and gender--suddenly became

important.

Still, up until the late '90s, parties and campaigns tried

to determine who would vote for them by looking primarily at who

had shown up for the previous election. As a first cut, this was

a reasonable way to go about things. The problem was that the

method didn't account for important nuances--such as newly

registered voters, people who usually vote but just happened to

miss the previous election, people who are registered one way

but tend to vote the other--which would make the get-out-the-vote
effort even more efficient.

That's where information technology (I.T.) has had a

significant impact in the past few years. Using ever more

detailed data, a computer can tell you exactly how much certain

demographic characteristics increase a person's likelihood of

voting--and of voting a certain way. Suppose, completely

arbitrarily, that affluent, middle-aged, white females only show

up for every other election, but they favor Democrats 90 percent

of the time when they do vote. If you're a Democratic candidate,

you probably want to make a special effort to get this group to

the polls.

Of course, focusing your efforts in this way may only get

you a couple of percentage points on Election Day. (Hal Malchow,

a direct-mail specialist who worked for Al Gore's presidential

campaign in 2000, estimates that a similar kind of targeting

improves the efficiency of a campaign mailing by between 10 and

30 percent.) But, in a close race, a couple of percentage points

may be the difference between winning and losing.

It's helpful to think about these developments in terms of

what you might call "cost per body"--that is, the total amount

you end up spending to bring a single supporter to the polls. If

resources were unlimited, no one would care about the cost per

body. You could just send a campaign worker to every house in,

say, Iowa, identify your supporters, and drag them to the voting

booth. But resources are limited. Which means that, among

candidates with similarly appealing platforms and equal amounts

of money, the one with the lowest cost per body wins. I.T. is a

way for campaigns to lower that cost, if only marginally.

And yet, even though campaigns are organizing supporters

more efficiently than ever before, they're still using the same

basic techniques they've been using for 35--and in many cases

150--years. Donna Brazile, who managed the Gore campaign,

recalls that her single most important concern at this point in

1999 was the campaign's Iowa hard count--i.e., the number of

people who have committed to supporting your candidate in the

upcoming election. "It's a standard recipe," Brazile explains:

The campaign buys a list of registered voters and past

caucusgoers from the state party just before it opens for

business. At that point, you start making phone calls. The

people who say they're definitely supporting your candidate are

assigned a "one." The people who say they're leaning your way

get a "two." And the people who say they're for the other guy

get a "three." Your job is to convert all your twos to ones and

to keep your ones from sliding. The number of ones you have at

any given time is your hard count. Let it fall too low, and you

can kiss the election goodbye.

Which is to say, with the possible exception of Trippi's

lemonade stands, no innovation introduced in the 160 years

between 1840 and 2000 had changed the basic economics of

organizing: As long as you still had to go out and identify your

supporters and drag them to the polls, it still cost you a ton

of money for every vote you won.

Trippi has always been a self-described technophile. He

spent three years at San Jose State University majoring in

aerospace engineering. Beckel remembers doing a panel discussion

with him not long after the 1984 campaign, when Trippi was

already talking about an early version of the Internet and how

it could change politics. "I said, 'Joe, I don't have any idea

what you're talking about,'" Beckel recalls. Meanwhile, though

Trippi's profile in the small world of political operatives

continued to grow with each successive presidential
campaign--Mondale in the 1984 election cycle, Gary Hart and then
Dick

Gephardt in the 1988 cycle--he'd begun to sour on the life of

the political operative. The constant plotting and scheming of a

presidential campaign had started to wear on him, as had the

growing importance of money in politics and the implosion of the

Hart campaign over something as seemingly irrelevant as Donna

Rice. So it wasn't entirely surprising that the late '90s found

Trippi entrenched in Silicon Valley instead--investing in tech

start-ups, sitting on boards of directors, and doing corporate

consulting on the side.

One of those start-ups was a little-known firm called Wave

Systems, whose products secure information--like credit card

numbers--used in online transactions. But more important than

the technology was the investor community Wave created. Starting

in about 1997, the company set up a chat board for Wave

investors interested in exchanging ideas with one another.

Pretty soon the site was attracting hundreds of posts per day

from so-called "Wavoids"--at all hours of the night. What kept

them coming back was the fact that Wave executives were actually

reading what the investors wrote. "They had this constituency,"

says Jason Barkeloo, a Ph.D. student living in Ohio who invested

in the company early on and remains a frequent poster on the

company's message board. "The people involved in this community

were doctors, neurosurgeons, psychiatrists, professors. ... I'd

come home at four, five in afternoon, and I'd be online doing

research 'til two in the morning."

Joe Trippi--username "random1"--was also a Wavoid.

"Snackman, Bigtim, EcommerceMan--I can tell you everything about

that community," he says. Trippi had begun investing in Wave and

posting on its chat board in 1999. Although he was intrigued by

the kind of community Wave had built, within a couple months it

became obvious that the company wasn't doing as good a job as it

could of interacting with investors. "They had a really tough

time communicating in English what it is they do," Trippi

recalls. So Trippi sent an e-mail directly to Wave CEO Steven

Sprague and his father, Peter, the company's chairman. "I said,

'I think you guys are screwing up. You're not communicating

things right. ... Here's why and how and everything.'"

A month later, Trippi was on the company payroll--a move

that, according to Barkeloo, was like catnip to the Wavoids.

"When Joe came on board, through the community there was an air

of, 'One of us now is on the inside.' Joe, as far as I know, was

the bridge between the community and the company." Sprague

estimates that, before long, Wave's investors were generating

1,000 and 1,500 posts per day, something basically unheard of in

the corporate world. "I don't think there's anyone that will

tell you there's anything like it," Trippi says.

Beyond its size, two things stood out about the Wave

community. The first was the emotional investment the

shareholders were making thanks to their interaction with each

other and the company's management--an investment that produced

incredible loyalty. "I think that the individual retail

investor, no doubt about it, kept Wave afloat," says Barkeloo.

"The loyal following kept the stock price up. The company should

have gone away [when the tech bubble burst], but it didn't

because of the retail base." The second thing was the way

the investment community expanded. "It was word of mouth,

grassroots," Sprague explains. "A buddy calls you up and says,

'Ah, I have a great stock.' You say, 'Where can I learn more?'

He says, 'Join the chat board.'"; Trippi is often credited with
bringing the Dean campaign

into the information age.

Trippi is often credited with bringing the Dean campaign

into the information age. In fact, it's the other way around: It

was Dean's rapidly growing Internet support that made it

necessary to bring Trippi into the campaign. The turning point

was the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee

(DNC) in February, where Dean offered a full-throated

denunciation of the drive to war in Iraq and accused his party

of failing to stand up to the president. Dean had been receiving

a healthy 50 e-mails per day prior to the speech, but suddenly

the messages were pouring in. "After the DNC speech, [the e-mails]
went up geometrically," says Rick Ridder, Trippi's

immediate predecessor as campaign manager. "It was close to five

hundred a day."

One of Trippi's first acts on behalf of the Dean campaign

(he was a consultant at the time) was to negotiate a contract

with Meetup.com--an online service that helps people with common

interests find one another and plan local gatherings. In early

January, according to The Wall Street Journal, Meetup

decided to test the market for political gatherings by inviting

users to sign up for a "Meetup" with John Edwards, John Kerry,

or Howard Dean. Four hundred people signed up for the Dean

Meetup on the first day alone, leading a young Meetup employee

named William Finkel to suggest to his boss, CEO Scott

Heiferman, that the two seek out Trippi and establish a formal

business relationship. "I was going to D.C. for a business

meeting at AOL," says Heiferman. "William said, 'Hey, let's go

see this guy Joe Trippi.' I said, 'Who the hell's Joe Trippi?'

He said, 'He's working on the Dean campaign.' I said, 'Who the

hell's Howard Dean?'"

But Heiferman met Trippi, and 40 minutes later the future

Dean campaign manager had seen something he hadn't seen for

almost 25 years. The beauty of the Meetups, like the beauty of

the lemonade stands he'd set up for Ted Kennedy in 1980, was

that your supporters came to you. And that meant that the

cost per body fell dramatically. Or, more precisely, to some

fraction of $2,500. That's the price Trippi agreed to pay Meetup

for the information Dean supporters entered when they signed up

for Dean gatherings.

Meetup figured perfectly into Trippi's grand campaign

strategy. He reasoned that Dean's antiwar, anti-Bush message

would resonate at the grassroots, meaning Dean could raise

impressive amounts of money from a large base of small donors.

That's what had happened in 1992, when Trippi's client, Jerry

Brown, promised not to accept donations larger than $100 for his

presidential campaign. "I had the same concern everyone else

did," Trippi recalls. "'A hundred dollars? Do you know how many

hundred-dollar checks you've got to raise to compete with Bill

Clinton and these other guys?'" But the response among

contributors was quick--and overwhelming. The campaign raised $5

million, helping Brown win the Connecticut and Colorado

primaries and come within a hair's breadth of winning New York.

But the way the campaign came to collect so much money in such

small amounts was even more significant: the first known use of

an 800 number to solicit feedback from supporters, making the

campaign interactive.

Trippi believed he could repeat that success using a
twenty-first-century update of his earlier methods--not only to
raise

money but to build the kind of community he'd seen evolve at

Wave Systems, which could do a lot of the heavy organizational

lifting for him. In addition to the Meetups, he created a Web

log, where supporters could post their thoughts and get feedback

from the campaign. The hope was that each person who attended a

Dean Meetup or who wrote regularly on the Dean blog would turn

around and involve several more people--siblings, parents,

friends, business associates--all of whom could be put to work

for the campaign. (On July 2, for example, Dean Meetup-goers

wrote letters to every undecided voter in Iowa.) Trippi would

eventually hire a Web staff of some ten people to write

everything from computer code to blog content.

Before long, Trippi puts together a PowerPoint presentation

explaining how he's going to use the Internet to attract cash

and sign up supporters--which he dutifully takes around to

meetings with labor leaders, congressmen, fund-raisers, and

other members of the Democratic establishment. But, of course,

at the time the campaign has a measly 8,000 people signed up on

its website. To say, as Trippi does, that Dean is going to have

150,000 people signed up by June and 450,000 by September, and

that it's going to lap the field in fund-raising--well, the

average Democratic suit just has no idea what to do with that.

"You have one hundred fifty-seven thousand bucks in the bank,

and everyone just saw your FEC report," Trippi says. "Everybody

I gave the presentation to looked at me like I was from Mars and

probably on massive quantities of hallucinogenic drugs."

That's February. In March, something happens. According to

Heiferman, the average pre-Dean Meetup size was between eight

and 16 people--"a dozen knitters here, fifteen Harry Potter fans

there." But, as Dean's March Meetup rolls around, Heiferman

notices that there are 250 people signed up for a single

location in New York--just one of hundreds of Dean Meetups set

to take place across the country on the same day. Heiferman

decides to check it out for himself and can barely believe his

eyes. "There's that moment of seeing what turned out to be five

hundred people packed into this place," he remembers, still not

entirely convinced he saw what he thinks he saw. Then, in late

March, something else happens. Trippi looks at his website and

sees that he's now got 22,000 e-mail addresses. He thinks to

himself, why not ask people to help make one big fund-raising

push in the last week of the quarter? The results blow him away:

10,000 individual contributors; nearly $500,000 in six

days.

A month passes, and it's more of the same: More e-mail

addresses, more people at the Meetups, more money rolling in.

Another month, and another, and it just keeps growing. Now it's

late June, and Trippi is sure he's not on massive quantities of

hallucinogenic drugs--or, if he is, the rest of the world is,

too. He packs up the PowerPoint presentation and goes back to

see the Democratic suits. "You saw me talk to you before,"

Trippi would say. "Let me explain this to you." And Trippi lays

out the numbers. Back in February, he'd promised that 150,000

people would sign up on the website by the end of June. There

are actually 159,000. Ears perk up. And then Trippi starts

speaking the suits' language. "I just hand them a slip of paper

that says 2.6 million dollars on it, or whatever it was that

day. I'd say, 'That's how much money we've raised this quarter.

We're ten days away from the end of quarter.'" And then he'd

close the deal. "You know how you're going to know this

[campaign] is true? Keep this. Whatever you read in the

newspaper about what we do in this quarter, remember that it

happened after this amount." And the suits just stare blankly at

their slips of paper--$2.6 million, or $2.4 million, or $3.1

million--whatever it happens to be that day. And now they're not

so sure. What if this guy is for real?

Come early July, the suits are sitting down to read those

newspapers Trippi told them to read, and the newspapers all say

that Dean has raised $7.6 million. The suits look at their slips

of paper--with $2.6 million, or 2.4, or 3.1, or whatever--and

they look back at the newspaper, and it just doesn't make any

sense. That's when Trippi's phone starts ringing. All at once

the suits are calling. They want another look at that PowerPoint

presentation. "Now, no one was doing 'Geez, you're crazy,'

anymore," Trippi says. "They were just going like, 'Oh shit.'"

Suddenly, it's dawning on the suits that, if you can go from

$2.6 to $7.6 million in ten days, and if you can go from 22,000

to 159,000 people in three months, then those 450,000 people

Trippi promised by the end of September just might materialize.

And, if those 450,000 people Trippi promised materialized, who

knew how much money they might bring with them?

But, in truth, the suits are only grasping the tip of the

iceberg. Because the money is incidental--a by-product, really.

Far more important is that Trippi is racking up a hard count

most campaign operatives could only dream of--and without having

to make a single phone call, knock on a single door, or send a

single piece of direct mail. Every time the suits have heard

about the Internet changing politics over the last ten years,

their eyes have glazed over. And for good reason. Up until

Howard Dean and Joe Trippi came along, the only thing I.T. had

done was marginally lower the cost of doing the same things

they'd always done. And it wasn't even clear it did that. But

Trippi is doing something radically different. Like all those

fanatical Wave Systems investors, the Dean supporters are doing

the hard work of organizing for him, which means the cost

per body is falling like mad. Come to think of it, the campaign

is even making money in the process.

Trippi is an olive-skinned man with large, bulbous features--bulging
eyes, prominent lips, meaty ears--a middle-aged paunch,

and a slightly balding, salt-and-pepper pate. When he's not out

roaming among aides, he's usually leaning back deep in his

chair, feet propped up on the edge of the folding table that

serves as his desk, grasping at a can of Diet Pepsi or one of

the handful of gadgets that litter his office. Halfway through

our conversation I ask how big a deal it is to have stumbled

onto a way to get supporters to do part of your job for you.

Trippi waves me around to his side of the table and directs me

to a portion of the Dean website called "Deanlink," which tracks

the number of additional supporters each current Dean-backer is

bringing in. "Here's Jonathan Kreiss Tompkins," Trippi says,

pointing to a picture on the screen of his laptop. Jonathan

Kreiss Tompkins lives in Alaska and, it turns out, has
single-handedly signed up 463 other Dean supporters--their names go
on

for screen after screen down the left side of Jonathan's

Deanlink page. "What I'm trying to say is ... all these people

have linked themselves to this guy--and it keeps going, dude."

Trippi pauses and looks up. "Now here's the really cool thing:

Jonathan Kreiss Tompkins is fourteen years old."

What Trippi doesn't say is that, if you find yourself enough

Jonathan Kreiss Tompkinses, pretty soon you've won yourself the

nomination. (This is something even the supposedly Internet-savvy
campaign of General Wesley Clark doesn't seem to

understand.) After all, there are about 100,000 Democrats who

typically vote in the Iowa caucuses out of about 500,000

registered in the state. In the average presidential year, you

can assure yourself of a win if you get your hard count up to

about 30,000. In a year when there are nine candidates, the hard

count you need to ensure victory is even lower. Now extend the

logic: If, as the DNC assumes, there are about 50 million

registered Democrats in the country, and the same percentage of

Democrats show up at the polls on primary day around the country

as they do in Iowa, then no more than ten million people are

likely to vote in all. Which means that, assuming your

supporters are distributed the right way, you probably don't

need a national hard count of more than one or two million to

assure yourself the nomination.

Mention this theory to Trippi, and he cites Washington state--a
place, it's probably safe to say, that none of the other

campaigns are even thinking about at this point. "In Washington

state, God help any of the other candidates," he says. "We have

such an organization up there." According to Trippi, somewhere

between 30,000 and 40,000 people have historically turned out

for the state's presidential caucuses. This past August, 15,000

people turned out to see Dean stop by a Seattle Meetup during

his "Sleepless Summer Tour." "I'm standing there going like,

'Shit, we'd win the caucus today,'" Trippi recalls. "'We'd win

the statewide caucus with how many people are standing here.'"

And even that probably understates Dean's grassroots support:

Seattle was just one of more than 20 Meetups across Washington

state that day.

Of course, a skeptic might say that, just because you have

15,000 people show up for a Meetup, or 250,000 people giving you

money, or 500,000 people giving you their e-mail addresses and

reading your blog, doesn't necessarily mean that all 15,000 or

250,000 or 500,000 are going to show up on Election Day. And, if

that's the case, the skeptic would probably continue, then the

two million e-mail addresses Trippi says he's building toward

don't mean a whole lot. But, then, this skeptic has probably

never worked for Wave Systems or, for that matter, the

presidential campaign of Jerry Brown. If he had, he probably

would have learned that, when you're raising money from people

in small increments, and when those same people think they're

being listened to, then those people start to feel like they own

the campaign. And, once they start to feel they own the

campaign, it's almost impossible to pry them away. In the

language of political organizing, you never have to worry about

your ones backsliding into twos.

Trippi gets a perfect test of this proposition in late June,

right in the middle of the $7.6 million push. Dean goes on NBC's

"Meet the Press" and, according to just about every pundit in

Washington, falls flat on his face. But the average Dean

supporter doesn't quite see it that way. He sees the same candor

and forthrightness that won him over in the first place. And,

truth be told, he thinks Tim Russert is a bit of an
asshole--constantly trying to trap Dean in contradictions and

hypocrisies. Furthermore, he's annoyed at how dismissive the

media is when it comes to a campaign that, after all, he partly

owns. Pretty soon, he's writing e-mails and ponying up more

cash, trying to send a message to the people who would tread on

his investment.

"Well, let's see," Trippi says when I suggest that his

supporters might not show up when it counts. "They can go to a

frickin' meeting once a month, but they aren't going to make it

to a caucus, which is--what's that--a meeting once every four

years?"

The bad news if you happen to be a Democratic partisan

intent on beating George W. Bush is that there's no obvious way

to organize yourself to a general-election victory. Unlike the

primary, where the goal is to win over one or two million hard-core
partisans, winning a general election requires something on

the order of 50 million votes--many from the vast political

center. Take the most successful Internet operation in history,

raise it an order of magnitude, and still you don't come

anywhere near the number of votes you need.

And that's under ordinary circumstances. The problem grows

considerably worse when you consider that your opponent is a

president who plans to raise some $200 million and who has spent

four years courting his own conservative base. The combination

of the two means Bush is likely to have both the money and the

political latitude to woo the millions of swing voters he needs

to cement his reelection.

Still, there is hope. Trippi and Dean are now hard at work

locking up the more traditional elements of the Democratic base.

(Dean is widely expected to receive the endorsement of the 1.6

million-member Service Employees International Union this week.)

Between Dean's Internet operation and the manpower of big labor

and various women's and civil rights groups, a nominee Dean

might even surpass the turnout operation that put Gore over the

top in several states--Delaware, Washington, Wisconsin,
Michigan--where he was running even with Bush or trailing in the
final

days of the 2000 campaign. "It's not like I just fell off the

turnip truck, and I'm an Internet guy, and all I know how to do

is the Internet," Trippi says. "Trust me. We're going to reach

African Americans. We know how to do that."

And, of course, there is the money. If Dean becomes the

Democratic nominee, his Internet fund-raising ability will once

again be a crucial factor in his chances of success. "This is

like in January, and we're sitting there, and we finally realize

it's going to take two million Americans each giving us one

hundred dollars online" to raise as much money as Bush, Trippi

says. "There's only one medium ... that can change things enough

that, if two million people tomorrow morning just woke up and

thought, here's your one hundred dollars, it could happen in a

day." Surely someone somewhere in the White House has had the

exact same thought.

Correction: This article originally stated that Howard Dean's August
2003 rally in Seattle, Washington was a Meetup. It was not. The
article also noted that a Mondale field organizer named Tom
Cosgrove was involved in an effort to steal tickets to the Iowa
Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner from the rival presidential campaign
of California Senator Alan Cranston in 1983. Cosgrove, though
actively involved in Monale's JJ dinner field operation, was not
involved in this effort. We regret the errors.

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