Turbo-Charging Grassroots Activism

On April 10, 2007, thousands of Americans around the country joined their peers in living rooms and coffee houses for an unprecedented virtual town hall meeting -- hosted by MoveOn.org -- featuring seven presidential candidates. As viewers watched on screens big and small, the candidates shared viewpoints and responded to questions supplied by MoveOn's 3.2 million members.

There is a new force stirring in American politics these days: the "net-roots." Thanks to the Internet and the evolution of easy-to-use communications technologies, grassroots activism is being turbo-charged. Today, for almost no money, anyone can be a community organizer, a reporter, an ad-maker, a publisher, a money-raiser, or a leader. If they put what they have to say up on the net and what they have to say is compelling, it will spread. Why? We like to share news of things we care about, and the net makes it so easy to share news. The cost of finding likeminded souls, banding together, and speaking to the powerful has dropped to almost zero.

With all this bottom-up activity, the contours of politics are starting to change. To be sure, most elections are still dominated by wealthy special interests, but if you go online you will discover a vibrant inter-networking of activists, leaders, staffers, pundits, and plain old citizens through top political blogs that is making the term “people-powered” a reality. On the left folks congregate around sites like DailyKos.com, TalkingPointsMemo.com, FireDogLake.com, and MyDD.com. On the right there’s Townhall.com, RedState.com, and Powerline.com. Similar hubs are popping up at the state and even local levels. Sites like these function as sieves, spurs, and switching stations for moving money, ideas, and people.

The impact can be seen in last fall’s elections. In 2006, volunteers made more than 7 million get-out-the-vote calls through MoveOn’s “Call for Change” program. Instead of having to go to a phone bank, MoveOn’s system enabled people to plug into a website, get a list of phone numbers in a targeted congressional district, read some suggested talking points, and record the results of their efforts. ActBlue, an innovative website for Democrats that enabled anyone to form his or her own mini-PAC, channeled $16.5 million in small donations, averaging $110, to a plethora of candidates. That may not seem like a lot, but for several candidates who were initially backed by net-roots activists, like James Webb of Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana, early donations made through such sites helped turn them into “serious” candidates. Today, both men are US senators. ActBlue’s success has inspired a Republican version, called RightRoots, which in its first year raised nearly $300,000 for House candidates.

This is hardly just an American phenomenon. As Allison Fine writes in her new book, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, net-roots-style activism is shaking things up everywhere. She tells this story from Kuwait: In 1999, the country’s ruler issued a decree granting women full political rights. But for years legislation implementing his decree was stalled in the all-male legislature until a grassroots group of women turned to technology. As Fine writes: 

Suddenly, in May 2005, the Kuwaiti legislature voted by a surprising large margin of thirty-five to twenty-three, with one abstention, to remove the word men from Article One of the election laws, thereby guaranteeing women the right to vote and the opportunity to run for elected office. Who voted for the legislation was clear. Why they voted for it was something of a mystery. So what happened? Privately, often beneath their burkas, women used their BlackBerries and cell phones to send text and email messages urging legislators to vote in favor of full women’s suffrage. Kuwaiti legislators learned that e-mails don’t wear skirts or burkas. 

Here in the US, Joan Blades, one of the founders of MoveOn, has launched a new organization called MomsRising that is explicitly harnessing the net to galvanize action around such issues as paid family leave, flexible work options, health care for all, and affordable child care. While the organization is still very new, already hundreds of women activated through their network of bloggers have been sending “baby onesies” decorated with slogans calling for family leave to the state legislature of Washington. MomsRising calls the campaign the “Power of ONEsie.” After holding hearings, the Washington legislature passed a bill that would allow workers to take five weeks of paid leave to care for a new child. MomsRising aims to eventually bring the campaign to Washington, DC.

Lots of advocacy groups are realizing that in the Connected Age, the whole concept of “membership” is changing. While formal membership is declining at many organizations, individuals are starting their own email lists or blogs about issues they care about, pulling in their friends and contacts and getting them to do the same. At the same time, net-roots-style activism shows us that there is a tremendous well of volunteer political energy to be tapped using online tools around issues that people care about. To engage this energy effectively, Fine writes, “Activist organizations must change the way they view themselves and their members; they must start to act as part of networks of activists, not as soloists.” It’s not enough to ask people to write a check and send them a newsletter once every few months; today’s activists expect a new kind of relationship with advocacy organizations, one that respects them as self-starters with their own smarts. Groups that try to deny this changing reality face difficulties ahead; those who embrace it will thrive.

Related Content: Voting Rights & Election Reform, Work-Family Balance