Bouyed by bloggers and even his own YouTube group, upstart millionaire Ned Lamont beat Senator Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary. Not only was Lieberman outmaneuvered online, his site went down in flames on Tuesday — inaccessible for most of the day. At first Lieberman’s campaign said they were hacked in a denial-of-service attack — and aides blamed Lamont supporters, even calling for a criminal investigation. But later in the day, Lamont’s chief blogger said that Lieberman’s folks hadn’t anticipated all the election day traffic, and the site crashed naturally under all the load. “They use a shared server with 72 other sites. They pay their server $15 a month for 10 gigabytes. We’ve gone through more than 10 gigabytes in the last 24 hours,” blogger Tim Tagaris said. Whatever the case, it’s clear bloggers had a major impact in the campaign. Slate goes as far as proclaiming that web videos dismantled the Lieberman campaign. As we move closer to November’s critical midterm elections, you can bet this campaign will have every candidate reinforcing their internet strategy — an area of focus that’s officially become even more important than television.
Remember the “War Room” back in the first Clinton campaign? James Carville and George Stephanopoulos realized that their competitive advantage was the ability to respond quickly in the media — within a single news cycle — to any news in the campaign. The set up the War Room to monitor every allegation, ever opportunity in the media. Meanwhile, the Bush Sr. campaign relied on traditional channels and took its time crafting a response. Fast forward to today, and we’ve witnessed another political machine fall flat on its face. Lieberman’s inability to respond online to an explosion of allegations cost him his seat. Same general idea, but this time, candidates must directly and indirectly empower their strongest supporters to take to the internet. Blogs naturally will respond to everything in near real-time. The key is empowering enough of them to make a difference.