February 18–25, 1999

city beat

election99.com

Philly's mayoral candidates are campaigning on the Internet, with varying degrees of success

by Frank Lewis

Jesse "The Body" Ventura's election to the office of governor of Minnesota was bizarre in so many ways that a key element of his campaign went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media. The charismatic but desperately underfunded third-party candidate's victory showed just how much impact a Web site can have.

"Early in the race, Ventura realized that the Internet was 'tailor-made' for his kind of low-budget, unconventional campaign," writes political analyst David Beiler in the current issue of Campaigns & Elections magazine. "'It's reaching a huge amount of people at a very low price,'" [Ventura] was quoted as observing."

Among political consultants, the word is out: An Internet presence can translate into votes. Indeed, the February issue of Campaigns & Elections includes three articles specifically about using Web sites and e-mail to turn out the vote, in addition to the "case study" on Ventura's unorthodox campaign. (Even two and a half years ago, C&E was banging the drum for e-campaigning; a July 1996 essay by a South Carolina-based political consultant predicted that the Internet would force campaigners to "rethink the very essence of what we do, rather than simply adapting and refining our techniques to fit a new 'shouting' medium.")

Those advising the Philadelphia mayoral candidates have been paying attention. With the primary still three months away, all but one (John White) of the six announced or soon-to-announce candidates have established an Internet presence.

But how much their Web sites and e-mailings could affect the election remains to be seen. Because as everyone who's done more online than read e-mail and poke through pornographic sites knows, in cyberspace, there are those who get it, and those who don't.

Among the mayoral hopefuls, the best example of the former is State Rep. Dwight Evans. Designed and maintained by deputy campaign manager David Sirota, Evans' site (www.dwightevans99.com) is thorough, easy to use and already firing on all cylinders. None of his competitors' sites can make all the same claims.

Like the others, Evans' site offers extensive biographical data (bet you didn't know he taught English in the Philadelphia school system for a year after college) and lists of accomplishments. But unlike the others, dwightevans99.com also has pages of detailed position papers—the kind of material traditionally available only to reporters, and rarely published verbatim.

Presently, the other sites offer only sketchy information on the candidates' plans if elected, or promises that such details will be posted later.

Evans' site also displays an understanding of the medium and what it can do that's not as clearly evidenced in his opponents' sites. For example, the site includes a Student Center that was "designed especially for those students following Philadelphia's mayoral race in 1999." The Student Center has a form to submit questions or comments to Evans via e-mail, and a Dwight Evans trivia quiz. ("What was the name of the group of Democratic and Republican representatives that helped reform the city police department? The Gang of Five, the Big Bad Group, the Goodfellas, or the Tough Guys?") A teacher couldn't ask for a better intro to a lesson in modern urban politics. (Actually, that's exactly what University of Pennsylvania professor and author Dr. Phyllis Kaniss had in mind when she suggested the idea, says Sirota.)

"Dwight insisted from the beginning that we have a good Web site," says Sirota, who, at 23, has already parlayed the Web-designing skills he picked up in college into jobs with four campaigns.

"The idea of having someone on staff who could do a Web site, among other things… was appealing," says Jack Fugett, Evans' campaign manager. Sirota's previous post had been with Joe Hoeffel's successful campaign for Congress in Montgomery County last year. And as Sirota notes (modestly), Hoeffel won by about 9,500 votes, and the Web site generated 11,000 hits from 8,000 different people.

Whether the Web site made the difference is impossible to say. But Fugett says Evans' site, and the e-mail list begun in conjunction with it, are already doing part of what the campaign wanted them to do: dispense information quickly.

"There's a more immediate reaction to e-mail, particularly with the media, than with faxes," Fugett says. The Evans Express e-newsletter is now going out at least a couple of times a week. Moments before this article was completed, an Evans media advisory arrived, announcing that Evans had issued a public challenge to his opponents to join him in weekly debates to be held throughout the city.

And as Ventura's operation showed, e-mail can be extremely effective in reaching and mobilizing supporters. The Campaigns & Elections article notes, "The campaign's big closing event, a 72-hour final drive through the state, was organized and coordinated entirely by e-mail through its Web site. [The Webmaster] sent out an e-mail to his 3,000-member list, called 'JesseNet,' inviting volunteers to a meeting; more than 250 people showed up to help organize the tour."

Try accomplishing that with a phone tree.

It's not clear yet how aggressively the other candidates will use e-mail. But for the most part, they have not yet shown the same enthusiasm for e-campaigning that Evans' team has.

John Street's team, for example, has only scratched the surface with www. street99.com. Among the few elements online as of this week were Street's announcement speech—all 2,489 words of it. His resignation address to Council is there too, weighing in at an only slightly more concise 2,202 words.

Still, the announcement speech posting did turn out to have an impact on the race, albeit a small one. According to Fugett, Evans' camp heard that Street, in his announcement speech, had overstated his early support for the Pennsylvania Convention Center, but couldn't confirm this until finding the speech on Street's Web site that night. Evans fired off a letter, and Street has since posted this letter, and his response, on the Web site.

But if you want to know what plans John Street has for the city, you won't find much on his Web site; it's heavy on bio, short on proposals. And oddly, links called "You can get involved" and "Get out the vote" don't work at all. (Street's spokesman, Bruce Crawley, couldn't be reached before press time.)

The same is true of Happy Fernandez's site, www.happyformayor.org. The personal and professional data go on and on, but the Issue Papers link leads only to a curt message: "This section will be available in the coming weeks."

The campaign decided to get the site up "sooner rather than later," explains campaign manager David Dougherty, and the team simply wasn't ready to release position papers. "There are issues of timing that the campaign needs to be sensitive to," he says. "And we think it certainly makes sense to start with the basics [like a biography and resume]… and move ahead from there over the next 13 or 14 weeks."

Presumably Marty Weinberg's team is taking the same approach. His site, www.marty99.com, has been online since early summer, and hasn't changed much since. The "draft Marty" theme, which was hard to swallow even back then, still pervades the site. ("Marty has let us know that he is interested in running for Mayor. It's now up to us to let him know that he has a campaign, and can be successful. This webpage is designed to build grass-roots support for his Mayoral bid in 1999.")

Still, marty99.com offers something the other sites don't—voter registration forms in PDF format, and a link to the site where you can download the software needed for such documents. The forms allow already-registered voters to change their party affiliation—and Weinberg is hoping for a strong showing from supporters of his late friend Frank Rizzo, whose unsuccessful mayoral bids were under the Republican banner.

Weinberg's press team did not return City Paper's call before deadline.

Republican candidate Sam Katz's Web site is thin—there isn't even much in the way of background material on www.samkatz.org—but he has an excuse: He's unopposed in the primary. But last week, says spokesman Bob Barnett, a Temple student who'd e-mailed the campaign requesting a brief interview for a class project informed him that the project had been cancelled. Katz had agreed, but the other mayoral candidates, Barnett says, had failed to respond to other students' inquiries.

"It's like a phone or a fax machine," says Barnett. "Once you set it up, you have to answer it. People expect an answer."