At midnight tonight, voting will close in the first online Democratic presidential primary ever. The vote is being sponsored by the San Francisco-based liberal activist group MoveOn; an estimated 300,000 of the group's more than 1.4 million U.S. members are expected to cast online ballots. And by Friday, one clear winner will have emerged: MoveOn itself.
The primary was designed, according to MoveOn organizing director Zack Exley, to give the group's members a voice in the presidential nominating contest at a stage normally dominated by "pollsters, pundits and people who can write $2,000 checks." The online nominating contest requires that a candidate win 50 percent of the vote in the field of nine in order to get the endorsement of MoveOn's political action committee (PAC) and support from its vast, potentially lucrative network of small donors -- support that will very likely be worth millions and could come before the crucial second-quarter of presidential primary fundraising ends June 30.
It will be a very tough contest to win. Around 180,000 of MoveOn's members voted in a preliminary poll about whether or not to hold a primary contest, says Exley, and 96.4 percent of them voted for it. But in a straw poll conducted around the same time, no candidate was able to garner more than 30-something percent of the vote, according to a campaign operative. The top three vote getters then were former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.), Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). MoveOn has refused to publicly release the straw poll numbers or even the order in which the candidates finished.
"We purposely set the bar high," says Exley of the 50-percent threshold for this week's vote. "I think it would be really difficult to win."
The Dean campaign, with more than 37,000 supporters registered through Meetup.com and an early and strong history of Internet organizing led by tech-savvy campaign manager Joe Trippi, is strongly favored to win the contest. Or at least, that's what the other campaigns have been saying. Erik Smith, spokesman for Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), last week alleged that "the process seems to be rigged" in favor of Dean. Other campaigns have made similar charges. "This is a format that is set up for Howard Dean to win," Kerry spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a telephone interview. "I would be completely shocked if Howard Dean didn't win."
Such suspicions have been fueled by a misunderstanding by the Gephardt team over the rules of the contest, by a two-day voting period scheduled to start the day after Dean formally announced his candidacy -- when his online momentum was likely to be at a peak -- and by the fact that Exley, one of MoveOn's top six leaders, once took a two-week leave of absence from MoveOn to consult with the Dean team about its Internet organizing efforts.
Yet the Dean team is worried that its candidate is being set up for a fall, according to one insider who's not with the campaign. "The Dean campaign is furious with this process. They are so upset with this. They hate this because all the other campaigns are setting expectations," said the operative. "They feel like they are going to take a huge hit" if they don't win.
Certainly, when it comes to playing the expectations game, the other campaigns have all done their best to increase the expectation of a Dean win while undermining the potential for one. The Kerry campaign began making automated telephone calls to supporters on Saturday night asking them for their e-mail addresses in the hope of gathering new online voters. (The rules required voters to register with MoveOn by the end of Monday to be eligible to cast ballots.) Gibbs said the calls went out to people who had either previously donated to, or somehow indicated interest in, the Kerry campaign -- and were only made to those whose e-mail contact information the campaign lacked. On Sunday, The Associated Press reported that the Dean campaign had also begun making automated calls in search of potential MoveOn voters. The Kerry and Dean campaigns, along with those of Kucinich, Gephardt, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), have all also undertaken e-mail and Web site campaigns to get their supporters to sign up with MoveOn and vote.
Given all the organizing for the primary and an expected turnout of 20-25 percent of MoveOn registrants, the odds that the contest could end in a nine-way checkmate with no candidate able to reach the 50-percent mark are high.
Exley dismissed predictions of an easy win for Dean as simple politicking by the other campaigns: "Any campaign who believes they are going to poll low has a cynical short-term interest in saying we've designed this for whatever candidate they think is going to do best. If we had wanted to design this process to give an early endorsement to a candidate, we could have done that. Any organization has the right to endorse a candidate."
In the past, MoveOn has simply had the PAC's institutional leaders choose which Democratic candidates to support and then funneled the group's resources to the favored candidates. This is the first time that MoveOn has thrown open its endorsement process to the general membership of the organization.
"I'd be shocked if any campaign won it outright," says Trippi. "I would find it amazing that anyone could get 50 percent in a field this large especially now with the resources that Kerry is spending."
So who wins if no one wins? "The eventual nominee wins the most," says Exley, "as we get our members active in all these campaigns." The goal was less to get the nine campaigns' existing supporters involved in MoveOn, says Exley, and more to get the existing MoveOn members, with all of their activist energy and passion, involved with the various presidential campaigns. Eventually, he says, MoveOn will try to get all its members -- old and new -- to support and help finance whichever candidate wins the real Democratic primary contest. Instead of having supporters of the losing candidates simply fade back into oblivion, MoveOn hopes to keep them mobilized and unite them around the common goal of defeating George W. Bush. Already, MoveOn is trying to help the candidates fundraise. Immediately after voting, primary participants are taken to a Web page with information about how to donate to the candidate they've just picked. In this way, the primary should increase MoveOn members' involvement with individual campaigns. Plus, MoveOn has sent information and direct appeals to its members from Dean, Kerry and Kucinich and has provided members with links to learn about the other candidates.
The other clear primary winner will, of course, be MoveOn. Over the past week, the group has managed to induce some of the highest-profile Democrats in the country into conducting a massive, no-cost membership drive for them. Every campaign has virtually turned over its list of supporters to MoveOn, allowing the liberal activist group to reach out to a whole new set of politically active individuals and potential donors, many of whom are part of the party establishment and had not previously felt a need to join up with MoveOn. "We're going to continue to be in touch with them," says Exley. "We have their e-mail addresses."
The first e-mail these new members got after voting asked for money for the MoveOn PAC itself. "Thank you for voting in the MoveOn Primary!" it read. "Please support our work with a financial contribution."
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.