Front-page of the Politico - House Republicans yet to seek consensus on an "agenda." An agenda is a small, limited set of core principles that everyone in the Conference should get behind and support.

I get the importance of agreeing to a core set of principles. In January 2006, I worked with Congressman Kingston on his American Renewal Project which was embraced, but not widely.

Indeed, six months before an election, it seems like everyone has a plan of ideas for the "limited" agenda items that they will, together, take forth to the American people. Everyone thinks their ideas are the way to go forward.

Among other plans out there:

* John Boehner has a Republican Agenda to fix a broken Washington.

* Mark Kirk has a Suburban Agenda.

* Jeb Hensarling has an Action Plan for House Republicans.

Gone are the days of Newt Gingrich's Contract for America, a plan which every Republican got behind and backed. A unified agenda back in 1994 was possible because of Newt Gingrich's intoxicating personality and strong leadership style; but it was also a different time, a time before the Internet inspired a culture of choice and information.

Today, thanks to the Internet, each Member of Congress can and should be fighting in the trenches for the hundreds of issues which drive their voters to the polls under the banner of the Republican Party. The Internet provides a medium to distribute our message like never before. We can fight on thousands of fronts.

Rather than being forced to to pick a few, limited set of agenda items, House Republicans should change the game and act more like iTunes and NetFlix -- offering conservative, libertarian, and independent voters a lot of different choices -- all of which can only be found under the larger brand -- Republican.

UPDATE 2:13 PM: James Joyner of Outside the Beltway disagrees with me because he argues that taking my approach would effectively dilute the Republican brand. Not really. If you're a "Republican" you have already agreed to a certain core philosophy. But to win back the Long Tail of the Republican Party - the Radiohead Republicans, the Punk Republicans, [insert brand] Republicans - we must start communicating more effectively and speaking to the issues that people care about. The only way to do that is by leveraging the Internet.

In Michael Arrington's interview with McCain's "victory chairwoman," Carly Fiorina, I found this nugget which discusses the embrace of a Long Tail strategy. (Emphasis mine.)

MA: If you look at the pure statistics, Barack Obama has done such a good job in getting friends and followers on the social networks and getting individual people to donate small amounts of money mostly on the internet. What are your plans, and I know its early still, but what are your plans in the near future to counter that and push McCain forward in those spaces as well. Do you have any specific ideas yet?

CF: It is too early for me to talk specifically about how were going to use the social networking sites although there are people thinking about that on Lou Eisenberg’s team. But what I would say is, again, every opportunity to communicate with people is an opportunity to ask for their contribution and as Barack has demonstrated small contributions can make as big a difference over time as big contributions, so nothing is too small. I would also say that it will be a focus of this campaign to go after young people more aggressively than we have to date. We need to broaden the appeal of the party and John McCain by making more diverse audiences aware of who he is and what he stands for and so you’re going to see John McCain reaching out to different members of the community than perhaps people would expect and you’ll see me doing that as well.

This is a strong step in the right direction. And of course, I've been urging a better embrace of the Long Tail for over a year in this space and others.

Heck, maybe even we'll see an uptick of donations for Team McCain at Slatecard. It'd be good if he were at least first in donations received as a POTUS candidate.

On Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 3:30 PM, I'll be moderating a panel on the Long Tail of Politics at the Politics Online Conference hosted by the George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet. Today is the final day to Register Online to attend the two-day conference.

Last summer, Julie Barko Germany (who is doing a tremendous job as the Director of IPDI), approached me with an opportunity to moderate a panel for POLC on an issue that I thought would be relevant. For me, the choice was simple.

The thought of a panel on the Long Tail of Politics has risen slowly after reading Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, and also based on my experience working on Congressional and Senate races.

In my experience working on campaigns, we would receive polling memorandums focusing on dozens of potential issues/messages that would “move votes.” However, due to limited resources, the focus of our efforts with regard to our paid media campaign was always on the top 3-5 messages that “moved” the most votes. Therefore, most of the candidate’s time on the stump and our earned media efforts focused on those 3-5 messages.

In other words, we spent all of our time and money talking about big picture issues (safety and security, immigration, and spending) because we never had a way to talk about niche issues, like school choice and second amendment rights, that moved votes but did so by the handfuls. Because the tools we used were expensive, it wasn’t feasible to do it any other way.

After reading the Long Tail, I changed my strategy and started focusing, like a laser, on the issues at the bottom of the polling memo. The neglected issues if you will.

We used tools like our blog, effective blogger outreach by issues, YouTube and socnets to target and disseminate our message. We talked about issues like how to keep women and children safe from online predators. We built micro-sites to help amplify our message and push it out to the mainstream.

With regard to fundraising, the Long Tail has never been more effective. The notion that Barack Obama hauled in $32M in the month of January with 90% coming from online donations only further justifies the point.

In 2004, President Bush was smart to focus on large dollar donors who could tap their networks to help bundle hundreds of thousands of dollars for their effort. But in 2008, we’re finding that it’s those candidates who embrace the low-dollar bundlers (the individual with 1,000 facebook friends who can raise $10 from each friend) who are changing the landscape of politics forever. And by the way, most of those low-dollar contributors have never given to a candidate before and will likely give more over their lifetime.

Now at Slatecard (ActBlue has of course been providing a similar platform for years), we have created quite simply a tool to help encourage low-dollar bundlers and have created an intuitive way to give those bundlers “credit” for the good work they are able to do. We’re in our infancy as a utility, but already we’re seeing signs of great success.

In my opinion, the future of online fundraising and effectively communicating is harnessing the Long Tail supporters and less on “moving” giant segments of the population at once.

That’s the gist of why I think this panel is absolutely critical to any discussion about how the Internet has changed politics forever.

I'm honored to have a great bipartisan crew of panelists to help contribute to the discussion. Here are some details:

LONG TAIL POLITICS: The Revolution of People-Powered Politics
In 2004, Presidential candidates tasked their largest contributors to tap in to their networks to raise enormous sums of money through large dollar contributions. In the 2008 cycle, candidates have improved the model and are focusing on small-dollar donors who can contribute smaller amounts in monthly contributions. What impact has this Revolution of People-Powered Politics had on the 2008 election cycle?

Panelists
David All (moderator) - Co-Founder, Slatecard.com
Cyrus Krohn – RNC eCampaign Director
Zack Exley — Co-Founder and President, New Organizing Institute
Matt Salisbury – Republican Candidate for Congress (Idaho-1)
Clay Johnson — Founder, Blue State Digital

I hope to see you next Tuesday for this important discussion.

Revolution.

Fredreka Schouten of USA Today helps affirm the importance of the Long Tail strategy in today's article, "Small donors can be big deal for candidates."

Democrat John Edwards and Republican Fred Thompson are political opposites, but their presidential campaigns share at least one trait: About $1 out of every $3 they have each raised for the primaries came from donors who contributed in small amounts.

Among the top fundraisers, Edwards and Thompson have raised the biggest share of money from donors who gave $200 or less, according to data compiled by the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute.

Lesser-known candidates — such as Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Dennis Kucinich — have relied even more heavily on these small donations to fuel their campaigns. For example, Paul has raised about $4.1 million in small contributions, about $1 million more than Rudy Giuliani, who leads national polls for the Republican nomination.

Overall, 21% of the money raised by the presidential candidates came from small donors, according to the center's analysis. That's up from 18% to presidential candidates four years earlier.

Read the "full story.

Space: The frontier all geeks care about. (Including those that vote.)

At least that's what I've learned from reading Eliza Strickland's piece in Wired, "I Love Mars, and I Vote."

Eliza reports on the role and responsibility Chris Carberry, political director of the Mars Society, will play in the upcoming Presidential race. As Eliza writes, "[Carberry is] the point man for Operation President 2008, in which Mars Society members lie in wait for presidential candidates at campaign stops in the early primary states, then leap out to pop the question: As president, would you send a man to Mars?"

Think about this for a minute: Carberry and his crew quite literally have to stake out the candidates on the campaign trail to get them to answer this important question. I'd be willing to bet $1,000 that Carberry and his crew would much rather be watching re-runs of Star Trek or looking through their telescopes at the stars than tracking down candidates like young opposition campaign operatives.

In other words, my instincts tell me that the "Mars vote" is yet another example of how modern media types can help a candidate win support one vote at a time on the Long Tail of politics.

So let's dig in and think about how we'd do it.

First I'd do a little research to find out that this group is very much a real deal organization. From Eliza's piece:

With yearly overall budget of about a quarter million, the Mars Society not only runs outreach efforts like Operation President, it also operates "Mars analogous" research stations in the Utah desert and the Canadian arctic. Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin sits on its steering committee, and so did NASA's current administrator, Michael Griffin, before he took the top NASA post.

But its real strength is its 7,000 passionate and devoted members in 80 chapters across the United States and worldwide. Zubrin says that while the group gets some large grants from science organizations and space agencies, members' donations make up the bulk of its funding.

Then I'd steal a moment with my candidate away from the kissing babies line and get him to send a personal video message to Carberry and the members of the Mars Society explaining exactly where he was on the issue.

I'd make it a point to brief my guy to finish his video to the group with a question and a challenge to the group and ask them for video responses on our YouTube video: What are your suggestions for my Administration on the role public-private sector partnerships could play in helping us achieve our mutual goal of safer, better, and faster space travel?

I would send the YouTube link to Carberry for distribution through his network.

But I wouldn't stop there. I'd also post the video on our blog asking our community to weigh in with video suggestions, and I'd ask a similar question through our candidate's LinkedIn network and let them know that we were talking about this issue on our blog and on our YouTube channel.

After the process cycled a bit. I'd have my candidate respond another time noting some of the suggestions he liked along with those he thought were a bit far-fetched. Repeat steps above.

During this next cycle, I'd reach out to space-focused bloggers and brief them on the discussion that's been going on and try and line-up a conference call about the issue with both my candidate and (hopefully) Carberry. Maybe some of these posts would spill over in to the larger discussion in the techosphere. Finally, I'd reach out to some folks at Slashdot and CNET with links of interest.

One thing is clear after this process: We'd likely be winning the "Mars vote." And maybe in the process of connecting with this niche we'd also win some other voters and supporters along the way.

Amy Schatz of the Wall Street Journal has an article today on ActBlue called, "Local politics, web money" which shows how the site is proving a valuable resource for local politicians. Again, Long Tail of politics in action.

Of course, the good news is that there's a Big Red Rightroots Slatecard Storm on the horizon for Republican candidates.

In case you missed it, last night Rudy Giuliani made a virtual appearance in over 1,000 homes during his "National House Party Night." (You can watch the archived webcast here.)

To be exact, according to the Giuliani campaign, 1,036 house party hosts in all 50 states (and in London) logged in to the webcast to hear what Rudy Giuliani had to say. To put this in to perspective, rival Fred Thompson earlier this month held a conference call where, "Hundreds of house parties were held in more than 40 states...where Thompson supporters could gather to listen to a conference call update of Thompson's first official day of campaigning." Bill Hobbs reported the exact number of house parties at 220.

In an email thanking hosts who participated in Rudy's big event, Giuliani campaign manager Michael DuHaime wrote [excerpt of email]:

Last night supporters across the country attended parties to show their support for Mayor Giuliani. The event was a resounding success and I want to thank you for hosting a House Party for Rudy. We could never have done it without you. Your party helped demonstrate to America that Rudy's grass-roots support is shared all over America and that he is the only candidate who can beat the Democrats in November 2008.

Last night the amount of support we saw for Rudy from all over the nation was overwhelming. Hall of Fame baseball player Yogi Berra introduced Rudy and comedian Dennis Miller kicked things off by asking the first question.

So what did a house party look like?

I contacted a host of one of the parties, Matthew Haller, who hosted his party on a rooftop deck overlooking historic downtown Washington who said, "Our House Party for Rudy was a great success because it allowed us to gather with our friends and colleagues and share why we are supporting the Mayor for President. We had a good mix of young professionals, Hill staff and students attend our party and we definitely grew Rudy’s base of support. We all enjoyed Mayor Giuliani’s live webcast that allowed him to speak to his supporters around the nation about why his strong leadership and bold vision is right for our country."

Though the host didn't say it explicitly, by identifying young, (likely new) low-dollar donors to support Giuliani through this event, the host has played a major role in helping Rudy Giuliani tap the "Long Tail of politics" which I write about extensively. Earlier this week, the Politico's Jeanne Cummings had an excellent article which reinforces the importance of people like Haller who are "baby bundlers" of low-dollar donors.

So what lessons can be learned from Rudy's success?

First and foremost, energizing your supporters to "do something" works. Second, live webcasts appear more appealing than conference calls. Third, it never hurts to have celebrities like Yogi Berra and Dennis Miller help lend their support.

And finally, in my humble opinion, this is yet another example of how a campaign can properly tap the "Long Tail" to help generate new support.

Hugh Hewitt wrote yesterday that Townhall.com had reached 5,001 user-generated blogs. Hugh briefly noted why this growth has been possible, "The long tail at work."

In other words, Townhall.com has not only been able to identify and isolate conservatives who are in the market for a blog and previously would have used another "free" platform like blogspot or even their myspace page, but Townhall.com has also converted activists to become new bloggers/soldiers. With a pool of over 5k, we can assume that they are blogging about all sorts of interesting, niche conservative issues not covered anywhere else in the vast 'sphere.

In the comments of the post, Robert Bluey who blogs at Redstate and writes a weekly column for Townhall.com, asks a question which is worth discussing because it's a question many of us have always wondered. (You'll note that Bluey, a good friend of Townhall.com, continues the endless banter between himself and Dean Barnett.)

Surely a few of these 5,000 bloggers are better than Dean Barnett. Why not promote a few to the main Townhall blog like RedState and DailyKos do with their contributors?

Bluey's right. Wouldn't you expect the next Michelle Malkin or John Hawkins to rise organically from this pool of conservative talent?

The power/problem with the long tail is that while we increase overall size and variety, most of us are still content with the big, fat juicy short head -- the top national bloggers like Hugh, Michelle, Glenn, LGF, Captain's Quarters, Power Line, etc. We just don't have time to stumble upon blogs hoping that doing so was a good use of our limited time. So we end up at our regular watering holes day in and day out where we trust the content. We count on those national bloggers to point us to other niche blogs that we would have never heard about.

But is there a way to leverage the energy of 5,001 bloggers for the sake of the Revolution? I think so.

Townhall.com could take Rob's advice promote some its best bloggers to its national group blog where bloggers are typing right along Hugh, Dean, Matt and Mary Katharine. By doing so, they'd help identify new personalities and voices in the movement and send a clear signal to their community that blogging at Townhall.com means that your blog post might end up on the front-page of a site that gets a lot of eyeballs each day.

Further, a lot of the bloggers at Townhall.com are talking about state and local issues. Why not create 50 state group blogs for the Townhall.com community, tap an editor to run the operation on a volunteer basis and promote the best state-based content to that group blog? Townhall.com would be providing a forum that doesn't exist in most states for Republicans but does for liberals.

"The Long Tail." The theme for the 2008 election cycle. Let's hope we figure out how to effectively leverage it.

Cruising Howard Dean's wikipedia page earlier looking for confirmation that his candidacy raised $50M (it did!) and I found this nugget:

While presidential campaigns have traditionally obtained finance by tapping wealthy, established political donors, Dean's funds came largely in small donations over the Internet; the average overall donation size was just under $80. This method of fundraising offered several important advantages over traditional fundraising, in addition to the inherent media interest in what was then a novelty. First, raising money on the Internet was relatively inexpensive, compared to conventional methods such as events, telemarketing, and direct mail campaigns. Secondly, as donors on average contributed far less than the legal limit ($2,000 per individual), the campaign could continue to resolicit them throughout the election season.

Open for discussion is why you think the Republican Presidential candidates have yet to tap this same cadre of donors? Surely, we're out here.

The Politico's Jonathan Martin has snagged a seven-page memo [PDF] on how John McCain can make a "comeback."

Check out point one of step two:

Step 1: Spend Less

• Significantly reduce the size of campaign overhead
• Hold expenses below the lowest income month
• Take advantage of free media events such as debates
• Participate in more “sponsored events” = live off the land

Step 2: Raise More

• Expand the base of our donor program to include smaller donors
• Make events more efficient, improve net income
• Broaden surrogate fundraising effort

3rd Quarter Goals

• Continue to expand campaign organization in early primary states
• Increase cash on hand each month this quarter
• Continue to win debates and outperform other candidates
• Emerge post-Labor Day with strong campaign themes, energy, and focus

The Long Tail is the new black...