A Virtual Political Community

Politics have hit the information superhighway. Campaign Web sites proliferate. Issues and candidates are dissected in chat rooms. How might the World Wide Web affect the 2000 elections? Some clues can be found in recent California history.

In 1934, Hollywood’s success in using the movie screen and its images to help defeat Upton Sinclair, the socialist reformer who was the Democratic nominee for governor, propelled California--and the United States--into the age of media politics. The flood of campaign dollars into state legislative races in the midst of the 1980 speakership fight catapulted money politics to unprecedented heights and prefigured by decades the record-breaking contributions to George W. Bush’s campaign. In 2000, California may be the proving ground for e-politics, the coming of age of the Internet as a political tool and a political community.

California is wired. According to a new statewide survey by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), 74% of residents say they use a computer at home, work or school, compared with 68% of Americans who told a July Pew Research Center Survey they used a computer at least occasionally. Sixty percent of Californians surveyed said they go online to access the Internet or send e-mail, as compared with 49% of the Pew respondents. Finally, 43% in the PPIC survey say they use the Internet to get news and information about current events, politics and public affairs.

Just as demographics drives politics, it drives computer use. There is a “digital divide” that could exacerbate the politics of haves versus have-nots. The PPIC data show “profound differences in the rates of computer use between ethnic and socioeconomic groups in the state.” “Computer use,” according to the survey, “declines with age--82% use for ages 18 to 54; 50% for ages 55 and older--and rises with household income--59% use for under $40,000; 85% for $40,000 to $79,999; 94% for $80,000 or more--and education--50% for high school or less; 81% for some college or more.” Two groups whom PPIC senior fellow Mark Baldassare says will determine the outcome of next year’s primary and general elections--Central Valley residents and Latinos--are less likely to be computer users.

Even more dramatic are the socioeconomic disparities between Californians who use the Internet for political news and information and those who don’t. Non-Latino whites account for roughly three-fourths of Californians who go online for political information; Latinos only 14%.

The most telling findings in the PPIC survey concern the way Internet users view the world and how they get their information about it. While television continues to be the prime source of news and political information for Californians, it is far less dominant among Netizens. Only 37% of Californians who use the Internet for political information identified TV as their chief source of political news, compared with 51% of Internet nonusers and 45% of the total sample.

The TV-viewing public has undergone dramatic fragmentation; niche programming is the key. The broadcast audience is shrinking, with defectors resembling Internet users. Coverage of politics on major networks and local newscasts has shrunk, too, which leaves digital have-nots with an ever-narrowing window of political information, while Internet users get their fix online.

Californians who get their political information from the Internet are more likely than nonusers to have a great deal or fair amount of interest in politics (68% to 56%), while nonusers are more likely than Internet users to exhibit little or no interest (44% to 32%). Similarly, more than 75% of Californians who go online for political information say they follow public affairs most or some of the time, compared with 66% of nonusers. Conversely, Californians who don’t log on for political news are more than twice as likely to say they hardly ever or never follow public affairs.

Furthermore, Californians who rely on the Internet for news on politics are far more likely than those who don’t to be registered to vote, and slightly more likely to be Republicans or independents. They are also more likely to vote, though economics, not computer use, may be the major determinant.

Because Internet-using Californians tend to view the world differently, that could have significant implications for next year’s elections. Internet users are more bullish than nonusers about their finances, more likely to say California is headed in the right direction (64% to 58%) and more likely to think the next 12 months will bring economic good times to the state (79% to 68%).

Only 28% of Californians overall prefer the larger tax cut proposed by congressional Republicans, but 32% of online Californians like it. On tax issues, Internet users tend to lean Republican, which, in 2000, could provide an interesting opening for the GOP. The party already is wooing high-techies aggressively.

But Internet folks don’t mesh well with the right on social issues. On the conservative-driven March 2000 “definition of marriage” initiative, which requires that only marriage between a man and a woman be recognized by the state, they tend to be more liberal than nonusers or Californians in general. Among PPIC respondents, 58% supported the initiative, compared with 64% of the total sample and 69% of non-Internet users.

Targeting Internet users would allow campaigns to engage in ultimate retail politics, far less expensive and expansive than the wholesale politics of television. The future may bring low-overhead campaigns fought from virtual campaign headquarters, downloading buttons and bumper stickers and uploading contributions from cyberspace. But the proliferation of unofficial, unauthorized Web sites would also diminish the control candidates and campaigns now enjoy over media, money and message.

E-campaigning can engage informed, high-propensity voters, and that’s what an effective political operation is all about. But the Internet isn’t that--yet; it’s still difficult to mobilize online voters within a single geographically based political district. By preaching to the computer-savvy choir, political communication through the Internet leaves out Californians who need to be motivated to participate in elections.

Perhaps the most effective application of the Internet to politics will be as the direct mail of the future. In the early 1960s, Assembly leaders Jesse M. Unruh and Tom Bane used manual typewriters and voter-registration lists to target messages to likely Democratic voters. The advent of mainframe computers and culling ethnic-surname dictionaries made that job easier and speedier. Now e-mail addresses offer candidates and causes the ability to reach large numbers of voters with maximum speed and at a cost far less than that of traditional mailings.

The politics of cyberspace are still evolving; the impact of California’s e-electorate remains unclear. The influence of the Internet may lead to a redefinition, and perhaps rejuvenation, of the concepts of community and politics, no longer geographically or institutionally based but electronically defined by chat rooms and Web addresses. On the other hand, with all that’ s going on, there is a real danger that politics could become nothing more than just another computer game. *