I have a confession to make: I think the Right is still bogged down on the technology front in a way the Left is not. I also think the reason is simple. If you look at the major players on the right, they have little interest in working with each other when they could be seeking competitive advantages against each other as well as major contracts with campaigns and businesses.Certainly there are those on the left who compete and seek contracts, but there is, in my mind, a substantial difference: the left put down the shared infrastructure first, then went out and started competing against each other. On the right, technologists started up competing against each other intending to get rich off the coming wave of tech infrastructure.Consequently, the left has Act Blue and the right has . . . well . . . had a variety of ultimately failed platforms the most successful of which was Slatecard, which is still gearing up for the 2010 election cycle. One of the only truly successful state efforts was RedStorm PAC, which has not been successfully duplicated to my knowledge.With RedState’s being owned by a corporation, it is more difficult for us to raise and control a pot of money through which we can fund worthwhile projects. I think, frankly, one of the advantages the left had early on is that there were very big blogs and only a handful of them. On the right, there are varied, competitive, and competing blogs of all roughly the same size save for Michelle Malkin and Hot Air, both of which dominate the rest of the right-o-sphere. This is one reason I am so excited about the Concord Project. A group of RedState readers got together and just did it.But that goes back to Act Blue. I would love to embed links to a central site at RedState to give to candidates — either individually or as a slate of candidates. That’s not going to happen. We don’t have the technology on our side.The conservative donor infrastructure, which has too often been burned by the charlatans on our side, remains hesitant to fund tech projects on our side outside of existing 501(c)(4)’s. One of them needs to step up. This is ridiculous.
The Right Technology
By
Erick Erickson |
10:54 AM on September 07, 2010
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