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Mon. Feb 02, 2004

Actives and Passives

Actives and Passives – There’s a lot of post-mortems being made on a campaign that isn’t quite dead yet. But the Dean Phenomenon’s sudden diversion has a lot of people trying to figure out if this was because of, or the fault of, the Internet and ”social software.”

Steven Berlin Johnson: ”I think it’s stretching things to argue that social software somehow contributed to that decline—given that Dean would have never even been in competition without his trusty bat and his Meetups [...] What he never really had, though, was the support of actual voters. And strangely enough, that turned out to matter after all.”

I don’t think it’s so much about social software. There’s a concept that was drilled into my head by constant exposure during my days in radio. Radio is a very retail business. You deal with a lot of people, and get a lot of instant feedback on your efforts, via the phone lines, remote broadcasts, turnout at station promotions, etc.

You learn that your audience is composed of ”actives” and ”passives.” Actives are the people who will pick up the phone to call with a complaint or compliment when they hear something that strikes them. They’ll come out to your remote broadcast just to meet the DJ and get a station t-shirt. They’ll enter the contests, dialing incessantly in hope of being caller number 93. For roughly every ten listeners, one of them will be an ”active,” and nine will be ”passives.”

My theory is that, early on, the Dean campaign captured a majority of the ”actives” in the Democratic Party. The people who sign on with a candidate 18 months before a vote, man the phones, print the flyers, etc. Both newcomers, and traditional political types on the Democratic side. The people who are excited about ”the process.” Dean mopped up in this group, and it was greatly enhanced by the use of ”social software,” in the form of Meetups and blogs. By doing so, he garnered a nearly critical mass of energy and momentum while the other eight candidates stumbled about. It was a very effective way to build a campaign from nearly nothing to a formidable and well funded grassroots organization. It will be studied closely, and replicated in many ways in the future.

But I think the mistake was that folks looked around at the ”actives” in this campaign, and all the energy that had flowed from them to Dean, then decided they were seeing a proportionally representative sample of the way things were going to shake out among the general public. However, somewhere around 90% of voters are ”passives,” and the Dean Phenomenon did not scale well in Iowa or New Hampshire. The percentage of ”Dean actives” did not translate to an equal percentage of ”Dean passives.” In fact, some of the very things about the Dean campaign that energized the actives … made the passives pensive.

The ultimate passives? The 30-40% in Iowa and New Hampshire who didn’t decide who to vote for until the final 48 hours.

The ultimate actives? You still see them in the polls for today’s primaries. In most of them, Dean is hovering in the neighborhood of 10%. One in ten.

Dean still has the actives. He never got the passives. That’s my theory.