washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Google Blasting Virginia

In the hours before the Virginia Democratic primary, it was almost impossible to visit a major website from a computer in Virginia without staring at an advertisement for Creigh Deeds.
After Deeds won the nomination, lots of people took notice, including Patrick Ruffini, blogging at TheNextRight:

The coup de grace came in the final 24 hours, when with money to burn Deeds bought a “network blast” on Google’s ad network, essentially taking over ad inventory on every website (including this one) if you lived in Virginia.

Ruffini is a consultant for Deeds’ opponent, Republican Bob McDonnell, and now that we’re hours out from Election Day in Virginia, he’s putting the lesson to use.
On his Flickr feed, Ruffini posted a screenshot taken this morning from TechCrunch, an incredibly popular tech blog based in Silicon Valley.
McDonnell’s face is everywhere.
This is yet another reminder that the Democratic technological advantage is not self-sustaining.
Whether it’s a willingness to experiment with Twitter, a drive to release new mobile applications, or putting the best lessons from Democratic campaigns to use, Republicans are determined to close the Internet gap.
And while it’s easy to point fingers and laugh when those experiments fail, Democrats ought to at least recognize that we cannot get complacent.

One comment on “Google Blasting Virginia

  1. mjshep on

    What’s the good of a “Google blast” if the candidate himself is a poor campaigner, has no message, no charisma and is a centrist hack who runs away from his own party to such a degree that he actually suppresses voter turnout among his putative base?
    Good tech is good. Good candidates are better. Good tech and good candidates are a winning formula.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.