Examining DeanSpace

What happened to the Dean campaign. A long thoughtful article.

Support isn’t Votes

Fervor Isn’t Votes

Effort Isn’t Votes

Money Isn’t Votes

Voting is the victory of geography over affinity. Deaniacs in NYC could donate money and time, blogging like mad or tramping through the cold to talk to a handful of potential voters, but they couldn’t actually vote anywhere but NYC. Iowa was left up to the Iowans.

The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost – the voters didn’t like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he’d win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well — we were all in Deanspace for a while there.

el - A seperate issue is why not enough voters liked him. His campaign lowered coordinating and fund raising costs but in the end it is how to get the mass of people who don't pay attention to politics to support your candidate.