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The Internet and the political process 373commitment, your dedication and your hard work, we can do it. This decision is nolonger mine to make. This is a campaign of the people, by the people and for thepeople. Your successful effort of raising a historic amount of money through smallcontributions has made this choice possible. This is why I am putting this decisionin your hands. (Dean, 2003)The two-day vote online, involving about 20 percent of supporters, returnedan 85 percent result in favor of declining matching funds. This freed thecampaign from the spending cap associated with public funding, but left itwith the challenge of raising $200 million – the amount Bush expected tomobilize. The Dean campaign planned to achieve this funding target bygetting 2 million Americans to contribute $100 each. The striking thing here isthe campaign’s confidence in its strategy, and commitment to involvingsupporters in crucial decision-making.The campaign was also very successful in mobilizing grassroots support,partly through MeetUp.com, a non-partisan Internet resource that enablespeople to connect with other like-minded people in their community. Thisresource came to be a part of the campaign when MeetUp executives weretesting the market for political gatherings and found a significant demandamong Dean supporters (Scheiber, 2003). Joe Trippi, a consultant and laterDean campaign manager, seized on the idea when it was presented to him,recognizing the potential to identify hundreds of supporters without spendingmuch on organizing activities. Over 140,000 Dean supporters had signed upwith MeetUp by the end of November 2003, compared with between 140 and47,000 for other candidates. And over half a million people had provided theire-mail addresses to the website of the campaign.Furthermore, without regard to loss of control, Dean’s campaign gavesupporters free rein to organize their activities (NPR, 2003). Visitors to Dean’sofficial website were given several options for participation, ranging fromsetting the official website as a homepage to joining the fund-raising team.Supporters could decide for themselves how involved they wanted to be. TheNew York Times wrote: “Staffers no longer flinch when a donor suggests toother potential givers that Dean backers eat ramen noodles for dinner once aweek and forward the savings to the campaigns. Or when an obituary asksmourners to send contributions to the Dean campaign in lieu of flowers”(Justice, 2003). Dean’s campaign manager explained: “You have to have acampaign that’s willing to let go” (Joe Trippi, quoted in Malone, 2003).Unofficial support groups were a valued resource for Dean’s campaign, unlikethe Clark campaign, which slowly dismantled unofficial structures once Clarkdecided to run and the media campaign was under way (Franke-Ruta, 2003).Perhaps the most talked about aspect of Dean’s campaign, along with fundraising,was the blogging phenomenon (Lessig, 2003), which, together withthe MeetUps, helped both to mobilize and instill a sense of ownership among