Last post, on the day of the primary election, I wrote:

My stomach is still in knots. After all, your program can work perfectly, and if your opponent’s program works perfectly +1, you lose. Remember 2004? We did our job perfectly in the presidential. We pulled a lot of people to the polls; unfortunately, their side pulled more. They did it perfectly +1…

Turns out, my race in Beacon did perfectly +3. In a four way race, we won almost 50% of the vote; our closest opponent only racked up 26% (two lesser candidates split the other 24%). That’s a blowout.

Even better, the turnout was double that of the last equivalent primary. That bodes extremely well for November — Democrats in our district are energized and ready to make waves. The momentum coming off election day was palpable.

To what did we owe our resounding success? In short, our ground game. Our old-fashioned, voter-to-voter, door-to-door campaign. Almost 200 volunteers hit the ground and the phones on E-day, and their efforts paid off handsomely.

So where did Democracy 2.0 fit in? What did our voter-to-voter sweep have to do with Internet? Election day was actually very low-tech. We ran off about 1500 pages of paper lists, and handed them out to 11 different staging sites. We photocopied precinct maps, we hand-wrote polling place lists, we collated scores of walk list packets. In some ways, our E-day operations could have run the same way in 1994 — the technology was that simple. (The only 2.0 moment was capturing John’s victory speech on video, slicing it down to 19 seconds, and having it posted on our sit less than an hour after the other candidates conceded).

Did the web have anything to do with our primary victory? Yes, but not in any groundbreaking way. The web did what it does for a million other campaigns, and causes, and businesses, and social networks — it provided a communications platform for people to find each other and get active. Our site was an attractive billboard for progressives looking to get involved in an election. Our email list grew steadily, and allowed us to stay in touch easily with our supporters.

So the web was our platform. But it wasn’t our playing field. We didn’t let any of our activists stay online. When it came to E-Day, we put everyone in the field. Is drawing in offline activists the best the web can do? Or can “online activism” go deeper? I guess its time to find out.

Bring on the general.