When people talk about the power of the internet to transform the American political process, they usually point to the fundraising success of sites like moveon.org or to the enormous support generated online for Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential primaries. This election season a perfect storm of technological and political factors have developed that make a win for grassroots democracy seem like a sure thing, whichever party wins at the polls.

What’s different now than in 2004? The reelection of Pres Bush tortured progressives into reassessing their strategies and into adopting new tools and tactics as part of their campaigns. This new approach combined with (1) new websites like YouTube and ActBlue, (2) increasingly powerful progressive blogs like DailyKos, and (3) the increasing numbers of sophisticated web users who go online not just for information but to engage with what they find there, taking it offline to the streets, mixing it up and sending it back into the online world. It’s all evidence of the mutating power of the web— that it might eventually do many things as well as it does porn!

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