Five interesting ways technology influenced the 1992 presidential election
Prodigy, the early online service that directly competed with AOL for a time, launched a 1992 campaign database for users to track candidates. The effort came about thanks to a collaboration with the League of Women Voters. Even better, Prodigy allowed you to write your representative electronically—well, kinda. "If you want to get your view across and write to your representative, you can write a letter on the computer screen," The Washington Post noted in February of 1992. "Prodigy will print and mail it for a fee of $2.50."
For his 1992 primary campaign, current California Gov. Jerry Brown innovated by using a 1-800 number to solicit donations. Sound kind of quaint? Don't be fooled: This was a Big Deal in 1992, as it hadn't properly been utilized by candidates previously. As the San Francisco Chronicle learned back in 2013 (and I just confirmed), the widely disseminated number, (800) 426-1112, is still active and still owned by Brown, though it's no longer accepting donations.
Jerry Brown also used Compuserve to reach voters, but so too did the Lincoln Chafee of the 1992 campaign, former Irvine, California mayor Larry Agran. Agran, who didn't last beyond New Hampshire, held online Q&A sessions on the early online network, with Bloomberg noting that Agran would speak answers to the online questions out loud, while a transcriptionist would type the answers into the computer.
Usenet! Freaking Usenet! The 1992 campaign was a hot topic on Usenet, the decentralized newsgroup system which is best described to those who never experienced it in person as the Reddit of its day. There were groups for all of the major candidates, as well as ample evidence that people didn't like Bill Clinton even back then, and Ross Perot was a hot topic way back when. (Side note: Many newsgroups from the era are still active, including one for Rush Limbaugh.)
MIT-programmed mailing lists: In 1992, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ran a number of email-driven bots on the campaign92.org domain, allowing users to request position papers for any campaign on the ballot in at least half of US states—which meant Libertarian Party candidate Andre Marrou and Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin got mailing lists, too. (Not that Hagelin got any respect—the MIT press release at the time called him "Larry.") MIT estimated that the in the days before the 1992 election, it was sending out 2,000 emails a day through the accounts.
— Dee Dee Myers, Bill Clinton's first White House press secretary, discussing in The American Behavioral Scientist, an academic journal, how the Clinton campaign pioneered the use of online communications during the 1992 campaign. Myers characterized the endeavor as democratizing what would have previously been private pool reports."For the first time, ordinary citizens had an easy way to obtain information that was previously available only to the national press corps," she noted. "Instead of seeing an 8-second sound bite chosen by a network producer, voters could read an entire speech."Clinton later became the first president to launch an official email address—president@whitehouse.gov, of course—and website. (In case you're wondering, George H.W. Bush's use of the internet during the 1992 campaign was much more, uh, conservative: according to the Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics, it was limited to emailing policy statements and speech transcripts to bulletin boards.)"One little-noticed development that illustrates the interactive nature of modern technology is the use of electronic mail. During the general election campaign, the text of all Bill Clinton's speeches as well as his daily schedule, press releases, and position papers were made available through online computer services, such as Compuserve and Prodigy."
How Ross Perot's 1992 campaign helped pave the way for the Internet Archive
As the 1996 election was just ending—with the internet's role in future elections secured, thanks to sites like Clinton/Gore 96 and Dole/Kemp 96, Kahle was getting a start on the project that would become the internet's ultimate scrapbook.On October 26, 1996, the Internet Archive began in earnest, helping to collect big statements and tiny wrinkles alike on the internet. Yes, that means their 20th anniversary is coming up next week. (Did you know they accept donations?)That broad swoop of data collection extends to the world of politics. These days, the Archive has in some ways democratized the basic ideas that Kahle's campaign machinery was built upon back in 92. The nonprofit's Political TV Ad Archive collects every political ad that has run during the 2016 campaign season (including links to fact-checks of the ads), along with granular data about each of the presidential debates—the latter with the help of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. What WAIS was doing for Perot's campaign way back when, the Political TV Ad Archive is expanding upon—and doing for the public at large.This time of year in the 92 election, Ross Perot was making some unusual left-field moves in an effort to topple Clinton and Bush—memorably, he ran a series of prime-time infomercials ahead of the election, which he paid for out of his own pocket because he's Ross Perot. Perot didn't win in 92, in part because his decision to drop out of the race, then return, didn't sit well with some.But just imagine how effective those ads could've been if they had the full power of Brewster Kahle's database behind them during that three-month break Perot took.