**Scroll to the bottom to see the comparison chart and your unit’s ranking.
While the contenders for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination ride into battle before record-breaking audiences, another campaign is taking place behind the scenes. In this year without statewide elections in Virginia, party officials remain busy behind the scenes addressing a myriad of organizational tasks in preparation to support the eventual nominee.
Those challenges include bolstering online outreach efforts. Traditionally, Democratic digital efforts have outpaced the GOP’s, though leaders have committed to closing that gap since 2012.
Virginia will be no exception as Republicans prepare for 2016.
Online informational listings for local Republican units remain woefully incomplete more than three months after Virginia’s GOP launched its new website. Contact details for a mere six of the state’s 127 local Republican committees are available through the state party’s website, obstructing efforts to increase local engagement and rebuild the party from the ground up after years of infighting and the loss of all statewide campaigns since 2009.
Only 52 units have functional websites of their own allowing interested citizens to connect with their local party and begin their party involvement. The remainder – nearly six in ten – lack unit-specific websites entirely, or have websites currently offline or ill-placed in Google’s results.
The daunting task of preparing 127 local websites for the upcoming presidential frenzy requires strong leadership from the state GOP. While a few units can draw upon their own financial resources or volunteer talent to maintain professional and engaging sites, most will be best-served through help from the state party.
Hiring professionals to design over 100 websites at the local level is a cumulative six-figure undertaking if done individually, whereas the state party can leverage a larger economy of scale to keep costs down by eliminating duplicitous tasks common to the construction of each site.
Maximizing grassroots engagement and recruiting the new members needed for 2016’s victory efforts requires a party which views openness and accessibility as concerns of the utmost importance. Most Republican voters have little to no concept of local Republican organization, and without a strong online committee presence, will lack the knowledge of how to become involved, where the committee meets, and how to contact its local leadership.
The Republican presence on Facebook is somewhat broader but still falls woefully short of expectations. Just 86 committees maintain Facebook pages, though 13 of those haven’t posted in 2015. Only 36 posted once per week or more, on average, and of those, most had multi-week periods with no activity whatsoever, leaving large gaps in public communication.
Relative engagement levels vary widely among the 73 units active on Facebook this year. Comparing relative followings among units with vastly different populations and political inclinations requires some statistical manipulation to correct for these differences. One simple basis for comparison can be crafted by comparing each committee’s number of Facebook page likes against the number of local votes won by Mitt Romney in 2012. This calculation – the number of likes per 1000 votes for Romney – provides a basic indication of committee engagement compared to the broadest possible number of Republicans in each committee’s territory.
The committees active on Facebook in 2015 averaged 30.4 likes per 1000 Romney voters, though the range varied widely, from 181.7 for Galax County at the upper end, to a minimum of 0.7 in Botetourt County.
Including inactive pages sets the bar even higher, at 227.9 for Petersburg’s city committee.
This range leaves ample room for improvement. The average committee would need to increase their like count sevenfold to match the leader, while the committee would need to increase relative engagement by more than 300 times.
Ranked by likes per 1000 Romney voters, Virginia’s top ten unit committees were Petersburg, Galax, Craig, Waynesboro, Charles City, Bland, Bristol, Giles, Brunswick, and Emporia/Greensville, respectively.
Party leaders would be well-advised to ignore the stereotype of social media as being targeted towards younger and more affluent audiences living in urban and suburban areas.
Comparatively, digital political engagement is more necessary in rural units, whose spread-out populations are less able to be engaged by door-to-door advocacy by candidates and campaign volunteers. In building a strong digital presence for 2016, Virginia’s Republicans cannot afford to leave any unit behind.
Virginia Republicans cannot delay in taking up this routine order of party business as one of many in need of immediate action, in furtherance of growing a party which works to the benefit of all Republican factions all across the Commonwealth.
Disappointing efforts in driving digital engagement at the grassroots level demonstrate why rank-and-file Republicans must cease wasting effort through infighting and return to the magisterial duties of running a thriving political party. Every hour spent furthering intra-party tensions or handling various procedural appeals is an hour not spent building the party’s community presence and recruiting new members in preparation for 2016.
The task at hand of building Republican digital engagement will leave the party’s rank-and-file looking to state party chairman John Whitbeck for his leadership, though many will also seek the input of Pete Snyder, an entrepreneur and longtime party patron who made his fortune in social media marketing before finding a new calling as a Republican candidate and advocate for pro-growth economic policies.
In politics, many hands make light work, and this task is particularly suited to self-directed volunteer action from the bottom up. Overburdened party leaders are always in need of additional help, and most will be very receptive to local volunteers who wish to take initiative in helping build the party’s presence on a website or through social media.
Republicans can invite their friends to like their committee’s page on Facebook, then encourage their friends to do the same. Those with time to spare can volunteer in helping curate content and preparing formal statements on matters of local interest for review by the committee, while those skilled in web design or digital graphics can volunteer their talents for the committee’s benefit.
Every Republican who can spare $25 or $50 can donate to their local committee to help defray costs of web development and page-building Facebook advertising, then encourage sitting Delegates, Senators, and local leaders to pitch in with help from campaign accounts.
It’s time for Republicans to get to work preparing to win the White House – it’s never too soon to begin laying the groundwork for victory.
In a grassroots party, change begins from the bottom up. Let the healthy competition begin.
