Colin Delany

Very few people have ever used "cool" and "redistricting" in the same headline, but longtime Epolitics.com readers will know that I'm a bit of a redistricting nerd -- my first substantive political experience was as staffer in the Texas Legislature during a 1992 redistricting special session, and I've...

Saturday's Washington Post article about big conservative money flooding into House and Senate races is just the latest sign of this year's changing post-Citizens United political landscape. The fear among Democrats? That wealthy Republicans will pour so much money into down-ballot races that Democratic congressional candidates will...

Chapter Three of the new ebook, How Campaigns Can Use the Internet to Win in 2012

Mobilization is simple in concept: it involves persuading people to do things -- donate, vote, volunteer, make phone calls, whatever. For instance, as the experience of the Obama campaign showed, one...

Chapter Two of the new ebook, How Campaigns Can Use the Internet to Win in 2012

Using the internet for politics may seem relatively new to some of us, but most online campaigning is a reincarnation of some classic political act in digital form. For instance, you can...

Excerpted from the new ebook, How Campaigns Can Use the Internet to Win in 2012

Hell of a political year, eh? The president, 33 senators, all 435 House members, scores of statewide officeholders and thousands of state legislators, mayors, city council members, etc., all up for election. The presidential...

As talk of a brokered Republican convention refuses to fade even after Romney's Arizona and Michigan victories, you can see evidence of the profound advantage the Republicans would give the Obama campaign if they put off choosing a nominee until the party meets in Tampa in August. One...

With the last "permanent" Occupy encampments in D.C. and Oakland beseiged, the first chapter of the Occupy movement seems to be closing. Will there be another, and if not, is that a bad thing?

First, let's think about what the movement has accomplished so far: nothing less...

Here's an angle that just occurred to me about yesterday's widespread online protests against the "Stop Online Piracy Act": normally we talk about digital activism being HOSTED on the internet, but this is a great example of what happens when the companies behind the internet start to DRIVE protest. And...

So Ron Paul made the bigtime today: a feature in the New York Times. What about? Those little newsletters that came out in his name a couple of decades back. You know, the ones that (among other things) predicted an upcoming race war and "contain[ed] bigotry against black,...

This week's news that Obama's 2012 campaign has already assembled a powerful army of small online donors -- more than a million people have given him money so far, only half of whom did so in 2008 -- provided just one of many recent glimpses into the growth...

With police crackdowns increasing and their physical encampments too-often attracting outright criminals looking for trouble, should Occupy Wall Street consider switching to a largely online existence?

In mid-November, the movement seems poised at a profoundly important turning point. The ideas it promoted -- that banks and a wealthy...

Nate Silver had a great piece in the Times recently looking at how clashes with police seem to have driven mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests (a classic example of the principle of "if it bleeds, it leads").

The centerpiece of his article is

Drew Westen's recent critique of Barack Obama's presidency and Jonathan Chait's devastating rebuttal raise a question for me: what matters more in politics, messaging or mechanics? In Westen's much-discussed New York Times piece, rhetoric and positioning are key: Obama's failings are fundamentally driven by bad messaging, weak leadership...

Earlier this weekend Eli Pariser linked to one of the funniest damn things I've seen in a while: a brilliant parody of erstwhile Republican Congressmember Jane Corwin's campaign website. JaneCorwin.ORG (the fake) mimics JaneCorwin.COM (the real deal) down to small details, but where the official site is...

Did Twitter and Facebook "cause" the Tunisian Revolution and the protests in Egypt? Not according to Malcolm Gladwell, as he and others have questioned the role of social media in social change in North Africa. But he's not there, and neither are most other Western observers weighing in on...

Originally published on Epolitics.com

When people talk about the promise of social media, they often praise tools like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for their ability to connect people, to remove barriers, to let us tell our own stories unfiltered and unmediated -- to show us as we are. Yet...

Tom DeLay was sentenced to three years in a Texas prison today, and I saw it coming almost 20 years ago. Sort of.

Back in that distant, unwired summer of 1991, I was a wide-eyed recent college grad starting a brand-new job as a staffer for a member...

So, the new Census numbers are out, and the Rs look to benefit mightily. One of the most revealing takes was Dave Weigel's breakdown of the states destined to gain Congressional seats vs. the party in control of the process -- not so pretty for Dems.

At...

Originally published on Epolitics.com

John Boehner's tears may have overshadowed the substance of his 60 Minutes appearance last Sunday, but he did mention some "serious" policy options in his time on screen. I put "serious" in quotes for a good reason, because looking below the surface of one at...

Originally published on Epolitics.com

In Saturday's AMP Summit panel discussion on effective online campaigning, fellow online politics old-timer Chris Casey made a great observation: politics may still be local, but fundraising in a networked age is national. I.e., candidates still have to reflect and react to attitudes and...