MyDD was the first large
collaborative politically progressive
American politics blog
A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...
. It was established by
Jerome Armstrong
Jerome Armstrong (born 1964) is an American political strategist. In 2001, he founded MyDD, a blog which covered politics, making him one of the first political bloggers. Armstrong coined the term ''netroots'', and was referred to as "The Blogfat ...
in 2001. Its name was originally short for "My
Due Diligence." In 2005, MyDD was profiled in Campaigns and Elections magazine, crediting the site with being "the first major liberal blog." In January 2006, the name was changed to "My Direct Democracy" as part of a site redesign, with the new tagline "
Direct Democracy for
People-Powered Politics."
History
The first Dean grassroots web site was created at MyDD in April 2002. In early 2003,
Joe Trippi
Joseph Paul Trippi (born June 10, 1956) is an American political strategist who has worked on several gubernatorial, United States Senate, and Congressional campaigns, including Jerry Brown for Governor of California and Doug Jones for U.S. Sen ...
learned of Meetup through Armstrong and MyDD. Armstrong shut down MyDD in 2003 to work on
Howard Dean
Howard Brush Dean III (born November 17, 1948) is an American physician, author, lobbyist, and retired politician who served as the 79th governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003 and chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2005 to 2009 ...
's presidential campaign. After lying dormant for a year, MyDD was re-launched with the Scoop blogging platform in March 2004, with blogger
Chris Bowers
Chris Bowers (born January 23, 1974) is a blogger for DailyKos and a manager of their email list. He was a blogger and co-founder of OpenLeft, and was until July 2007 a front-page blogger for MyDD. His focus is on polling and data-driven analy ...
. MyDD was instrumental in online campaigning and organizing of grassroots action to elect Howard Dean as Chairman of the
Democratic National Committee in January, 2005, with "the pro-Dean site MyDD.com, which served as a key clearinghouse of information about the race."
Several early contributors to MyDD became prominent in politics on the Internet.
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the most-visited political blog in the world,
Daily Kos
Daily Kos ( ) is a group blog and internet forum focused on the U.S. Democratic Party and liberal American politics. The site includes glossaries and other content. It is sometimes considered an example of " netroots" activism.
Daily Kos was ...
, began commenting on MyDD before starting his own blog in May 2002, and refers to Armstrong as his "blogfather".
Armstrong attended the California State Democratic convention in Sacramento in March, 2003 with Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos.
Mathew Gross, creator of the blog on Howard Dean's website, was another contributor to MyDD. Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean, met and hired Gross based on Gross' involvement with MyDD.
"One day, soon after we'd moved to a larger quarters in a South Burlington office park, I looked up to see this tall young guy with an earring and a nearly shaved head wandering around the office. Security had just grabbed him and was hauling him away when he yelled out to me: 'Wait! I blog on MyDD.com!' This was, of course, the political Web site where I'd first heard about Meetup.com. 'You're hired!' I yelled."
Other notable bloggers on MyDD that went on to work with campaigns include
Matt Stoller
Matt may refer to:
* Matt (name), people with the given name ''Matt'' or Matthew, meaning "gift from God", or the surname Matt
*In British English, of a surface: having a non-glossy finish, see gloss (material appearance)
* Matt, Switzerland, a ...
with
Jon Corzine
Jon Stevens Corzine ( ; born January 1, 1947) is an American financial executive and retired politician who served as a United States Senator from New Jersey from 2001 to 2006 and the 54th governor of New Jersey from 2006 to 2010. Corzine ran fo ...
,
Scott Shields with
Bob Menendez, Tim Tagaris with
Ned Lamont
Edward Miner Lamont Jr. (born January 3, 1954) is an American businessman and politician serving as the 89th governor of Connecticut. He has served in this position since January 9, 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he served as a Greenw ...
and
Sherrod Brown
Sherrod Campbell Brown (; born November 9, 1952) is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Ohio, a seat which he has held since 2007. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the U.S. representative for Ohio's ...
, Melissa Ryan with
Russ Feingold
Russell Dana Feingold ( ; born March 2, 1953) is an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States Senator from Wisconsin from 1993 to 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, he was its nominee in the 2016 election for the same U ...
,
Laura Packard
Laura Packard (born May 23, 1976) is an American health care activist and political commentator. She is the founder of Health Care Voices, a non-profit grassroots organization for adults with serious medical conditions. She is executive directo ...
with
Debbie Stabenow
Deborah Ann Stabenow ( ; née Greer, born April 29, 1950) is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from Michigan, a seat she has held since 2001. A member of the Democratic Party, she became the state's first female ...
and
Bill Halter and Todd Beeton with
Kirsten Gillibrand
Kirsten Elizabeth Gillibrand (; ; born December 9, 1966) is an American lawyer and politician serving as the junior United States senator from New York since 2009. A member of the Democratic Party, she served as member of the U.S. House of ...
.
The site garnered a great deal of attention during the
2004 U.S. Presidential Election when Jerome Armstrong was the first source to break the
exit polls at 1:58 PM EST.
MyDD was profiled in late 2005 as part of the article "Blogging Down the Money Trail" in ''Campaigns and Elections'' magazine. The article focused on the
special election in Ohio's second congressional district and the ability of blogs like MyDD, Daily Kos, and Swing State Project to raise funds for Democratic candidates and draw national attention to local races.
During the 2006 midterm elections, MyDD's Chris Bowers launched two campaigns in October 2006 on MyDD.com before the
2006 congressional elections. The first was the "Use it or Lose it" to prompt
safe Democrats to give 30 percent of their campaign funds to other Democratic causes; the second was a
Google bomb campaign to raise the site listings for negative news articles on a set of
Republican
Republican can refer to:
Political ideology
* An advocate of a republic, a type of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law.
** Republicanism, the ideology in support of republics or agains ...
incumbent
The incumbent is the current holder of an office or position, usually in relation to an election. In an election for president, the incumbent is the person holding or acting in the office of president before the election, whether seeking re-ele ...
s.
The "Use It or Lose It" campaign called on bloggers and Democratic activists to pressure Democrats in safe seats to ask them to give at least 30 percent of their campaign accounts to the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee or directly to Democrats in competitive congressional races (subject to
FEC limits). "Safe" Democrats was defined as those who were either running unopposed by a Republican, or whose Republican opponent raised less than $10,000 (and thus were not considered serious opponents). The lists of such Democrats were pulled from FEC filings. The campaign drew media attention and also brought
MoveOn
MoveOn (formerly known as MoveOn.org) is a progressive public policy advocacy group and political action committee. Formed in 1998 around one of the first massively viral email petitions, MoveOn has since grown into one of the largest grassroot ...
on board with their own page promoting the campaign.
Almost immediately after starting the "Use it or Lose It" campaign, Bowers began a
Googlebomb campaign to increase the search results of a set of negative articles about endangered Republican congressional incumbents. The idea was to reach less-informed voters who might use
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
to search for information on candidates, most often by simply entering the person's name. Taking advantage of the Google indexing algorithm, having many people link to these articles using the candidates' names, would raise their prominence in the search results.
The articles chosen were to be from non-partisan news sources, and factually negative about the chosen Republicans. Local news sources were preferred over national news. The chosen list included mainly such sources, but also some
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
pages. The candidates chosen were culled from an initial list (chosen by Bowers) of 70, down to 52. The candidates cut were those whom a suitably credible and negative article could not be found.
The concept drew criticism from conservative bloggers although the right had used the same tactic against
John Kerry
John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is an American attorney, politician and diplomat who currently serves as the first United States special presidential envoy for climate. A member of the Forbes family and the Democratic Party, he ...
in the
2004 election. In June 2007, front-pagers Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers left MyDD to found a new political blog,
OpenLeft, which went online on July 9, 2007.
Founder Jerome Armstrong was known in the blogosphere for his criticisms of Democratic presidential candidate
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...
. "I was rooting that it would come down to Edwards and Clinton -- that to me represents a battle of Democratic values and ideas," said Armstrong. "Obama's candidacy is really just personality-driven, wrapped with quasi-religious overtures." As a result, many of the supporters of rival candidate
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States sen ...
migrated to MyDD. However, MyDD was one of the few blogs to let bloggers from all the campaigns post on the front page. Longtime editor
Jonathan Singer supported the Illinois Senator, and in June 2008,
Josh Orton, the Netroots Nation political director and former Online Outreach director for Barack Obama, joined MyDD as a frontpage blogger.
Peter Jukes
Peter Jukes (born 13 October 1960) is an English author, screenwriter, playwright, literary critic and journalist. He is the co-founder and executive editor of ''Byline Times''.
Early life
Jukes was born in Swindon, Wiltshire, England, and atte ...
, aka "brit" on MyDD, wrote a post-cap of the Obama-Clinton primary war on MyDD, titled, "My Story: Flaming for Obama" in September, 2008 for Prospect Magazine which detailed the combative primary on MyDD.
The authors of the blog during this period included Armstrong, Jonathan Singer, Josh Orton, Charles Lemos,
Nathan Empsall, Jason Williams, and pseudonym authors desmoinesdemocrat, Senate Guru, and Texas Nate.
MyDD has been largely dormant since 2010. Its founder, Jerome Armstrong explained that he “had to get out to save from becoming hardened, cynical, and without peace,” citing the negativity in American politics.
Armstrong's last political post on the blog, from October 10, 2016, was entitled "A blowout of historical proportion" and predicted a crushing Clinton victory over Trump in the 2016 presidential election—one for "the record books". As of late 2019 the website is a generic product review site and no longer covers politics.
References
External links
MyDDExit poll posting
*"Blogging Down the Money Trail". ''
Campaigns and Elections
''Campaigns & Elections'' is a trade magazine covering political campaigns, focused on tools, tactics, and techniques of the political consulting profession. The magazine was founded by Stanley Foster Reed in 1980. It is headquartered in Arlingto ...
''. October/November, 2005. 19
{Dead link, date=November 2019 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes
American political blogs
Internet properties established in 2001