DNC to focus on Neighborhood Program employing social capital

In an interesting development, and taking a page from the Huckabee campaign (and many other historical examples) that show that peer-to-peer persuasion has a much higher efficacy in campaigns than the call from a stranger or political ad, the Democratic National Committee in what they call is a first, is developing a neighborhood program called “Neighborhood VoteBuilder”, an “online portal to the voter file for activists, candidates, and the Democratic Party to use in the 2008 elections. “

The DNC aims to increase “personal contact between activists and their neighbors and friends” and “recruit, train and mobilize hundreds of thousands of local leaders and activists to communicate with their neighbors in targeted precincts across the country by Labor Day 2008.”

They have pilot tested this approach in both the 2007 Virginia elections and the Ohio 5th Congressional District special election.

They hope that Neighborhood VoteBuilder will enable them to scale personal persuasion to a national scale.

We’ll all stay tuned to monitor its effectiveness.