My posts on the Republican online campaign are sometimes prodding, but in at least one area, John McCain laps the competition: using his site to tell his story to first-time visitors and undecided voters.

I was really struck by this visiting the site today, on the 35th anniversary of McCain's release as a POW.

If he wins, John McCain will have spent roughly $40 million to secure the nomination against two vastly better funded opponents. That is a far cry from the conventional wisdom that it would take $100 million to compete.

How much you raise may not matter that much, but I'm about to argue that how you raise it makes a big difference.

Facebook has given us an unprecedented look inside the demographic breakdowns of its user base. For the first time, there's a model for quantifying who the early adopters on the Web are, and how they vote.

Read this post for the full data.

It looks like I was only a little early in my prediction of a Ron Paul $4 million quarter.

In a quarter when non-Hillary fundraising bottomed out, Ron Paul has shown Republicans that there is a price to be paid for not making the Web a central part of your strategy. Sure, top GOPers read the headlines about Obama's fundraising. But they waved it off as a Democrat phenomenon. Their philosophy: Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus -- and nothing about one side could every apply to the other.

Paul's nearly matching a weakened John McCain and quintupling offline darling Mike Huckabee could either be a much needed wake up call, or the morphine drip that keeps this top-down fear of the Internet going until catastrophe forces change.

The controversy over MoveOn's General Betray Us ad reminds us that the best online strategy is still about getting the basics right. In this case: tapping into the visceral reaction to an event within the first 12-24 hours and inviting your supporters to participate to respond in ways that count. And you'll primarily use the most unglamorous, Web 1.0 club in the bag: e-mail.

Maybe Republicans aren't allergic to the Interwebs after all. If you give them a reason to go online, to signup and donate, in the form of a big event -- they will. What you see above is the surge of traffic to Fred08.com the day of his online-exclusive announcement.

Allen Fuller has a great post up discussing Fred's online announcement on September 6th. For whatever reason, people's antennae seem to go up whenever there's an inkling of Fred running a video-based campaign, and this is no exception.

Fred Thompson will launch a legitimate campaign for President via webcast. That's just unreal. Sure, Hillary and Edwards and all them did it months ago, but that was months ago when there was no pressure and relatively little media attention. I'm as much of a new media guy as anyone, and I applaud them for going for it, but this is risky at best. Friends of Fred Thompson will not get nearly the attention from the mainstream media as a big event on the square in Lawrenceburg, Tenn. would. On the other hand, this does play to his strength. He is a professional TV actor after all. I'd imagine they will allow networks to play the broadcast-quality video live as well. Either way it is a go-for-broke strategy and I'm interested to see how it plays out.

I for one applaud Fred for announcing on the Web. It's a strategy I've advocated for candidates in different settings for months. With that said, context matters. And to put it mildly, I don't think they've handled the run-up to this announcement very well.

The New York Times has a story on the online fundraising disparity between Democrats and Republicans online. I'm quoted in it, to the effect that the environment stinks for Republicans right now, and we have an opportunity to do better against someone like Hillary as an opponent in the general election. Online fundraising will explode come the general election, on both sides. The question is whether we'll rise enough to keep up. That's what keeps me up at night (as you can probably tell by the timestamp on this post).

Last night, I got an email from John McCain filled with typical political happy talk like "Though we have a long, hard road ahead of all of us, I know that with your help, we will prevail," and "Together, I have every confidence that we will be successful."

I certainly don't feel any outsized affection for Senator McCain, but I sincerely believe he missed an opportunity to make history. To really engage his supporters in a valiant comeback attempt, to give them ownership of the campaign, and to maybe -- just maybe -- set in motion some momentum that could have gotten him back in this. It's a strategy that will take guts -- a willingness to publicly put the very survival of the campaign on the line (as though it isn't already).

Here's the email McCain could have sent (after the jump):

When critics point to the Republican Party's problems online, my response is that our problems aren't online. Our problems are offline, in a cranky base, in a reluctance to truly motivate and inspire cause-oriented Republican voters, and in the fact that we are in power in the midst of an unpopular war. Many of these apparent problems go away or get a lot better once we unify against Hillary as the nominee. If this were simply a contest of Web sites and technology -- GeorgeWBush.com vs. JohnKerry.com in 2004, GOP.com vs. Democrats.org, Voter Vault vs. Demzilla, microtargeting vs. what exactly? -- Republicans would win hands down.

Or at least, that seems to have been the case until now.

I've worked with enough of the developers and tech visionaries on the Republican side to know that the talent to build great online experiences, ones that connect you directly with your voters, exists in abundance. But recently, this approach has lost ground to a theory that the best way to communicate with your base is through third parties like bloggers and social networks. That means Republicans are far out front on things like blogger conference calls, hashing out legislation on Red State, and Twittering. And they're quietly losing ground on the basics of online campaigning: e-mail lists, Web development, and video.