[T]he hard thing to explain is not how the Dean campaign blew such a huge lead, but rather why we ever thought that lead actually existed. Dean's campaign didn't just fail, it dissolved on contact with reality.

The answer, I think, is that we talked ourselves, but not the voters, into believing. And I think the way the campaign was organized helped inflate and sustain that bubble of belief, right up to the moment that the voters arrived.

[...]

Howard Dean had the best-funded, best-publicized bid to be the Democratic nominee; he was so widely understood to be in the lead that the inevitability of his victory was a broad topic of discussion. (Google "Howard Dean"+inevitable if you need independent confirmation.) Even the people disputing the posited inevitability burnished the idea; no one bother debunking the idea of, say, Kucinich's inevitability.

I've had a hard time processing his Iowa and New Hampshire losses because I'd spent months hearing about how well he was going to do. It has taken me two weeks to decide that my mental model - how could such a successful campaign suddenly do so badly? - was the problem.

Dean's campaign was never actually successful. It did many of the things successful campaigns do, of course - got press and raised money and excited people and even got potential voters to aver to campaign workers and pollsters that they would vote for him when the time came. When the time came, however, they didn't. The campaign never succeeded at making Howard Dean the first choice of any group of voters he faced, and it seems unlikely to do so today. [UPDATE: Dean did no better than third place in any of the 7 states voting on February 3rd; his added delegate count was closer to Al Sharpton's than to Kerry, Edwards, or Clark's.]

If this thesis - call it the 'mirage' thesis - is too strong for you, consider its cousin, where the campaign was doing well until the last few days. In this version, one New Hampshire voter in three dumped Dean after no event more momentous than a third-place showing in Iowa (rarely known to track to New Hampshire elections) and a little hootin' and hollerin' in the concession speech (to use Sharpton's memorable phrase). Not one Dean supporter in three, mind, one voter in three.

In this view, Dean's support was real, but so thin and vulnerable that a mere political pin-prick was enough to cause the whole thing to collapse. Call this the 'soap bubble' thesis; the only difference between it and the mirage thesis is that in some other version of the election, if Dean had done everything perfectly, he could have performed well. I leave the likelihood of a primary race going perfectly as an exercise for the reader, but neither model suggests a campaign prepared for the real world.

[...]

Prior to January, "Howard Dean" was pronounced "Anybody but Bush." The thing Dean did spectacularly right was to pick a fight with the President, a hugely polarizing and therefore energizing figure, on the issue most Democrats wanted to keep quiet about. Even if you'd been only been following politics casually, you would have known that Dean was the person who had most directly challenged Bush. For any Democrat whose primary motivation was not a bundle of particular policy proposals but the chance to send the current President home, Dean was the man of the hour.

In this view, the change in the poll numbers in January reflected not a transfer of votes from Dean to Kerry but rather from the general to the specific. Voter's polled as to their choices last year were not bound by their answers, and nor had most of them bothered to sort out the candidates positions from one another. (My wife and I, both deeply interested in the primaries, couldn't always remember all of their names.) A couple of weeks before the primaries, though, voters in those states started to have to make some real decisions, transferring their sense of "Anybody but Bush" to a specific Democratic candidate. And sometimes that candidate was Howard Dean. But mostly not.

[...]

The easy thing to explain is why Dean lost - the voters didn't like him. The hard thing to explain is why we (and why Dean himself) thought he'd win, and easily at that. The bubble of belief, which collapsed so quickly and so completely, was inflated by tools that made formerly hard things easy, tricking us into thinking that getting votes had become easy as well - we were all in Deanspace for a while there.

Shirky's got a lot more, including some pitfalls to be avoided to help keep future Internet-based campaigns from imploding (or dissolving, as the case may be). He lists of a number of things which aren't votes, and cannot substitute for them: support, effort, fervor, money, and sometimes even voters (when the right criteria isn't used to categorize and count them). For anyone interested in the potentially far-reaching effect of the Internet-based techniques introduced by Dean and Trippi, it's worth a close read.

It's been a shock, but it doesn't have to be a fatal one. Lowering coordination costs and making it easier for citizens to create media and distributing fundraising to the masses are all good things. This year, however, to the surprise of many of us, pasting those things on to relatively traditional campaigns has worked better than the Dean campaign's organic strategy did. The biggest difficulty for whatever version of next time comes around will be remembering not to believe our own PR.

[Link via PressThink]