Rob Zerban, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Reddit’s preferred candidate thanks to his stance against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), responded late Thursday to TPM’s questions about the role Reddit has played in his campaign with a lengthy email.
Zerban admits that he hadn’t heard of social news website Reddit until he was contacted by the “Operation Pull Ryan” supporters, but states he has readily (no pun intended) embraced the website now and thinks it has the potential to dramatically influence the political landscape.
Here’s Zerban’s statement to TPM in full:
I have always work my hardest to be accessible and give straight answers. We need our representatives to be open and honest with the people, and that has not happened with Paul Ryan. I am happy to engage the people in any venue, whether it be in person here in the 1st District of Wisconsin or, increasingly, online.
On Wednesday afternoon of last week I received a few emails from individuals identifying themselves are members of reddit community, requesting my position on SOPA. Shortly thereafter we began to receive more emails and then phone calls from redditors encouraging me to participate in an AMA session. I was unfamiliar with reddit prior to this. The AMA session began around 7pm CST, hitting #1 on the front page a few minutes later, and we immediately experienced a surge of online contributions. In addition to donations we received hundreds of emails from redditors offering words of encouragement and signing up to volunteer; our social media presence also greatly expanded, adding a significant number of Facebook and Twitter followers.
My finance staff estimated we raised $5,000 from redditors within the first 36 hours. I returned to reddit to thank them for the experience and to let them know what a great help they had been… and then they donated another $10,000! Many redditors have requested we create a dedicated donation page to track their efforts, and we are currently exploring that option.
(For clarification, allow me to state that I’ve raised significantly more than $15,000 in my campaign to defeat Paul Ryan in 2012. Reddit’s fundraising efforts came on the heels of my campaign’s strongest fundraising quarter to date. These numbers will become public information shortly when I file my quarterly report with the FEC later this month.)
Reddit is a well-educated, well-informed, community of highly-talented, eclectic and wildly hilarious individuals. There is something very endearing about a paradigm in which the consumers are the producers and all members have the same influence: 1 vote. The person that wants to draw attention to legislation, or world events, or scientific breakthroughs has no more leverage than the person that wants to draw attention to funny pictures of cats. Reddit is not only changing the way we receive information and interact but increasingly the way mainstream media reacts. Reddit has demonstrated it is capable of organizing people to act for a common goal, whether it is raising awareness about an issue, raising money for charity or initiating boycotts against major corporations. These are the same basic metrics by which political campaigns are measured: the ability to earn media, the ability to raise funds and the ability to initiate activism. Reddit can become a very powerful political force, if it so chooses. I look forward to keeping the lines of communication with reddit open and continuing to earn their support.
We’re still awaiting a response from Rep. Ryan’s office, which has begun tweeting again after a holiday break, basking in the glow of various magazine awards that Ryan won in 2011.
