Photo © James Roderick Micah L. Sifryis a writer, editor, and democracy activist. As co-founder and editorial director of Personal Democracy Media, he helps run the annual PDF conference and daily techPresident.com news-site, which focus on the ways technology is changing politics, government and civil society. He is also a senior adviser to the Sunlight Foundation, which he helped found in 2006, and serves on the boards of Consumer Reports and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. He is the author or editor of six previous books, most recently WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. In the spring of 2012 he taught "The Politics of the Internet" at Harvard's Kennedy School. His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.

On the left, the open Internet and connection technologies have given anti-war and pro-civil liberties dissidents like writer Glenn Greenwald a standing and reach that, if we had a multi-party political system, would surely be rewarded with a healthy segment of the popular vote. And Occupy Wall Street, which was organized almost entirely outside the contours of "normal" American politics by anarchists inspired by the protest movements of Europe and the Arab Spring, was able to briefly upend the political debate and focus attention on inequality in America, a topic the two major parties uniformly ignore.

But the central contours of American politics really haven't changed all that much in the ten years since the rise of "people-powered" campaigns, big e-groups like MoveOn, online fundraising hubs like ActBlue, blogs and social media. The political operating system of big money campaigns, gerrymandered districts, discriminatory ballot access rules favoring the major parties, largely undisclosed lobbying, and winner-takes-all first-past-the-post representation hasn’t been altered in the slightest. Consider these sobering facts:

In 2004, the average cost of winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives was $1.26 million (in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars), according to the Campaign Finance Institute. In 2012 it had risen to $1.6 million. On the Senate side, the average winning campaign cost $8.7 million in 2004; in 2012 that had risen to $10.4 million.[1]

If the Internet was democratizing electoral politics, then small donors would be stepping up and playing a bigger role in helping candidates clear these tougher thresholds. But on the whole they aren't. In the 2004 cycle, just eight percent of the money given to House candidates came from donors giving less than $200. In 2012, that percentage had inched up to just ten percent. Big donors (those who give more than $1000) and PACs still mattered far more to House candidates, delivering a whopping 71% of all the money raised in 2012 (which was, in fact, more than in 2004).[2] On the Senate side, the percentage of money going to candidates from donors giving less than $200 didn't change at all: it was 17% in 2004 and 17% in 1012.[3]

Photo © James Roderick Micah L. Sifryis a writer, editor, and democracy activist. As co-founder and editorial director of Personal Democracy Media, he helps run the annual PDF conference and daily techPresident.com news-site, which focus on the ways technology is changing politics, government and civil society. He is also a senior adviser to the Sunlight Foundation, which he helped found in 2006, and serves on the boards of Consumer Reports and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. He is the author or editor of six previous books, most recently WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. In the spring of 2012 he taught "The Politics of the Internet" at Harvard's Kennedy School. His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.

On the left, the open Internet and connection technologies have given anti-war and pro-civil liberties dissidents like writer Glenn Greenwald a standing and reach that, if we had a multi-party political system, would surely be rewarded with a healthy segment of the popular vote. And Occupy Wall Street, which was organized almost entirely outside the contours of "normal" American politics by anarchists inspired by the protest movements of Europe and the Arab Spring, was able to briefly upend the political debate and focus attention on inequality in America, a topic the two major parties uniformly ignore.

But the central contours of American politics really haven't changed all that much in the ten years since the rise of "people-powered" campaigns, big e-groups like MoveOn, online fundraising hubs like ActBlue, blogs and social media. The political operating system of big money campaigns, gerrymandered districts, discriminatory ballot access rules favoring the major parties, largely undisclosed lobbying, and winner-takes-all first-past-the-post representation hasn’t been altered in the slightest. Consider these sobering facts:

In 2004, the average cost of winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives was $1.26 million (in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars), according to the Campaign Finance Institute. In 2012 it had risen to $1.6 million. On the Senate side, the average winning campaign cost $8.7 million in 2004; in 2012 that had risen to $10.4 million.[1]

If the Internet was democratizing electoral politics, then small donors would be stepping up and playing a bigger role in helping candidates clear these tougher thresholds. But on the whole they aren't. In the 2004 cycle, just eight percent of the money given to House candidates came from donors giving less than $200. In 2012, that percentage had inched up to just ten percent. Big donors (those who give more than $1000) and PACs still mattered far more to House candidates, delivering a whopping 71% of all the money raised in 2012 (which was, in fact, more than in 2004).[2] On the Senate side, the percentage of money going to candidates from donors giving less than $200 didn't change at all: it was 17% in 2004 and 17% in 1012.[3]