WASHINGTON - Jeff Seemann, 35. an Ohio Democrat and a former disc jockey, is little-known in his community and has not received much support from his party, yet he has raised at least $25,000 online and hired a dozen staffers for his congressional campaign.
His secret? A group of political bloggers who frequent the political blog dailykos.com has endorsed Seemann, along with seven other Democratic candidates running against Republican incumbents. Their goal is to raise money and visibility for these candidates.
"My site is a Democratic hangout," said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a lawyer from Berkeley, Calif., who runs Daily Kos, which he says gets more than 150,000 hits a day. "There are people here who have never donated before, but now they realize that they have to take an active role in politics."
Blogs - short for Web logs, which are online journals that usually feature commentaries on daily events and provide links to other Web sites - are emerging as potentially powerful tools for building grass-roots political support.
`New face of politics'
"Blogs are the new face of politics," Seemann, of Canton, Ohio, said. "We are on the ground level of what will be shaping up as the future of political campaigning."
While scores of political blogs don't go beyond gossip and bickering, many are quite influential, analysts say. Some feature political commentaries, such as the liberal instapundit.com or the conservative electionprojection.com.
Others, like Daily Kos, are designed as grass-roots tools. Blog for America, for example, recruits and endorses Democratic candidates for all elective offices. It started in 2002 as the official blog for former presidential candidate Howard Dean, who raised millions of dollars online.
It is impossible to obtain a precise figure for the number of political blogs, but they number in the thousands at least, according to the blog community.
Whether these blogs will generate enough cash and attention to make a difference in the November elections and beyond is uncertain.
But analysts say bloggers should not be ignored.
"Many people don't take into account how influential bloggers are," said Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. "Blogs are getting an increasing readership. People who are going to those blogs are real political junkies who can then reach everybody else."
The Dean factor
