Other Notable Activities
During the 2006 election, Bowers again came into the spotlight for two internet campaigns he initiated. The first was called "Use It or Lose It" where he and other bloggers analyzed the FEC reports for "safe" Democrats and implored them to donate some of their campaign finance reserves to other Democratic candidates in more competitive elections. As a result of this campaign, several Democrats did donate additional money, including John Kerry and Barney Frank. Bowers estimated the effort generated a minimum of $2.3M for Democrats in competitive campaigns from "safe" Democrats.
The second campaign in 2006 was a Google bomb (or less pejoratively, a "search engine optimization") campaign against a list of Republican candidates. The idea was to elevate perceived negative stories in traditional media outlets about these candidates in Google searches. Bowers attempted to distinguish this from other well-known Google bombs, such as Miserable Failure or Flip Flop search terms returning biographies of George W. Bush and John Kerry during the 2004 election, by returning only serious and factual articles about the targets. .
Bowers is a Fellow at the Commonweal Institute.
Read more about this topic: Chris Bowers
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