America elected Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States yesterday. Obama changed the way campaigns will be run in this country forever. While candidates had used the Internet as part of their campaign strategy in some part before Obama, he was the first to fully leverage its potential to raise enormous sums of money in political contributions and communicate his message to millions of mostly-younger, connected Americans.
In the days to come, the pundits will analyze the results of the election and try to figure out how and why Barack Obama won. I feel, with great certainty, they will find that the turnout among young voters was higher than ever and the Obama campaign's near-perfect execution of an Internet strategy made that happen.
