How to campaign cheaply and effectively

Here is the cheapest (free!), quickest (nearly instantaneous!), and most effective way to campaign that is probably possible. Send an email to everyone on your contact list. Include a link to this web site and ask them to take a look. Tell them you think this approach can actually work. And tell them if they agree after having a look themselves, to send a similar email to everyone in their contact list. Their email should be similar, including a link to this web site and asking the recipient to take a look. They should also include a statement giving a personal endorsement if they know someone who's decided to run, something simple like "I've known John/Jane for years. I trust him/her to be able and willing to do a good job in Congress. I intend to vote for him/her, and I hope you will too." The email should request the recipients, if they really want to improve government, to send an email to everyone in their contact list with a link, quoting your endorsement, and inviting their recipients to do the same. 

The number of voters reached can grow extremely quickly. As noted previously for example, if you send an email to ten of your contacts, and each of the ten recipients sends an email to ten of their own contacts, and so on, after only five or six levels every voter in a congressional district can be reached; all of the voters in most states can be reached after six to seven levels, and every voter in the country can be reached in eight to nine levels. 

As recently as a couple of decades ago, the only way to reach thousands or millions of voters was to produce ads and run them in newspapers, radio, and TV. Of course, that costs more than any ordinary person has to spare, which is why politicians have always been eager to work on behalf of special interests. Because that's where the money is.

Today, politicians still spend enormous amounts of money on their campaigns. But all of that money is good for just one thing. To communicate with us voters, and influence how we vote. But now, we can do that for free, using email and social networks. The Internet gives us a magnificent advantage over anything that's possible without it. We mustn't squander this valuable opportunity!

You can do anything you have time and money for. You can use your computer to create flyers and handouts, and make copies on your printer or a copy shop. Post them at convenient places, leave piles of them where allowed, hand them out on public walkways. You can put up a web site. You can start a blog. You can do anything else you can think of. There's no bad way to campaign! And you can do all of this yourself, using tools you already have or have easy access to, for little or no money, without spending hours upon hours working on it. 

In theory, this should be sufficient to reach enough of us voters to get elected. Assuming we reach them and they vote for us, what's next?