Dean-Counters

I've heard Dean called the "dot-com candidate." Well, his spending may have been dotcommish, but his grassroots membership growth curve sure wasn't. Dot-com curves are not supposed to level off the way Dean's did.

I started collecting the Dean counter images off of Blog for America back in mid-September 2003. Why, I don't know. I guess I had a hunch something interesting might emerge from looking back on the numbers.

Well, the numbers are rather interesting, once graphed. I would argue there are three interesting moments in time on this graph: point A, point B, and point C.

Point C is easy: The perfect storm of Iowa, the "I Have a Scream" Speech, and New Hampshire. Enough to take the wind out of the sails, causing the dreaded leveling-off of the growth curve. Just watching this curve all during late January and the first week of February, it was clear something was very, very wrong: this was a rocketship without enough thrust to get into orbit.

Point B: I'm not so sure about: I'm guessing the buildup before Iowa. (I welcome other opinions.)

Point A is the one I'm wondering about. If whatever happened that first week of October hadn't happened the way it did, Dean might have 1,200,000 + grassroots members by now. What the heck happened?