Bloggasm

Tevis narrowly lost the election for a Kansas House of Representatives seat, but he’s launched a new web comic announcing his strategy for a 2010 run

Though presidential candidates Barrack Obama and Ron Paul shattered records last year for online campaign fundraising, Sean Tevis’ Internet fundraising success may be even more extraordinary. After virtually no luck raising money door-to-door (reportedly he brought in a meager $25) the rookie candidate published a web comic paying homage to XKCD that — with a series of tech geek references and pleas for donations — was linked to from thousands of websites and covered by major media outlets ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the LA Times. In the first 24 hours after publishing the comic he had received $25,000, and by the end of the campaign he had racked up over $109,000, most of which came from out-of-state donors. And he was running in a district where only 10,103 people voted. When votes were finally cast, he lost to his conservative opponent in a heavily Republican district by only 452 votes.

For a couple months after his defeat he went back to just working as an information architect and stayed out of the political sphere. But in February, Tevis was at first excited and then quickly horrified when he found out that Kansas Representative Scott Schwab had introduced House Bill No. 2244 to the state legislature, referring to it as the “Sean Tevis Bill.” If passed, it would have forced a candidate to file a public report with a person’s full name and home address on it if he donates less than $50 to a political campaign, but only if the candidate raised over $1,000 in small donations. What first seemed like a bill promoting campaign transparency was simply an attempt to target one person: Sean Tevis.

“When you hear there’s a bill being introduced and it has your name on it, you want it to be something great, or at least something good, but once you actually read it and go through it and you realize it’s almost the opposite of what you’ve been campaigning for or what you wanted to accomplish, it just made me mad, really mad,” Tevis told me in a phone conversation. “So I wrote a press release, put it on my website, and sent it out to a couple news organizations. But what really made the difference was just putting it on my site. Apparently so many people had subscribed to my RSS feed that it made it to Metafilter, and to BoingBoing, to Reddit, and to a couple other places. Because it made it onto those, people were actually calling the state capitol while the legislature was in session, and the guy who was introducing the bill apparently had to turn off his phone while he was out on the house floor because so many people were calling to complain.”

The bill was swiftly killed, but by now Tevis’ inner political activist had been reawakened. After seeing yet again the passionate following he had from those who fervently believed in the same issues, he decided that he wanted to make another go at his local seat, convinced this time he could perform even better and win. But at this point the candidate was not willing to lie dormant for several months waiting for the campaign season to come up. So he went back to his comic strip and illustrated over 100 panels detailing not only what he had been up to thus far, but what he planned on accomplishing in the months ahead.

“I’m an information architect by trade, and what that means is I look at how groups collaborate with each other, whether it’s business units, or things within a company, and I try to find ways to get better information in front of others, and hopefully improve it,” Tevis said. “And I had collected all those [constituents'] information from going door to door … and because I lost, I wasn’t going to be able to act on it, and I thought that well, maybe I can go give it to my opponent. But he really does not like me. After the election, I called to give my concession speech and he hung up on me. He’s not a friendly guy. There was a lot of media attention about me, and he took it very personally, like ‘I really hate this guy, what is he doing?’”

So in Tevis’ new plan, he would visit a minimum of 50 politicians across the state and US to not only share the information he gathered from his constituents, but also to promote his own ideas for transparency in government.

“It’d be nice when I go meet these politicians if I could wear a shirt saying who’s sponsoring me,” he said. “They’re all real people who are sponsoring. They’re not sponsored by lobbyist or corporations. I wanted to get a real person’s name on my shirt. And then I would also give a shirt to the politician themselves just for meeting with me.”

Tevis officially kicks off his visits on June 1, but he said that he’s already met with one representative who would soon be out of the country for several months and unable to meet with him any other time. For those who donate $13,37, he’ll be wearing their names on his shirt when he sits down with a politician, and the $120 donors will have their names printed on the shirt given to the elected official.

But the burning question I had for Tevis was this: In all the coverage of his campaign — both on the internet and off – did anyone ever get a reaction from Randall Munroe — the creator of XKCD — to the candidate’s homage to him?

“No, but I’ve always wondered what he’s thought of these. If you do talk to him though, tell him I said hi and I love his work.”