It wasn't very long ago when it was hard for any legislative campaign to have a website. Unless you were willing to pay a consulting firm an absurd amount of money or knew a very talented kid, your options were pretty limited. Now, that's all changing (in part because of resources like DLCCWeb), and it's a good thing.

In this cycle, we're starting to see some really creative uses of the web. I've already talked about some of the things that activists are doing in Texas. But the folks in the Pennsylvania House Democratic Campaign Committee have some pretty good ideas for using the Internet as well.

This is one of them. Todd Stephens is a Republican candidate for state representative in District 151. He's also an assistant district attorney who is making a slew of questionable decisions:

[R]ather than uphold a strict code of ethics and put our community first, Todd is busy lining his campaign coffers with cash. Todd’s accepted over $5,000 in political contributions from defense attorneys and law firms. And Todd has taken cash from attorneys defending at least five clients—four DUI offenders and one accused sexual predator—with cases pending before his office.

That’s a minimum of five documented conflicts of interests.

Yes, you still try to get folks in the traditional media to write stories about this kind of thing. Yes, you still put facts like these in traditional advertising and mail. But a creative website that allows you to present all the information you have about a candidate costs very little and allows you to attract a lot of new eyeballs. That's exactly what PAHDC has done here.

And it's effective.

Sean Tevis -- my current favorite elected-office-seeking geek -- has gone from profiles on BoingBoing (and DLCC.org!) and landed in the Wall Street Journal.

As you'd imagine, the story is largely about the campaign's fundraising success. So far, Tevis has raised more than $95,000 -- almost entirely from small online donations. His GOP opponent plans to rake in just $35,000 (with very little of that money coming from individuals in his district).

The story includes one detail that I'm both simultaneously relieved and embarrassed that I didn't notice:

Mr. Tevis's coup de grâce was to embed a hidden message, in the source code. He knew that only fellow techies would bother scrolling through the dense lines of programming, so he rewarded them with a message asking them to tack an extra 88 cents on to any donation so he would recognize them. Nearly 20% of his 5,700 or so donors have done that. Mr. Tevis has become such a fund-raising machine that he is fielding calls from legislative candidates in other states asking for advice.

Sure enough, when you pull up the source code, there it is:

Hello person who cares enough to read source code.

Please donate $8.88 to my campaign. Any amount with 88 cents at the end is flagged for me to let me know that it came from someone who I guess is a lot like me. You'll also be entered into a drawing to win a prize and it will help save the world. Thank you.

I just can't get over how terrific and clever this whole thing is.

In this interconnected world of ours, there are few better ways to draw attention to something than to protest its existence. Unfortunately for him and his state, I don't think Republican State Sen. David Thomas of South Carolina understands that.

Earlier this year, the Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism of his state agreed to participate in an advertising campaign to promote South Carolina to gay European tourists. Similar ads were sponsored by the city governments of Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.

The advertisements were timed for London’s Gay Pride Week, which ended Saturday. The posters touted the attractions of the state to gay tourists, including its "gay beaches" and its Civil War-era plantations.

Sen. Thomas found out about the ad when he was contacted by the SC blog Palmetto Scoop. He called for an audit of the state's tourism advertising budget and told the blog this:

"South Carolinians will be irate when they learn their hard earned tax dollars are being spent to advertise our state as 'so gay'...This campaign goes against our core values."

A Google search for the phrase, 'Sen. David Thomas "So Gay" ' now returns about 108,000 results. Because of him, copies and text from the advertisement have run alongside coverage from Time and Newsweek, and papers from all over the country and the world.

Maybe that's exactly what Thomas intended, but here's the thing. Prior to this kerfuffle, I had no idea that South Carolina even had gay beaches.

And more importantly, an advertisement designed to improve the state's tourism industry will now have the opposite effect. In tough economic times, you gotta think that's a little foolish.

It’s not easy being a first-time candidate running against an incumbent. Especially if you are a Democrat campaigning in Kansas. To be successful, you need to have something going for you -- even if that’s just the drive to outwork your opponent every day.

But it really does pay to be smart.

Sean Tevis is an information architect from Olathe, Kansas. He’s running against Rep. Arlen Siegfreid, a deeply conservative Republican (even by Sunflower State standards), and apparently, he's got polling showing him running three points back.

He’s also a geek.

Faced with the challenge of raising the $26,000 it will take to make this stage of the race competitive, Tevis found a brilliant, clever way to tell his story and in doing so has captured the imagination of a certain part of the Internet.

Writing in the style of xkcd (a web comic read by the geekiest of geeks), Tevis laid out his reasons for running and asked for 3,000 people to contribute $8.34 to his campaign. And then the Internets responded.

His appeal was picked up by BoingBoing -- an incredibly popular geek culture blog -- and promoted thousands of times by news aggregators Digg and Reddit. All the traffic overwhelmed the servers hosting his website, but the donations kept pouring in.

By 9:30 on Monday morning, 5,298 people had given to his campaign. Previously (as Tevis notes in his comic), no state rep campaign in Kansas had ever attracted even 650 donors, and more remarkable still, Tevis lives in a district where just 6,327 people voted in the last election.

Obviously the specifics of Tevis' story can't necessarily be repeated (no way that every candidate will be able to finance her campaign with a clever comic strip), but there's a whole lot to be said for his creativity.

This is the Internet -- a place where leaders can connect with thousands of passionate potential supporters...if the campaign can find a way to stand out.

(cross posted at TDS)