Usability and the Bush victory

I just finished reading Nielsen's article on Bush and Kerry's email newsletters and I think he makes some really interesting points related to the campaigns internet strategies. While Kerry focused most of his efforts towards fundraising in the final week of the campaign, Bush used the internet as a GOTV tool and was able to bring his campaign to victory. While I had never really thought about it before, I can definitely see how Kerry could have capitalized more on web use rather than alienating his supporters with annoying fundraising appeals down the home stretch. This seems like poor planning on the Kerry campaign's part as it would seem like the campaign should have been focused on turning out support rather than trying to get more money so late in the campaign. This should be a lesson to future campaigns in that the net needs to be taken seriously as a turn out tool and that strategic thinking needs to go into how a campaign operation heads into the end of a campaign.