One site that I examined that seemed to do a very poor job of advocating for their cause was the GOP National Committee’s site. The site is likely one of the GOP’s best chances to directly reach people, and yet this site does a horrendous job of attempting to spread the GOP’s messages and principles.
Like many sites, this one has a scrolling “Top Headlines” section at the very top of the page. However, rather than highlighting the GOP’s current objectives, goals, and principles, 2/4 headlines are simply direct attacks on President Obama. One of the states “Obama doesn’t Care,” while the other one asks you to “Stand Against Obama’s Political Theater.” Considering that the president has already won the election and will not be running for office ever again, it seems silly to emphasize what the Republicans perceive as his faults. This is especially true because these headlines never state how the GOP disagrees with him, only that they do. Clicking on the headlines to see where they take you provides little additional information.
Clicking on “Obama doesn’t care” takes you to a single-page site which simply says that Obamacare is “bad policy” and will have “disasterous” results, providing no semblance of evidence to support that claim whatsoever.
The other headline takes you to a petition to reinstate White House tours. Considering such a petition would have very little effect and the tours are pretty much a non-issue by national policy standards, it again seems silly to make such a big deal of it.
These headlines, if anything, reinforces the obstructionist appearance of the party that they should be working to shed.
In fact, the home page of the GOP’s site doesn’t actually mention anything regarding what the party actually believes or advocates. There’s the attacks on Obama, some recent rally/event news, a “Donate” section, and a “Join the GOP” section. Being that this site is the first thing a person would see when searching for information about the GOP online, it would seem to make sense that they would assert what the party believes on the homepage of the site.