This past election held promise for many in Maine who have been feeling the crunch of our difficult economic climate. One seat away from ending Democrats’ 30-year reign in Maine’s House, Maine Republicans represented hope for business owners and individuals whose standard of living has been dampened by decades of repressive tax policy.

Unfortunately, Maine’s Republican Party performed abysmally and allowed the progenitors of a completely irrational economic policy to gain a more powerful grip on the state coffers.

GOP heads will blame the losses on the Iraq war. There is a degree of merit to this analysis; anecdotal evidence shows many Mainers voting straight Democrat in order to “send a message” to Bush and the Washington establishment. But the Iraq war is not the reason for Maine’s liberal backslide. It simply filled a void that a strong voice for fiscal sanity should have occupied.

When no discernible message pervades the minds of voters, the zeitgeist prevails. This is why a Maine Democratic machine has been able to maintain control of this state through almost every imaginable failure of government. Maine’s Republican Party needs to learn to get its message out.

The responsibility of Republicans is not simply to wrestle control of the state’s purse strings away from a well-seated political opponent. Maine Republicans have a responsibility to act as an effective opposition party in order to maintain the balance in government that keeps outrageous policy and corruption from manifesting itself. The same responsibility was recognized and seized by national Democrats in this last election: Errant foreign policy and a culture of deviance within the national Republican power structure will be subdued, in part, by the effectiveness of the minority party’s resistance.

The prevailing wisdom of Republicans this election cycle was that candidates needed to go door to door to get votes. While this presents an idyllic and quaint portrait of Maine life, it is an utter waste of time and resources. No candidate in any district can effectively seize control of the political dialog when they are hamstrung between their everyday job and what amounts to a slow-motion marathon race around their district. Political candidates win when their name is known, and the technology exists today that makes lack of message resonance an unforgivable political crime.

Consumer and voter use of the Internet is growing exponentially. But search the Internet for a clear and potent Maine GOP message, or search the emerging social networks for the presence of a viable explanation of Maine’s economic troubles. You’ll come up empty-handed.

What may be found are forums filled with a small sect of social conservatives, arguing with each other about gay marriage and abortion. What has occurred with Maine’s Republican identity online is directly relative to what has happened to its identity offline: The average Maine voter considers Republicans to be fanatics. The Maine GOP’s negligence in establishing deep roots in the online community, and its inability to leverage current technology to relay a coherent message, has allowed the Democrats to sit back and watch the fringe elements of the party define it. It’s not even that the Democrats have done a better job getting their message out, it’s simply that they have been patient enough to watch a culture of unelectable social conservative voices drag the rest of the party down like a 50-ton anchor.

The need to harness new media to control the political landscape is not a new idea. Over the past several election cycles we’ve watched the emergence of people such as Howard Dean and Ned Lamont, previously unknown individuals who were able to harness new technology to rise to the forefront of the American political scene. What they did was not complicated, but the results were revolutionary.

To a lesser degree, new and inexpensive media have begun to affect local elections. Boston City Council candidate John Tobin teamed up with pioneering video blogger Steve Garfield during his last election. Through the use of a $300 digital video camera and a $10-a-month hosting account, Tobin was able to connect with local voters in a way that would have required hundreds of thousands of dollars in television buys. His short, three-minute or so video clips on the streets of Boston introduced a face, a name and a voice to what usually remains simply an R or D on a voter’s ballot. This type of new media will transform the scope of politics over the next several years, and those who get to it first will end up with a dramatic advantage. In a state such as Maine, where a huge chunk of voters use satellite television and never even see local political ads, video blogging would be extremely potent. And voters are becoming increasingly jaded toward political advertisements. Connecting through video blogging or other new social media methods allows a much more transparent and personal message to come across, one that is free of the absurdities of old-school marketing.

Logic and history show clearly that Maine needs to adopt a more conservative fiscal policy in order to make the state a tolerable place to live. Taxes need to be lowered, regulation on business needs to be measured, and competition in the health care industry needs to be encouraged. These three items are not likely to be addressed sufficiently until an opposition party emerges that will press the controlling Democrats to be accountable and transparent. This will require control of the political microphone, which means harnessing current technologies at a faster pace than their opponents. It means understanding that newspapers and door-to-door glad-handing are methods of the past, and that there are faster, cheaper and more effective means to get a message out. And it means coming to clear understanding that today, if you don’t get your message out, someone else will step in and do it for you.

Lance Dutson is the publisher of MaineWebReport.com, a citizen journalism Web site that concentrates on Maine state government. He is also the owner of Maine Coast Design, a new media marketing firm in Searsmont.