About
< Home 
Patrick Ruffini is an online strategist dedicated to helping Republicans and conservatives achieve dominance in a networked era. He has seen American politics from every vantagepoint — as a campaign staffer, activist, and analyst. This site is his on-again, off-again effort to chronicle the glories and absurdities of American politics; eleven years after coding his first website, it’s a habit he can’t quite break.
Shaping Online Strategy
Ruffini currently advises Republican candidates and organizations on mastering new media, with a disciplined focus on Web site, e-mail, and blog strategies shaped by years of experience in the field. His strategic consulting firm is set to publicly launch in the summer of 2007. For more information on potentially working together, he encourages you to email workingtogether@patrickruffini.com.
From 2005 to 2007, Ruffini served as eCampaign Director at the Republican National Committee, overseeing the Party’s online strategy for the 2006 election cycle. His tenure saw unprecedented outreach to the online community, breakthroughs in online fundraising, and successful initiatives in the emerging worlds of social media, online video, and text messaging. Even during a difficult election cycle, the RNC’s relationship with the blogosphere grew closer and stronger than ever. Beyond these successes, the RNC’s eCampaign serves as the Republican Party’s R&D arm for innovation on the Internet, where no major development online goes unnoticed or is left untapped. In this role, Ruffini advised Republican candidates and organizations at all levels on best practices for winning online.
In the 2004 election cycle, Ruffini served as webmaster for Bush-Cheney ‘04, overseeing a wide range of activities from day-to-day website operations, designing special features around high-profile events like the Conventions and Presidential debates, and managing the first-ever campaign blog for an incumbent President. Having come to the campaign as a former blogger, Ruffini instituted an aggressive blog outreach program even though the medium was still in its infancy. Towards the end of the campaign, Time magazine noted the campaign’s adept strategy of reaching beyond official organs and touching voters through media they know and trust, among them the blogosphere.
Other professional highlights include a previous stint at the RNC during the 2002 cycle and time well spent at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the nation’s leading conservative think tanks.
Blogging Before Blogging Was Cool
Ruffini has been blogging since 2001, when the number of influential political blogs could probably be counted on one hand. Since then, PatrickRuffini.com has since been cited in the Washington Post, Time magazine, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News Channel, and CNN. Two defining characteristics of Ruffini’s blogging are its depth of analysis and often unconventional presentation. PatrickRuffini.com favors in-depth analysis of politics and public figures over “quick hits.” His site has married innovative web applications with blogging, including a popular series of straw polls that attracted as many as 20,000 unique votes and the 2008 Presidential Wire, a comprehensive buzz tracker dedicated to the race for the White House. Nationally syndicated talk show host Hugh Hewitt has called Ruffini “a genuine breakthrough thinker on the blogosphere.” Ruffini is now a guest blogger on Hewitt’s blog, one of the most linked political blogs in the country.
The blogosphere wasn’t Ruffini’s first experience with online politics. In 1998, Ruffini saw then Gov. George W. Bush’s national potential and started a grassroots website and e-mail list supporting him. It grew to be the largest online community supporting a Republican candidate in the 2000 election.
By the Numbers
Ruffini’s favorite computer program is Microsoft Excel. He is a numbers junkie. From election data to polls to the results of the latest online marketing campaign, Ruffini is fiercely committed to finding what works and why. He wants to use technology to make polling, voter outreach, and political analysis fundamentally better than they are today. Through his online polls, he has experimented with users tagging their own demographics and analyzing how individual voters can often shift dramatically over a few weeks. The Research section of this website covers Ruffini’s work in the broader realm of election analysis, including maps of political change down to the precinct level.
On a Personal Note…
Ruffini graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000 with a B.A. in Diplomatic History and Political Science. He and his wife live in the Washington, D.C. area, and are eagerly preparing for the birth of their twins this spring.
