BLAINE, MINN. — Elwyn Tinklenberg is living the long-shot candidate's political dream.
There weren't enough chairs for the volunteers crammed inside the four-room campaign office Wednesday morning. Every time aides hit "refresh" on their computers, hundreds more online donations appeared. Downstairs, the postal carrier spent 10 minutes trying to cram a two-foot stack of envelopes stuffed with checks into the mail slot.
"It's been raining money," said Beth DeZiel, 39, the campaign's dazed deputy finance director. "There's so much, we can barely keep up. It's unbelievable."
But this unsolicited good fortune -- $1.3 million since Friday -- isn't based on anything the Democratic former mayor and grandfather of seven did. It's all because of something his rival, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, said.
On Friday afternoon, Bachmann appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and made what has been dubbed the million-dollar mistake: Bachmann, 52, alleged that presidential candidate Barack Obama may hold "anti-American" views, and proposed a media investigation into "the views of the people in Congress [to] find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?"
While Sen. Obama's presidential bid has transformed the way campaigns use the Internet to reach volunteers and donors, the technology has also become a way for the public to instantly react -- even to races in which they can't vote.
Those quick reactions, often in the form of donations, can influence the outcome of a campaign, said Julie Barko Germany, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management.
Barko Germany said "the Internet can be an amplifier," enabling viewers to react instantly to something that incites strong support or fury.
"It's an excellent fundraising tool," she added, citing research indicating that "when you show someone a video online, they donate 10% more."
Bachmann's interview has turned the race into one of the country's most intensely watched. It also unleashed an online backlash against Bachmann, who many local political observers assumed would easily win reelection.
President Bush won the district in 2004 with 57% of the vote. In 2006, former state Sen. Bachmann was heralded as the first female Republican to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the district, which is dominated by blue-collar and farming communities.
