Yellin says that maybe the secret to Schrader's success can be found in the way he wrote his original appeal. People have told him, he says, that he phrased his praise for Schrader in a particularly artful way, inspiring many to support her despite her status as a novice. "The term I've heard used is 'kingmaker,'" he says. (This would ordinarily be an odd thing to hear a 16-year-old say, but Yellin's no ordinary teenager. When Salon called, he was in the middle of a photo shoot with the New York Times.)

Yellin is not sure that Schrader's success was all his doing. "I wouldn't call myself a kingmaker, though I feel very, very honored to be part of this. I think it's that people online are so dedicated, so fired up, they're willing to do whatever it takes to get people elected. It was the combination of the way I wrote it, but also the political climate."

Jerome Armstrong, the proprietor of MyDD, another popular political blog, agrees that the political climate had something to do with Schrader's success. But the most important thing, he says, is the sense of "community" felt by the readers of political blogs. Until Monday, Armstrong had never heard of Ginny Schrader. Then he got an instant message from Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who runs Daily Kos and is Armstrong's partner in a political consulting firm, with news of Greenwood's departure from the race. He took a look at Schrader's Web site, and "I told Markos this has the potential of getting big quick."

How did he know? Armstrong -- who used to work in Howard Dean's campaign, where these money floods were a normal thing -- says he can't really put his finger on it. "You learn to recognize it," he says. He and Moulitsas sent in their own donations to Schrader, signaling to their readers that they were in full support of the candidate. "And then we just sat to the side and looked on," Armstrong says.

When Armstrong, Moulitsas and Yellin had all played their hands, that's when the readers started really jumping on the Schrader bandwagon. According to some estimates, the money was coming in at the rate of about $3,000 an hour on Monday night and Tuesday morning. It's probably fair to say that at this point, a kind of madness had overcome the denizens of the lefty blog, and many of them were giving Schrader money just because they knew that others would be giving. "There's a whole stimulus-response type of reaction to it," Armstrong says. "It feels good. Joe Trippi" -- who headed Dean's campaign -- "used to tell me that people would give because they felt that other people would give and they didn't want to miss out. They'd want to be able to say, 'I was part of this thing. It's bigger than me, and I wanted to be part of it."

Benjamin Rahn, the president of ActBlue, a political action committee that runs a popular Web site that allows people to donate to Democrats of their choosing, echoes this thought. "One of the exciting things about online fundraising is that it gives people who are giving small amounts very tangible evidence that they are part of a strong community that, together, will be giving a lot. It's not because people are writing $2,000 checks, it's because you can see that lots and lots of people are sending in money."

And people also donated to Schrader just to show that the Web -- and Daily Kos in particular -- is a powerful political force. Jon Schiffman, an attorney in New York who is a very dedicated fan of Daily Kos and who gave $75 to Schrader, says that "there was a sense that this is something you do because you want to support Markos as a player among the big people. We wanted to show that there's an activist base out here and we should be listened to."

They got their wish, too. When Greenwood first dropped out, there was some speculation that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would look to replace Schrader with a candidate who'd had more political experience. Until this week, Schrader's campaign had not really taken off. According to Brian Welsh, the campaign manager, Schrader, who handily won a primary contest to become the nominee in April, was still working at her day job, which left her few opportunities for fundraising. (Until this week, the campaign's biggest fundraising event was a screening it arranged for the Michael Moore film "Fahrenheit 9/11"; the campaign raised $1,100.) Now that the seat was open, would the Democratic establishment look for a candidate that could at least raise more money?

The question was put to rest, Welsh says, when the money started coming in from the Web. "The Daily Kos was the wind on our sails that we needed to cruise through that 24-hour period; without that, this would have been very rough for us," he says. "And it all started with Stephen Yellin. I spoke to him earlier today and I thanked him about a hundred times."

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