ASHINGTON - Books, cars, and mutual funds are already hawked online, so why not pitch a congressman or two?
That's the aim of about a dozen new Web sites calling themselves ''democracy portals'' and hoping to turn politics into a lucrative e-commerce application.
Plenty of politicians already have sites of their own, to raise money and to turn out the vote, such as for today's presidential primary.
But the democracy portals are drawing users with their own polls, news stories, and bipartisan e-mail debates. And they are developing high-tech plans to sell their access to potential voters to the candidates and political parties themselves.
In an age when all politics is marketing, election pros love the formula.
In recent weeks, Voter.com of Boston has signed promotional agreements with everyone from the Democratic Leadership Council and the AFL-CIO to the Christian Coalition and the Republican National Committee.
A rival, Grassroots.com, is targeting local races around the country, with advice from former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu and a content deal with the League of Women Voters.
Other entrants include SpeakOut
.com, Vote.com, and Voxcap.com.
These for-profit companies all declare they want the Internet to be an engine of public discourse. But by tracking voters' interests and e-mail addresses, the sites also expect to build up databases better than those kept by any political organization to date.
The portals won't share their data with outsiders, but they will make use of the information as middlemen, their owners say, channelling e-mail pitches from candidates to users who have expressed interest in certain causes.
The aim is to help candidates better target supporters and lower the cost of campaigns - blending the lofty goal of increasing voter participation with a big dose of dot-com commercialism.
Even at a cost of thousands of dollars, the services the Web companies could provide to candidates would be far cheaper than the television and radio ads that dominate campaigns today. And in theory they would allow a deeper discussion of issues.
''Among the public, there's a tremendous frustration with the existing tools'' of politics, said Justin Dangel, Voter.com's 25-year-old founder and chief executive.
Television spots are too brief and expensive to allow candidates to talk about complex matters like health care and education, he said, while much news coverage focuses on campaign tactics, not issues.
''No campaign in America will tell you they're happy with the level of distribution of their issue information,'' said Lawrence Purpuro, who oversees online efforts for the Republican National Committee.
Purpuro has signed deals with several of the independent portals since December, in hopes of reaching potential voters who might not register themselves on sites run by the RNC or the Republican Party itself.
While the party has a database of 120 million voters, it has e-mail addresses for just a small fraction of them, Purpuro said, and needs to build up its electronic contact list to cut its communication costs.
Already, e-mail has reduced the RNC's fax budget from $25,000 to $7,000 a month, he said. ''We've made it clear we need to go digital or die, but how we get there is unclear,'' Purpuro said.
Politicians and parties have made broad use of the Internet since the 1998 election cycle, and major Internet and media companies pump a massive amount of political news and analysis onto their own sites.
But most of the political sites draw mainly hard-core party loyalists.
In contrast, the new portals hope to attract more of the swing voters who decide most elections, then summarize and deliver their views to politicians and interest groups.
Ron Celmer, one of the investors in SpeakOut.com, calls it ''the aggregation of public opinion.''
The packaging of information on electronic visitors begins when users log in. Many online companies are keen to collect credit card and Social Security numbers, but the democracy portals often ask for a person's ZIP code, party affiliation and whether they are registered to vote, all of which can help politicians target communications.
Next, many of the portals ask users to specify a few issues they care most about, such as civil rights, the environment, or crime, and suggest that users take a brief quiz on each area. The data amount to a rough ideological and demographic profile of each user.
After providing the information, visitors to Voter.com can then call up a section called ''My Officials,'' customized by ZIP code. A user from Dorchester, for instance, would see links to officials from President Clinton down to the local state representative, Democrat John A. Hart.
These links don't generate revenue, but Voter.com collects fees from politicians who want to display more information about themselves. Currently these include Hillary Clinton, running for Senate from New York, and Jon Gordon, seeking a congressional seat in California.
Both Democrats pay several hundred dollars a month. That's hardly a significant outlay; Gordon said he plans to spend $1 million if he wins his party's nomination, primarily on broadcast advertising.
But Voter.com thinks it can make money on volume, hoping to sign up virtually every one of thousands of candidates seeking state or federal office this year. That could generate enough revenue to make it profitable by 2001, the company says.
Other revenue sources include building home pages for candidates and collecting online contributions, in return for a percentage of the donations.
Gordon, who once lived in Natick, said television ads are still more important than exposure on the Web, but that may change in several years. ''The big opportunity here [online] is to reduce the targetting cost,'' of reaching swing voters who might not go to the polls otherwise, he said.
Eventually, Voter.com hopes to provide its services to people running for local councils and school boards, a market it estimates at more than 100,000 candidates nationwide. To help build trust across party and ideological lines, it has hired executives like Randy Tate, former head of the Christian Coalition, and Craig Smith, former manager of Al Gore's presidential campaign.
The rush to turn politics into e-commerce worries observers like Michael Cornfield, a political scientist at George Washington University.
He's made ''a little antsy'' by what he calls ''the commercialization of citizen communications.''
But Cornfield said he doubts most of the sites will draw much of an audience. ''For all but a handful of junkies, politics is an occasional interest,'' he said.
The businesses aim to prove him wrong, by showing they can expand the market for political talk and lowering communications costs for candidates.
''The problem we're solving is making political communication more efficient,'' said Voter.com's Dangel.
