(FORTUNE Magazine) – Steve Forbes dives into the Republican race not by flying to Des Moines or Manchester, N.H., but by announcing his candidacy on the Internet. Jesse Jackson gets out of the Democratic race not by calling a press conference or calling reporters but by disclosing his intentions on the Internet. Pat Buchanan is forming an Internet Brigade. Bill Bradley is asking supporters to send contributions by credit card over the Internet.

After a tentative foray four years ago, the world's second-oldest profession has finally discovered the Web in a big way, and suddenly ordinarily sober politicians are talking wildly about cyber ward heelers and trying to figure out how many volunteers make up an e-precinct (50, according to the Forbes camp, which hopes to form e-wards, e-cities, and e-counties as well). Web surfers can now get online safety tips for kids from the Gore campaign ("Do not respond to any messages that are mean" is one), watch John Kasich in New Hampshire (see him tap a tree for maple syrup!), or become one of Buchanan's peasants with pitchforks. (E-mail to e-peasants: "Check in at least once a day for orders from headquarters.") "There's a shift going on, and soon people will be campaigning in different ways," says Jock Gill, a former Clinton aide who prides himself on having been the first person with an e-mail address on his White House business card. "The culture of politics has been based on politicians talking at people. Now everyone's going to have to learn to participate in a two-way, interactive system."

Perhaps. Bear in mind, however, that politics, whether practiced by Democrats or by Republicans, is a conservative profession, famously slow to change. And maybe, in this case, for good reason. To get their message out to masses of voters, candidates need a mass medium like TV--and the Internet is not that kind of medium. "For those already motivated and interested, [the Internet] can deepen their knowledge about candidates and issues," says Curtis Gans, the nation's foremost expert on why people vote. "And it will allow specific, already formed interest groups to be mobilized." But that's about it, especially since the people most likely to use a computer are the very people least likely to vote. A Pew Charitable Trust poll taken this year shows that the biggest computer users by far are those between the ages of 18 and 29. In the last presidential election, fewer than a third of them went to the polls. Of the people least likely to use a computer, those 50 and over, 62% voted.

The candidates are charging ahead anyway. An Internet site may not be a bridge to voters, but it is a sign that a candidate has crossed the bridge to the 21st century. It's also a badge of respectability; even lowly Bob Smith has one. And hope springs eternal. Nothing so motivates a presidential candidate as the hint that somehow, somewhere, there exists an untapped army of voters who, if only they can be mobilized, will transform the political landscape.

"You need to contact people on the Internet; then you need to nurture them intensely," says Republican candidate John McCain of Arizona, who has sent advisers to Minnesota to study how Jesse "The Body" Ventura used the Internet in his upstart campaign for governor. But you can't contact everybody on the Internet: Before Steve Forbes announced his candidacy on the Web, his press people had to call reporters on the phone to make sure they logged on.

DAVID SHRIBMAN is Washington bureau chief of the Boston Globe and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political reporter.