Still have doubts about the power of the Internet as a fundraising medium?

Kentucky Democrat Ben Chandler, who was running in Tuesday’s special election to fill the vacant 6th District seat, spent $2,000 on “blogads” — advertisements running on blogs targeted to left-leaning readers — and raked in over $80,000 in contributions from the ads in just two weeks. Chandler went on to defeat his Republican opponent 55%-43% — no small feat in a conservative, Southern district, especially when national GOP leaders were in the district campaigning for his opponent (though they didn’t do a very good job of it).

Now, this is clearly a special case since Chandler had the attention of the blog world all to himself for the last couple of weeks — there will be a lot more candidates asking for dough in the weeks leading up to November, so it will be much harder for one candidate to see such a huge ROI. But if you can make even $8,000 off a $2,000 investment, rather than $80,000, that’s still money well spent, no?