Jumping parties during an attorney general run in a swing state with twice the kitty of the opposition's front-runner looks like clever politics. But elections are won by more than money these days.

Former Republican state Sen. Chris Koster, who announced today he was defecting to the Democrats to run for state attorney general, might soon need to learn.

Koster and his AG campaign are taking with them some $640,000 in GOP donations following today's split, blogger BlueGirlRedMissouri posted today. That's more than double the $300,000 raised in the first half of 2007 by the Democrats' AG front-runner Jeff Harris, who's officially been running longer than Koster.

But our report today reveals that longer-standing Democrat Harris's campaign has one glaring advantage over any of its rivals, including Koster's: a public face that looks like the real deal.

Harris's slick, well organized and easy-to-navigate AG campaign website is as effective as any campaign's on the web, with lots of emphasis on signing up and donating. Visitors are left with no doubt why (apart from wanting to be governor some day) he's running for AG in 2008.

A longer trawl for a Chris Koster Internet presence yields an appealing-looking web-site but focused on Koster's 2006 run for state Senate with no mention of his five-month-old AG bid in 2007. Some home-page quotes are four years old.

That's not going to cut it from a guy who jumped ship on his "rising star" rep for what look like self-serving reasons. Poor Internet presence in modern campaigning signals a lack of engagement with voters - bad news in swing states like Missouri.

And Koster will learn fast that though he could probably afford to ignore Internet-based campaigning as a Republican, as a Democrat he'll get no such luxury.