The batch of readings dealing with the Internet makes it clear that Democrats dominated across two of the most relevant political functions of the Internet- fundraising, organization, and blogging.
(1) Blogging: McKibben makes it clear that Blogging is a Democratic pastime:
Reporters long cowed by conservative charges of bias (as Michael Massing demonstrated in his recent essays on press coverage of Iraq[2] ) now find that they are getting closer scrutiny on the Internet. Since the liberals of the blogosphere are better organized, this is starting to have a balancing effect. Kos says he gets fifty times the number of visits received by the entire right-wing "blogosphere," where his biggest competitor is probably a site called Instapundit.com.
(2) Fundraising: The Washington Post reports that Obama raised over half a billion dollars online:
In an exclusive interview with The Post, members of the vaunted Triple O, Obama's online operation, broke down the numbers: 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million. Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less. The average online donation was $80, and the average Obama donor gave more than once.
(3) Organization: The Washington Post also notes the size Obama's extensive Internet volunteer network:
Obama's e-mail list contains upwards of 13 million addresses. Over the course of the campaign, aides sent more than 7,000 different messages, many of them targeted to specific donation levels (people who gave less than $200, for example, or those who gave more than $1,000). In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes. (Four years ago, Sen. John F. Kerry had 3 million e-addresses on his list; former Vermont governor Howard Dean had 600,000.)
A million people signed up for Obama's text-messaging program. On the night Obama accepted the Democratic nomination at Invesco Field in Denver, more than 30,000 phones among the crowd of 75,000 were used to text in to join the program. On Election Day, every voter who'd signed up for alerts in battleground states got at least three text messages. Supporters on average received five to 20 text messages per month, depending on where they lived -- the program was divided by states, regions, zip codes and colleges -- and what kind of messages they had opted to receive.
On MyBarackObama.com, or MyBO, Obama's own socnet, 2 million profiles were created. In addition, 200,000 offline events were planned, about 400,000 blog posts were written and more than 35,000 volunteer groups were created -- at least 1,000 of them on Feb. 10, 2007, the day Obama announced his candidacy. Some 3 million calls were made in the final four days of the campaign using MyBO's virtual phone-banking platform. On their own MyBO fundraising pages, 70,000 people raised $30 million. The campaign even set up a grassroots finance committee that was inspired by the national finance committee's high-dollar bundlers. In the grassroots committee, though, supporters were trained to collect small-dollar donations from their friends, relatives and co-workers.
Obama has 5 million supporters in other socnets. He maintained a profile in more than 15 online communities, including BlackPlanet, a MySpace for African Americans, and Eons, a Facebook for baby boomers. On Facebook, where about 3.2 million signed up as his supporters, a group called Students for Barack Obama was created in July 2007. It was so effective at energizing college-age voters that senior aides made it an official part of the campaign the following spring. And Facebook users did vote: On Facebook's Election 2008 page, which listed an 800 number to call for voting problems, more than 5.4 million users clicked on an "I Voted" button to let their Facebook friends know that they made it to the polls. (Talk about online peer pressure.)
[If anyone can find McCain's numbers, please post them in comments. I could not.]
The diffrence between Republicans and Democrats dates back to the 2004 campaign of Howard Dean. Hindman notes this and attributes it to Liberals greater usage of the internet:
There is much that we still do not know about political Web use, and many important details remain to be filled in. In the Dean case, though, the importance of these skewed political demographics is clear. In the early campaign, Dean positioned himself to the left of most competitors, declaring that he represented “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” and offering forceful opposition to the Iraq war while other competitors adopted more nuanced positions. 2 If the patterns of political Web usage were reversed—if conservatives visited political sites far more than liberals—the Internet would not have been such an asset for Dean. He would have raised much less money, recruited fewer volunteers, and attracted less positive press coverage.
These findings force us to consider whether Dean's experience might be part of a larger trend in online activism that benefits liberal views. Should we expect this liberal-conservative gap to be temporary or an enduring feature of the online political landscape? At this point, we do not know. There is some reason to expect that conservatives will catch up. The Internet is a young medium, and effective methods of online organizing are still largely experimental. As user sophistication continues to improve, as conservative candidates invest resources in exploiting the Web, and as conservative partisans themselves see online participation as a key part of political activism, online politics may have less of a liberal cast.
Ideological differentials in usage may not fade quickly, though. 2004 is not 1994; the majority of the American public is online and has been for several years. There is no liberal-conservative gap in access more generally, or in time spent online. Moreover, many other mediums of political outreach have had a persistent partisan character. For example, direct mail solicitation has long been a more effective tool for Republicans than Democrats.
The Dean campaign highlights the importance of the liberal-conservative gap in political Web usage, but it does little to show us how this disparity will evolve as online politics matures. Measuring and understanding the ideological divide in political Web usage will be critical to nearly every aspect of online politics.
Why do they use the Internet more? I have two theories: the first being that (a) Democrats tend to be younger and (b) Younger people are more comfortable using the Internet, meaning they can use it for political activities with ease. The Pew Research Center makes this clear about at least one of the three categories- blogging- analyzed:
More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30, and about another third (30%) are between 30 and 50. Just 14% of bloggers fall in the 50 to 64 age group and a tiny 2% are 65 or older. In comparison, only 24% of Internet users are age 18-29. Nearly half of Internet users (45%) are age 30 to 49 and another quarter (24%) are age 50 to 64. About 7% of Internet users are 65 or older.
There are important ramifications for the dominance of younger voters of the Internet. First, it raises doubt if the Democratic party will be able to hold a lock on the Internet over the long term. Those older members of the Grand Old Party- they where young once too. What happens when the Internet generation turns to the dark side? Second, these same voters are, well, young, and notorious for non-participation in elections. Perhaps this explains the findings of one of earlier readings...
There is a second theory, although I type it with caution. Is it so crazy to suggest the Democratic party is by nature more anti-establishment then the Republican party? If this was a truth, it would account for the natural flow of Democrats to the grassroots medium of the Internet. McKibben seems to hint at this a couple times, first with this...
The incumbent, Terry McAuliffe, retired after his failure in the 2004 elections, and the general consensus was that the 447 voting members of the relevant party committees would turn to yet another veteran of the inbred and centrist world of Democratic Party technicians, bland pols, and full-time fund-raisers. Jerome, on his widely followed MyDD blog (where Kos had begun his blogging career by posting comments), started handicapping the race; other bloggers began to study the records of Dean's rivals. One of them, Leo Hindery, for instance, was a prototypical fat cat. According to Crashing the Gate, he turned his Gulfstream around in midair while en route to a Democratic caucus when he learned that the blogs had revealed he was a chief backer of the ad linking Dean and Osama. When Dean eventually won, he said, "This party's strength does not come from consultants down. It comes from the grassroots up." In essence, this new force had lost the primary, but made it clear that it could continue to fight. "Dean was the first to break through and get inside the heretofore closed world of the party," Kos and Jerome write. "He won't be the last."
...and then with this interesting contrast between DailyKos (of the grassroots Internet) and The New Republic (of that old stuffy medium)...
At the center of this world, however, is Daily Kos, which because of its particular architecture, and the open spirit of its founder, has become an experiment in Web-style democracy. Kos himself posts a few blog entries every day. But each year he appoints five assistants who can post comments of their own on his front page. Many of these have become household names (albeit pseudonymous ones) in the blogging world—Meteor Blades or Armando are far more widely read than, say, The New Republic's TRB, despite the magazine's hundred-year head start. (As a measure of comparative fortunes, The New Republic announced last month that its circulation had fallen by 40 percent in the last few years.) But anyone who joins Daily Kos—a free and painless process—is allowed to post "diaries"—really mini-essays—about particular topics at any time
If my theory is true, it would also account for why the conservative FOX news is more popular then the liberal MSNBC. Conservatives are more inclined to be satisfied with the tried and true establishment of television. According to this theory, the stage is set for the trend of Democratic domination of the internet to continue.
5 comments:
I would argue that the same way Dean motivated people and used the internet to his advantage could easily be done by a Republican. Perhaps the argument is not that the Democrats have been overly successful but that the Republicans have really failed.
Maybe its not that democrats are more anti-establishment rather that since the technology of the internet and more specifically the rise of blogs has come about during an unpopular presidency which fostered the environment that allows for people to question Authority. Maybe blogs are filling the void that the media has left by failing its duty to serve as a check on government.
Good point Keyak. I forgot to mention that.
Steven, the Hindman article does state explicitly that class, race, party affiliation and specially political orientation (namely liberal orientation) does play a huge factor in internet use. I would argue that although you may be right that it is possible for a republican to succeed in this type of campaign, it will be much harder to succeed and it will take quite a few years until the playing field is leveled.
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