As a follow-up from our post earlier today - The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? - The Washington Post is reporting that online "friends" could be pivotal in the 2008 U.S. race. But it seems Democrats have a big advantage on popular social networks:
"Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1 on Facebook and 3-to-1 on MySpace, said Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who studies online politics."
So far Barack Obama has 299,000 supporters on MySpace and Facebook, compared to 169,000 for Hillary Clinton. John Edwards ranks third among Democrats with 64,000 supporters, says the Washington Post - noting that Edwards is also using lesser-known social networks like Ning, Bebo and Care2.
On the Republican side, Ron Paul leads with 75,000 supporters - even though he barely registers in most opinion polls, a point made by Josh Catone in our post. Giuliani has only 7,400 supporters on MySpace.
Proving how web 2.0 hip he is, Obama even has a digg profile! Although judging by the amount of homepages he has (zero), Obama has my luck getting to the digg frontpage.
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Premise 1. youngsters vote democrat, oldies republican.
Premise 2. youngsters use web 2.0 much more than oldies
Conclusion: web 2.0 users vote democrat
The web 2.0 ideary is more related to democrat typical voter than republican's. It happens in most countries. In Spain the bias for left-winged parties over the internet is very high... the Spanish digg version meneame.net is a very good example.
All this is somehow extensible to the whole web but especially 2.0.
Posted by: xmariachi | August 24, 2007 10:26 AM
There's a particular fact that isn't being accounted for: not all Myspace and YouTube users are Americans! A lot of those counted friends and video viewers don't vote and aren't the campaign target. Today US elections is a issue of global interest, and so there's the urge to keep on track of what's going on.
Posted by: Bruno Ribeiro | August 24, 2007 6:02 PM
The Internet will be a key way people reserach candidates. The Democrats have a bigger majority and as a result will porbably have a better shot at moveing the undecided voter via the Internet. Another key that came out of the last election was eTactics to get people out ot vote. take a look at the Internet Political Performance Index http://www.spartaninternet.com/2008/
Posted by: Roberto_2008 | August 24, 2007 9:17 PM
This is a cross-post (thursday's article was about much the same).
I agree with some of the points made about the metrics: this is not the US voting public. A lot of users in the world deperately want/need the US to change its policies and are following the campaigns, or lending their online presences to candidates they hope will bring about meaningful change.
Posted by: derek abdinor | August 24, 2007 11:53 PM
Bruno there's one more "key" that is being taken for granted. That we will have an election in '08.
I for one have believed that there will be an election this coming year. However, suspicion in favor of the opposing opinion is mounting.
Posted by: Charles Rey | August 25, 2007 5:21 PM