Not to be outdone, or left behind, this week the Republican party launched a new website that makes use of social media tools. Let's take a look...

The homepage features a video (the first half of which is all Ronald Reagan), options to upload video or text to the site, a bright red 'Donate' button, a link to the party's Facebook group, and more. It even features an AddThis.com bookmarking pop-up widget.

Judging by the text and video entries uploaded so far, the site hasn't gotten major traction yet. There are 325 text entries and just 17 video entries. The site has a useful search filter and community ratings - although there's no apparent way to comment on individual submissions. The video section needs work; the screens are tiny and users need to click through to YouTube to view full-screen. And again there is no way to comment.

One noticeable difference between RepublicanForAReason.com and Obama's change.gov is that the content submissions for change.gov don't currently display on the public website. In fact there's no indication where those messages go and if they will be published at all. The change.gov blog asks readers to "keep sending your stories and we'll keep learning from them." But it'd be great if everything was published on the site. RepublicanForAReason.com appears to have no filter, which means it's open to be mocked by The Daily Show - but good on them for publishing the public's submissions.

Conclusion

Overall, RepublicanForAReason.com feels a little underdone - possibly rushed in response to the Obama campaign's dominating presence in social media. However we do give RepublicanForAReason.com points for being more open than change.gov in publishing public submissions.

Back in June, ReadWriteWeb reviewed the websites of Obama and McCain - and we came away impressed with both. We wrote that Obama's website was a tour de force of web magic, with seemingly every social networking base covered. McCain's website was impressive too - donations, calls to get involved, and social networking were features to the fore. So both parties have effectively used the Web this year - check out this article by Adult ADD Strengths for detailed stats - and are continuing to tap the Internet with new sites post-election.

Whatever your political persuasion, it's great to see politicians opening up for public stories and opinions using the Web. There's improvement needed on both RepublicanForAReason.com and change.gov, but soliciting the thoughts of citizens via the Web is a good start. Let's hope the politicians on both sides actually listen and respond to them.

Besides, the new iGoogle interface seems to be an issue that really motivates potential voters.

And it's not like there aren't worse reasons to vote against someone.

More Noise to Signal

According to Nielson Mobile, a service of the consumer research-focused Nielson Company, 43 million Americans subscribe to mobile internet. Also, 33 million Americans use text messages, 32 million IM, 29 million download wallpapers/screensavers, and 4 million subscribe to and view mobile video.

However, when you break those numbers down by political preference, the following is true of mobile media in Q2 2008:

• Overall, 62% of Democrats are data users who use one or more data service on their mobile phone (compared with 55% of Republicans).
• Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use text messaging (53% compared with 46%).
• Democrats are more likely to use picture messaging and MMS (27% compared with 21%).
• Democrats are more likely to use mobile internet (17 % compared with 13%)

Apparently, someone already told the candidates of this news. It has been widely reported the numerous ways the Obama campaign makes use of mobile marketing for voter outreach. Already, they used SMS to announce Obama's VP choice. Unfortunately, the SMS message came after traditional journalists reported the news, not first, as originally promised. Still, the idea was unique and was the first attempt in leveraging the mobile medium in that way. In addition to the SMS VP announcement, the Obama campaign's mobile web site offers news, videos and ringtone and wallpaper downloads. 

The McCain camp has not been as active on the mobile front, but that's not to say that conservative voters don't use mobile media. Their use just isn't as heavy. In fact, Nielsen reports that the conservative-leaning web site The Drudge Report has a mobile audience of 567,000 uniques per month, for example.

To see how the numbers break down even further by Democrat vs Republican mobile data use, check out the chart below:

Why More Mobile Democrats?

There are a lot of conclusions one can come to from reviewing this data, but perhaps the most telling is that the campaigns really do know their demographics. Statistically, young voters are trending Democratic, and, as we all know by now, today's young voters are what are known as "digital natives." These plugged in, tech-savvy voters (also called "Generation Y") are now coming of age and many are eligible to vote for the first time. By marketing to this group of active technology users, the Obama campaign is hoping to motivate them to go out and vote. The recent launch of the official Obama iPhone app is just more proof of the campaign's efforts to actively engage this particular group of voters.

Many reports about Generation Y make note that they are known to be socially conscious and politically involved, but the election will likely be the first time we see if those generalizations are true. If Gen Y turns out the polls in great numbers, then they will have proven that they are indeed different than the other young generations of voters who preceded them. Typically an apathetic bunch when it comes to voting, young voters have not yet had the impact on U.S. elections that they could if they made the effort.

The Obama campaign seems to know that mobilizing these young voters may be as simple as interacting with them on the platforms they feel the most comfortable - the web, social networks, and their phone.

There are no major surprises in the reading lists of the two campaigns and it also needs to be noted that these are relatively small lists. John McCain's list is comprised of 26 feeds, while the Obama campaign only tracks 18 sources, including its own blog (and yes, somewhat predictably, McCain tracks Fox News and Obama the New York Times...). Overall, though, these reading lists are very conservative and mostly include the major, well known news organizations and large political blogs.

The setup of Power Readers in Politics is quite well done overall. Google completely avoids using any technical terms like RSS and OPML that might scare away users unfamiliar with feed reading. Instead, Google just offers users to subscribe to these reading lists in Google Reader. If this gets any traction, it might become a good way for Google to introduce more people to feed reading - but for that to happen, the campaigns will have to start sharing a bit more and may have to get a bit more adventurous in what items they share.

Yes. Is it cool, too, though? We think it is. This author signed up for the notification without a moment's hesitation. We learned about the announcement via the company blog of Kwiry, an SMS reminder service we've used in the past.

Will it Really Be First?

Surely there will be media trying to break the story before the official announcement. Will the public really find out first by SMS, as the campaign says? We'll be watching Memeorandum (the political sister site of TechMeme) as well and wonder where we'll find out first.

We expect that if many people do learn about the selection by SMS first, it will likely be an emotional moment that helps advance Obama's mindshare at the very least. Nothing is as immediate as SMS and we think it's a wise move politically to spend political capital like this, in a nod to the new generation of communicators.

Compare This to, Reportedly, The Next McCain Ad

From Politico.com, this apparently official McCain ad speaks for itself. This isn't for real, right?

In the red shorts will be Liz Mair, online communications director of the Republican National Committee. In the blue shorts will be Mike Nelson, a professor at Georgetown University who served in the Clinton White House under Vice President Gore on tech policy issues. When it comes to Twitter, both appear to be total noobs. Though the debate is scheduled to last for days, the fighters will probably be hoping for the "fail whale" (Twitter down time) after just a few hours.

The contest is a daring one for the campaigns to make an official entry into - but that's especially true for McCain. If you thought the fund raising race was lopsided, Obama's dominance on Twitter is even greater. His official account has an amazing 40k followers and friends. We haven't found an official McCain account on Twitter - but his campaign did suspend a staffer in March for posting a link on Twitter to a racially inflammatory now-pulled YouTube video criticizing Obama. McCain himself admits that he doesn't know how to use a computer (video at bottom of post) so don't expect him to be tweeting himself on topics like the neutrality of the tubes.

The Debate

The debate will be hosted by Time writer and former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox, who knows how to get a few thousand followers but is too good to follow back all but 30 of them. It's hard to know how well this crew will be able to use Twitter to discuss the issues.

Throw in a hashtag (#pdfdebate for the sponsoring Personal Democracy Forum) and you've got even less than 140 characters to make your points and ask your questions. You can follow the debate via this search results page but below we're displaying the last 10 tweets about it all, too, just to give you a taste of the flavor in the hours before things begin.

It's a great idea, but the technical challenges may be insurmountable. For a more fleshed out discussion of the topics, see also the threaded conversations that will emerge over on FriendFeed.

A Peek at The Discussion

The ten most recent Tweets about the debate are:

While it would be easy to look at McCain's blog as a runaway success because the posts routinely have thousands of comments (Obama's posts get hundreds of comments each, but the blog has a higher post volume), there is likely more to it than meets the eye.

A Harris Poll from earlier this year found that 56% of Americans never read political blogs, and just 22% read them several times per month or more. Interestingly, those over the age of 63 were the most likely to be readers of political blogs -- just 17-19% of Gen X and Gen Y (called "echo boomers" in the Harris Poll report) read political blogs.

That certainly explains why Obama has eschewed building a conversational blog while McCain has hired a well-known and experienced blogger -- Obama appeals to the specific demographic that doesn't read political blogs, while McCain appeals to the demographic more likely to subscribe to them. But could that speak to a larger trend in the blogosphere as a whole?

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any recent polling data on how many people are reading blogs. In 2005, comScore found that about 30% of American Internet users read blogs (PDF), though their study didn't really delve into how often people were reading blogs. Is that 30% who read them every day? Or 30% who have visited a blog in the past year? The study doesn't make that clear. Very likely, things have changed since 2005 -- when the comScore report was published, for example, TechCrunch -- now one of the world's largest blogs -- was only 2 months old.

However, if the Harris Poll data is at all representative of the mainstream public's reading habits toward blogs in general, things don't look particularly rosy. The Harris Poll found that of those who visit at least one political blog at least one time each week, 76% read under four of them -- a third read just one. So even though blog readership may be up, people are reading only a small number of blogs on a regular basis.

Further, 69% of political blog readers don't comment on blogs. That indicates that those thousands of comments on McCain's blog are coming from a small subset of political junkies who closely track the political blogosphere. And that makes sense anecdotally. I have a number of friends who are political and tech junkies and consume tens or hundreds of blogs daily and comment on them regularly. But I have an even greater number of friends who are average, mainstream web users. They may read blogs once in awhile -- but generally only in topics they are very interested in (i.e., even though they might be casually interested in politics, and read political news that pops up on their MyYahoo! page, or watch it on TV, they'd never think to read DailyKos or Little Green Footballs unless specifically pointed there).

Fellow ReadWriteWeb blogger Sarah Perez has observed the same thing with her friends, who might occasionally read an industry blog or visit ICanHasCheezBurger, but generally don't regularly consume blogs every day. So really, just how mainstream are blogs? If avid blog readers tend to be those who are deeply passionate about a subject, and if most of the mainstream's interactions with blogs are on a limited basis, it could be that blog reading is still a very niche activity. What do you see anecdotally from your non-geek friends? Do you know of any recent studies into blog readership that we've overlooked? Let us know in the comments.

Image via factoryjoe.

"This six-month opportunity will allow you to:

• Create software tools which will enable an unprecedented nationwide voter contact and mobilization effort
• Help build and run the largest online, grassroots fundraising operation in the history of American politics
• Introduce cutting-edge social networking and online organizing to the democratic process by empowering everyday people to participate on My.BarackObama"

Meanwhile John McCain's campaign has beefed up its own web presence. The Huffington Post recently reported that McCain's new website is now very similar to Obama's. The HuffPost's Sam Stein noted McCain's new "Obama-like slogan, and an image that seems uncannily similar to Obama's trademark campaign logo".

The Vanity Fair blog did a good analysis of the two websites. According to web entrepreneur and design expert Doug Jaeger, Obama has "the best design, in terms of typography, color, and website architecture." He also notes that "Obama has by far the most links under what he calls "Obama Everywhere." Links to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blackplanet, FaithBase, Digg, Twitter--he's doing it all. He's more Web 2.0 than some of the people I hang out with."

Barack Obama's official website

I agree that Obama's website is a tour de force of web magic, with seemingly every social networking base covered. I was also impressed at how the first page you're confronted with on Obama's site is a donation form! It's not done in an 'in your face' style either, there is a 'skip this page' link very clearly marked at the top of the page if you don't wish to donate.

McCain's new site is impressive too. Donations, calls to get involved, and social networking are features to the fore, and overall it is a clean and usable design. It does indeed seem to take inspiration from Obama's site, down to the "A leader we can believe in" motto!

John McCain's official website

In truth, both are great websites and packed full of useful features and excellent integration with 'real world' efforts - such as getting donations and spreading the word about their respective candidates.

Further ReadWriteWeb coverage of the US election relating to web tech:

• Is That Barack Obama in Your FriendFeed?
• Oh Boy Obama: User Generated Campaign Think Tank
• Another Way to Measure Electoral Clout: Watch the Widgets
• Web 2.0 Tools Favor Democrats
• The Birth of the Political Long Tail

That said, however, Obama has dominated the online discussion since day one. It would appear that when it comes to spreading his campaign message via widgets, there's no exception to the rule -- Obama widgets are far and away the most popular. (Though, note that the data on this graph is based on the candidate's most popular widget in the Widgetbox system, and not averaged across multiple widgets -- so it's really only good for looking at a general trend.)

We tried to match peaks and valleys in widget installs to news events to see if there was any correlation, which is really difficult with this data. It looks like Obama saw a growing number of installs in the run up to the Ohio and Texas primaries (entering which he'd won something like 11 or 12 contests in a row) -- then flat-lined for a month after he lost them. Clinton saw a modest bump after Super Tuesday in February where she scored huge wins in New York and California. Sen. John McCain saw a big dip the first week in March, which coincided with his becoming the presumptive nominee and President Bush's endorsement (we'll let you guess which might have turned people off his widget...).

But what's important about this data, is the trends. Starting with the Iowa caucuses just after New Year's, Barack Obama has seen his widgets spread steadily across the web. And even though his campaign does push the widgets on his site, 80-90% of new installs are coming via widgets embedded on non-official blogs -- they're coming from the grassroots rather than via the campaign itself. Clinton and McCain widgets are also being spread virally by supporters, though clearly not as fast. It does look like McCain supporters are doing a better job of embracing new web technologies than they were earlier in the election cycle, though -- the first McCain widgets appeared on Widgetbox in mid-February and have enjoyed mostly steady upward growth since.

This is really just another data point to watch to gauge which candidate has momentum. It's really quite amazing to look a things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and widgets to measure a US presidential election -- the last time around most of these tools didn't exist (or at least weren't nearly as important).

Who would do such a thing? It would appear to be conservative political blogger Patrick Ruffini, who last month wrote that he was squatting on both the Obama and McCain names on names via a Twitter update. Last night he cheekily wondered who the mystery squatter could be.

Ruffini is one of the most web-savvy people in politics (with people like him on the right, it is a wonder that they haven't yet figured out how to tap into the power of the web the way Obama or massive groups like MoveOn.org and blogs like HuffingtonPost have). During the Iowa caucuses earlier this year, Ruffini was the first to know about Obama's surprising victory. How? An ingenious use of Twitter. Ruffini used Facebook to recruit caucus goers and then had them tweet results from inside the caucus sites to a special Twitter feed that he watched for trends.

"Twitter is revolutionizing newsgathering and real citizen journalism. The crowd will know about it before the media knows about it," Ruffini told PBS MediaShift in March -- that's a sentiment we've echoed on RWW in the past. So it's not surprising that he would embrace FriendFeed as a way to easily aggregate all the data points from the various campaigns. With such an unprecedented use of social media going on during this election cycle, Ruffini's FriendFeed accounts will alert him of new media from the campaigns as soon as it's out there. Smart.

Interestingly, Spot Runner also just started offering political ads. The difference, though, is that while Spot Runner is targeting local elections -- making it easier for a person running for, say, a town council seat to run a television ad -- VoterVoter.com is talking national politics. The purpose of VoterVoter.com is for individuals to run ads supporting or attacking Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain -- who each have their own section in the site's ad library.

What's the point of paying to run an ad in support of your favorite candidate rather than just giving directly to the campaign? According to VoterVoter.com the reason is that you can get around the Federal Election Commission's $4,600 campaign donation cap per candidate. "Because you are not contributing to a campaign, but are making your own choice on how to spend your money, your independent expenditure is not limited," reads the site's FAQ.

Another reason, one that VoterVoter.com doesn't mention, is that by bypassing your candidate's official campaign, you're free to engage in dirty politics that candidates generally try to avoid. Anyone up for a little swiftboating?

As The Nation notes, MoveOn.org recently launched a pro-Barack Obama TV commercial contest, with the winning ad to be aired nationally. VoterVoter.com will allow any ad to find its way on the air -- which may not be a good thing. One one hand, it does put more power in the hands of the people to influence American politics, but on the other hand, it also makes it easier for partisan organizations to engage in smear campaigns, which is exactly the type of politics we should be working to eliminate, not encourage.

What do you think of VoterVoter.com? Does it add to the political process or make things worse? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The Obama campaign is using software from business intranet provider Central Desktop to manage "precinct captains" -- volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state. The campaign started using the software during the run up to an earlier nominating contest in California -- the nation's most populous state. "The Web-based collaboration platform combined with a strong organized grass-roots effort, created unprecedented public involvement that is revitalizing politics in America," said Patrick DeTemple, the California Data & Systems Manager for the Obama campaign. "Not since Bobby Kennedy has there been such an extensive Precinct Captain operation for a presidential candidate in California."

Central Desktop is a wiki-based collaboration tool that competes with 37Signals' Basecamp (to put it in some perspective). Though most users are business clients who utilize the software as a private intranet, the Obama campaign is using it to power a public facing wiki to organize information for precinct captains in Texas. According to Garcia, the campaign is using the software on their own without much input beyond basic support from Central Desktop -- or in other words, the campaign has been savvy enough to figure out how to utilize an existing tool for a completely new use case.

In fact, Garcia told me that Central Desktop was actually unaware that the campaign had planned to use their software for additional states following California until they noticed an influx of traffic on their servers going to the campaign's new Texas site. Further, according to Garcia, the idea to use collaboration software to manage precinct captains was actually something that bubbled up in the campaign from the grassroots volunteers who were out in the field.

That the Obama campaign is so tech savvy and so open to using social software is unsurprising. They have run one of the most comprehensive online campaigns in recent memory -- perhaps ever -- generally outperforming opponents on nearly every social network or social media site, and according to a recent post from Ning's Marc Andreesen, Obama has long been very interested in social networking and how it can affect politics.

The specific appeal of Central Desktop's wiki-based approach is that allows volunteers to shape the messaging and quickly collaborate with each other without the need to go through a webmaster. The Texas effort, some of which was cloned over from the previous California site, was literally launched a couple of weeks ago in mid-February.

In 2004, the Howard Dean campaign famously used Meetup.com to mobilize supporters. But Dean's use of Meetup was mostly about bringing supporters together to share a common experience. It was not so much a focused and organized campaigning effort, as Obama's use of Central Desktop's software has been. Garcia was hesitant to say for sure, but he thinks Obama's may be the first campaign to make heavy use of collaboration software to help manage on the ground organization (though, Mitt Romney and Ron Paul both utilized Salesforce.com in their campaigns).

Update: Jason Fried pinged us to let us know that the Obama campaign is actually using Basecamp as well. The new media team at the campaign's national headquarters in Chicago (where 37Signals is based), for example, used Basecamp to collaborate while building BarackObama.com. Basecamp is also being used by some parts of the campaign in New York City to manage events.

UPDATE: Also check out Keeping Tabs on Super Tuesday, our guide to following Super Tuesday via the Internet.

Looking over Obama's numbers, we see that an overwhelming amount of that $28 million was via small donations -- 90% under $100 each. 10,000 people gave between $5 and $10. That's a whole new paradigm for fundraising. Rather than chase $2,300 checks from a few hundred rich people at lavish fundraisers (okay, they still do that), campaigns can more easily focus on collecting thousands of smaller donations from regular people that add up to the same amount (or more).

Further, 10,000 donations under $10 means the email addresses of 10,000 people who can still give more money later. About half of Hilary Clinton's money came from "maxed out" voters compared to just about one third for Obama. That gives Obama a much larger pool of donors to hit up for more cash and to put on notice for get out the vote campaigns.

Though I am loathe to agree with Karl Rove, he's right about how the Internet is affecting campaign fundraising. "The Internet dramatically shortens the gap between political success and raising money," he wrote. "Today, if you do well in a debate on Tuesday night you can begin raising large sums of money Wednesday morning. Effective fundraising can be a mouse-click away."

That's something that nearly all of the campaigns are doing. Within hours after Obama's win in South Carolina, his campaign had dispatched emails to supporters pitching for donations. However, raising money doesn't win elections. "Raising the most amount of money by no means assures you of winning the presidential primary," says former chairman of the Federal Election Commission Michael Toner. And for Paul, money and online popularity hasn't translated into votes. For Obama, though, arguably his online success has had an impact at the polls.

The reason may be in get out the vote efforts of each party. Both Paul and Obama, with their anti-war stances and Internet savvy, are attractive to young voters. But only the Democrats are succeeding in getting young people to the voting booths. In Iowa, exit polls showed 40% of voters under the age of 44, and Obama killed in those demographics. On the Republican side, just 26% of voters were under 44. That picture was repeated in other early primary states.

Incidentally, this is also potentially the reason that Mike Huckabee has faded as well -- he appeals to young people with, as one South Carolina paper writes, "his celebrity supporters, preacher’s gift for humor and skill with an electric guitar."

The Democrats are succeeding with young people because they are targeting young people and they are using the Internet to successfully microtarget and rally their base. The Obama campaign, for example, uses sophisticated targeting tools that let them send specially tailored campaign materials to each voter. Firm supporters get a different email than those on the fence.

Other progressive organizations are using similar tools. One is called Catalist. It is used by large progressive organizations like MoveOn and the AFL-CIO to microtarget their campaigns. According to Tony DeYoung of Catalyst Resources (unrelated to Catalist -- Catalyst is a design firm that was contracted by Catalist to redesign the UI of their "Q-Tool" software), Catalist utilizes "on-demand data analysis services to help Democratics microtarget in their voter outreach efforts. Microtargeting uses sophisticated computer models regularly used in commercial marketing, which helps campaigns to locate sympathetic voters and target them with individually tailored messages on issues that are predicted to be most important to them."

This is the same technique the Republicans employed to great effect in 2004 to get out messages to conservative evangelical Christian voters -- who this election cycle don't have a clear cut favorite among the front runners. Which may explain why their get out the vote efforts aren't working as well this time around.

So while both Obama and Paul are running effective online campaigns, albeit in different ways, the get out the vote efforts of the Democrats, which target young people, play to Obama's strength. While strong turnout by voters over the age of 45 have played to John McCain on the Republican side.

Related: Keeping Tabs on Super Tuesday

The people who make Politweets, which I'd come across earlier in the day via The Social Times, also make Twittertale, another Twitter filter, which pulls out all the posts with naughty words. While Twittertale is fun, Politweets is actually useful. As my example from last night illustrates, the site clearly demonstrates Twitter's ability to disseminate newsworthy information quickly and effectively -- and in a conversation atmosphere.

Some sports leagues may be cracking down on live blogging, but as we have suggested, Twitter is going to become a more and more important way for people to report on news as they see it happen. Whether that is "Turn on the TV, something is happening!" or "The score is 87-84 with 23 seconds left," Twitter is becoming a useful tool for citizen journalism.

With a week until Nevada, the Twittersphere has turned its attention to discussing why Hillary won and Obama lost, and how Obama can regain his mojo. On the Republican side, everyone just seems to be trying to figure out who really is the front-runner. It's an interesting discussion to watch on both sides and has already led me to some articles on other sites that I'd likely have missed otherwise. For political junkies, Politweet will be a must monitor web-site on every primary date this season until we know who the candidates for the general election are.

The site also has a ranking of candidate popularity (based on how many times their name has been mentioned on Twitter). Surprisingly, Twitter seems to be one of the few places that Ron Paul isn't ulta-popular -- he is third among Republicans in terms of Twitter exposure.

We noted in August, that looking at YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook popularity predicted an eventual head-to-head between Ron Paul and Barack Obama. But in every national poll at the time, neither candidate came out on top. In November, the Compete "Candidate FaceTime" metric showed Paul and Mike Huckabee way out in front, with Obama and Hillary Clinton leading on the Democratic side. The national poll results still don't bear out the online popularity. National polls still have Clinton way ahead of Obama, and Paul in a distant sixth place.

We've speculated that one reason might be that much of the attention anti-war candidates like Obama and Paul are receiving is coming from overseas -- where anti-war and anti-Bush sentiment is generally greater than in the US. American politics are profoundly important across the globe, so people outside of the US pay attention, but though their votes in online straw polls and visits to candidate MySpace pages are counted, they cannot vote in US elections and are left out of local polling.

Yesterday, Hitwise released numbers showing which candidate's official web site was most popular among Iowans. That means these numbers can't be influenced by people from other countries -- this is the Internet election as predicted by the very people who caucus to start the process tonight.

Surprisingly, Iowa predicts wins for Barack Obama and Ron Paul -- both of whom received far more Internet visits from Iowa connected computers in the past month than their next closes rivals (Clinton and Huckabee, respectively). Hitwise is seeing similar results nationally (though with Paul and Huckabee ahead of Obama and Clinton). These results are in line with what the web has been telling us all year.

The latest polls out of Iowa, however, still disagree with what the web predicts. Real Clear Politics, which averages major polls to come up with a single number, shows a statistical dead heat in Iowa between Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards. On the Republican site, Huckabee and Mitt Romney are neck and neck, but Paul is sitting in 6th place, well out of contention.

So which is right? While Obama and Paul continue to rack up the wins online, the offline poll numbers show a tougher road to the White House for both. At this point, it's probably best to dispense with the predictions, and guesses, and analysis and wait to see who actually wins in the morning -- then we'll have a clearer picture of how much the Internet matters in campaign politics. At least until Tuesday, when we get to do it all over again in New Hampshire (where, incidentally, Hitwise shows John McCain and Mike Huckabee both leading Ron Paul, and the latest polls have McCain in the lead).

Image via: AAAS.