The Center for American Progress is doing a great job tracking the 2008 presidential eCampaigns. Check out this page. One the most helpful pieces is the profiling of each major party candidate's online presence, including a link to each campaign's official profile on third party web communities such as Facebook and Myspace. This is especially important, because the open design of many of these sites allows for an explosion of profiles that are not managed by the campaign, which could easily lead to confusion or worse as the election cycle progresses.
Their page includes an index that shows the extent of each candidate's online presence, so readers can see how extensively a candidate is using third party resources. The index is sortable by category. If you sort by party, one pattern is clear: Democrats are engaging the social Web, and Republicans really aren't, beyond managing their own official Web site.
As far as I can see, this discrepancy leads to three possible conclusions. First and easiest is the possibility that Rightwingers are somehow hopelessly out of touch. Second, one can assume that there has been at least some investment from the right wing power structure in analyzing political opportunities on the Web, and some group of consultants have convinced the leadership that the Web belongs to the Left, that their base may use the Web for information gathering, but not to collaborate and organize, as is becoming common of the Left.
The third conclusion is a little more alarming. Is it possible that after considerable research and analysis, the consultocracy of the right has quietly determined that the Net will not pay a major role in determining the outcome of the 2008 election, despite the buzz that the Web will have an important impact? If this is the case, the leadership will continue to direct their capital towards the traditional brew of TV (and probably Web) ads, direct mail, phone banking and door-to-door canvassing. If this is the case, should organizers on the Left pause in their enthusiasm to rethink their own investments in the Web and social media, at least briefly?
All of this is speculative and sets aside important considerations, such as the lack of a powerhouse candidate for the GOP. I'll keep thinking about it, and if anyone is reading and has any perspective or resource that may help to answer these questions, please chime in.
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About Me
- Nathaniel James
- Washington, DC, United States
- In my professional life, I'm the Campaign Coordinator at the Media and Democracy Coalition. Beyond my commitment to advancing the values of justice and democracy in the media sphere through policy change and advancing community media, I have an intense interest in the social structure and process of intra and inter-organizational collaboration; social networks and social network analysis; network theory; complex systems; and emergent phenomenon. The views expressed here are my own and don't reflect the positions of any organizational entity.