Posted on 08/13/2007 12:19:41 PM PDT by kristinn
Is there any chance of the Republicans catching up to the Democrats online in 2008? From any angle, the picture looks rosy if you're a Democrat and bleak if you're a Republican.
-- According to Hitwise.com, which tracks the surfing behavior of 10 million Americans across 1 million sites, online interest in the Democrats is way ahead of the Republicans. For example, for the week ended Aug. 4, the Democrats drew a whopping 66 percent of all the traffic to candidate websites.
-- In terms of donations online, the Democratic field reports raising more than $28 million, versus about $9.4 million for the Republicans. While we don't think you can meaningfully separate online donations from the rest anymore, even the reported differences are stark. Overall, the Democratic field has outraised the Republicans by $180 million to $117 million in the first half of 2007.
-- The number of small (under $200) donors to the Democratic field, 94,833, is 50 percent greater than the Republicans' 63,248, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics [ ].
-- On the big social networking sites MySpace.com and Facebook.com, the Democratic field has accumulated more than 611,000 friends, compared to about 219,000 for the Republicans, according to our techPresident tracking tools.
-- Interest in online messaging from the Democrats is also clearly higher when you look at how many times their videos have been viewed on YouTube.com: nearly 9 million times, compared to 7.3 million for the Republican field (of which, it's worth noting, nearly 3 million views were of Ron Paul's videos).
These kinds of numbers are starting to stir a spirited debate among Republican activists about whether their party is not only on a path to losing the 2008 election but also headed toward a longer period of second-class status as the online arena becomes more important to politics.
They look at the YearlyKos convention in Chicago, which brought together some 1,500 Netroots Democrats the first weekend in August, and wonder, "Where's our YearlyKos?"
Some Republicans clearly think all these dynamics will change in their favor once the primary battles are over and the Democrats nominate front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, the right's bête noire.
Indeed, Sen. Clinton does generate nearly as much mobilization on the online right as President Bush does on the left; for example, the biggest Stop Hillary group on Facebook now has more than 358,000 members, more than the so-called "Million Strong" group for Barack Obama.
But Patrick Ruffini, the former e-campaign director for the Republican National Committee (and briefly an adviser to the Rudy Giuliani campaign), argues that there's a deeper problem on the Republican side of the online equation.
He notes that conservatives don't lack for their own YearlyKos, as thousands of right-wingers have been gathering for years at the annual CPAC conference. And he argues that in sheer traffic terms, sites like the Drudge Report and Free Republic still outdraw their left-wing competitors – which is true.
To Ruffini, the Republican problem online is rooted in an older culture that has stopped innovating and has failed to embrace the sort of cooperative networking practices and freewheeling activism that collectively has produced so much new energy on the Democratic side.
"Drudge has made clear he disdains blogs," Ruffini writes on his blog. "The site looks the same as it did in 1997. … There is no interactivity on Drudge. You go there, read, refresh, and that's it." As for Free Republic, Ruffini points to a whole set of things the site’s owners have done that have stifled the formation of a vibrant community.
"The founders made the decision that they were going to hoard as much traffic on their servers as possible. … Early on, links to blogs were verboten. If you expressed your own opinion when starting a thread, that was a 'vanity' and it was frowned upon. And fundraising for candidates was strictly forbidden, except for those pet causes approved by [the site's owner]. … What lessons did our activists learn from this? Freepers, who were our best online activists, never learned how to swarm to other sites, to take different kinds of actions and to raise money for conservative candidates."
What all this means is it’s highly unlikely Republicans are going to turn the tide online – not until they wean themselves off their top-down habits and start using the Web more to foster community and collaboration.
Right now, we don't see much sign of this happening (except among supporters of Ron Paul) – but we know plenty of Republicans who are watching how well the Democrats are doing this cycle, taking notes and making plans.
Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry are, respectively, the founder and editor of Personal Democracy Forum, a daily website and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.
Free Republic and Drudge are, after all, not part of the Republican party ~ but DailyKos is definitely the mouthpiece for the Nazis. Democrats affiliate with that steaming P-S at their own risk.
We do?
Uh-huh - stopped right there.
Links to blogs are NOT verboten. However, to keep FR from getting overwhelmed by blob pimps, blog links are not mixed in with news.
The discouragement of vanity posts also serves to keep FRs signal to noise ratio well above that of other sites.
Put up an online poll, stand back, and THEN say that, punk.
Well you can thank all the Rudy Giuliani people for driving dozens of otherwise good conservatives away from FR to other sites.
Too funny. Ruffini is still trying to get the license plate of the truck that ran over him, and then went around the block and creamed him again. Both Rudy and the RNC got taken to the woodshed by the grassroots over their liberalism and support of shamnesty.
I never knew that FR was a Republican site. I knew that Kos was a Democrat site though.
The GOP was at some point offering a 30% bounty to sites who drummed up donations for the party. I don’t know if that is still so. If it isn’t, I guess it didn’t work out so well.
Yeah, all FR is is the most up-to-date and comprehensive news digest the world has ever seen. This site makes Drudge redundant. The author fails to ‘get’ that keeping opinion under control is what makes this site. Not that there aren’t ample opportunities for opinions to be shared. In fact, I’d say that people look at this site and miss the news dissemination in favor of the opinion. But this is how news is going to work when the titans crumble.
Yes, exactly, and what does “cooperative networking practices and freewheeling activism” mean, exactly? Do I hear chickens running around with their heads cut off?
Most of these statistics just show that democrats have a much larger base of basement loser-types who spend all their time surfing the web, making changes to their facebook entries, and pretending that the internet is a rational replacement for a real life.
Meanwhile, republicans mostly have jobs and see the internet as a tool, not as a “community” where they live.
So I use FR to get news stories and commentary on those stories, a typical liberal uses the internet to get “me-to” esteem points from other clueless liberals.
They also don’t ‘get’ that FR is the arch-enemy of the RINO republicans.
My response to Mr Ruffini can be found here:
http://www.townhall.com/blog/g/9219ea7e-9210-4789-81aa-467505597a5b?comments=true#comments
Go to the very last commnent by Collins (that’s me)
What a yutz!
Who needs to go to a candidates political web site? All I have to do is goto FreeRepublic to get the info I need.
We have several notches in our belt. When we get busy we can move mountains, and we have. I believe that the first GOE outnumbered their antiwar protest by about five times, for instance.
Exactly, which is why rino’s and folks who are rino’s and panderers don’t like us.
drudge swamps kos, freerepublic is slightly behind. alexa.com isnt the most reliable but it gives a general idea of internet traffic rankings.
Who would send hard-earned money to a Lindsey Graham?
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