I started reading blogs at a time when Republican blogs like Powerline and RedState were ascendent and liberal blogs weren’t much bigger than DailyKos, MyDD, and Atrios. Ignore for a moment the fact that those five blogs remain on every list of influential blogs. In 2003 and 2004 right wing blogs were the story. They had the power. They influenced the news. They helped beat John Kerry and cost Dan Rather his job. In so doing, they reelected a president with mediocre poll numbers who was presiding over a war launched on false pretexts. I cannot understand the grandeur of that achievement.

Now, however, it is liberal blogs that are ascendent and have been that way since the aftermath of the 2004 election. As a result of two plus years of blogospheric dominance, Democratic candidates have been forced to develop sophisticated and constantly evolving online communications strategies that engage blogs, as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Advanced, sincere efforts to talk with the netroots is prerequisite for Democratic candidates to gain support from the progressive base.

This article by Micah Sifry of the non-partisan Personal Democracy Forum makes clear that the Republican presidential field is light years behind the Democratic field when it comes to e-organizing.

[I]n order to do an apples-to-apples comparison that would track with the post I did on the Democratic presidentials online [Ed. Link], I focused again solely on these four indications of organic grass-roots enthusiasm: the number of friends each candidate has on their MySpace page; the number of wall posts people have left on their Facebook page; the number of incoming blog links to their website as measured by Technorati; and the number of photos of them posted to Flickr.

And here’s the problem with reading too much into these results: By and large, none of the Republican presidential candidates appear to be making a serious effort to garner support online through MySpace or Facebook; nor do they appear to have much outreach to blogs going; nor do any of them have a clue about Flickr. In fact, while several of the Democratic sites have front page links to many of those sites (and others), I don’t think I saw one on any Republican site. Is entrepreneurial behavior dead in the Republican party?
…
No, the only conclusion I have is that right now, on top of relative cluelessness on the part of the Republican presidential campaigns about the value of engaging the big social network sites (c’mon guys, think of your MySpace and Facebook pages as booths at the state fair!), the Republican field just isn’t generating as much enthusiasm online as the Democrats.

Sifry’s article gives a much clearer picture than this excerpt provides, but his conclusions are based on solid numerical comparisons of the metrics he lists above. There just isn’t the same volume of online support for top-tier (or even third-tier) Republican presidential candidates as there is for Democratic candidates.

I’ll be very interested to see the Republican e-organizing deficit persists over the course of the campaign or if Republican candidates are able to gear up their online operations to become competitive with Democrats.

Technorati Tags: 2008 Presidential election, Micah Sifry, online organizing

Posted by Matt Browner Hamlin
Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 11:34 pm

1 Response to “Republican Contenders Failing To Organize Online”

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