Last week, comedian Stephen Colbert announced his intention to run in both the Republican and Democratic primaries, only in his native state of South Carolina. Colbert instructed faithful fans in the state to organize a petition seeking enough signatures to be on the ballot next year.
Yesterday, he appeared on NBC News’ Meet the Press with Tim Russert and let the cat out of the bag that his goal is really to obtain at least one delegate at either convention.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza looks at national polling with Stephen Colbert’s name with both parties. Not surprisingly, Colbert performs much better among Democrats than Republicans. On the Democratic ticket, Colbert received 2.7 percent of the vote, good enough to be ahead of Senator Joe Biden, Governor Bill Richardson, Representative Dennis Kucinich and former Senator Mike Gravel.
He was less lucky in the Republican field, where he took less than 1 percent of the vote behind even longshot candidates like Reps. Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani led the Republican field with 29 percent, followed by former Gov. Mitt Romney at 12 percent, former Sen. Fred Thompson (11 percent) and Sen. John McCain (10 percent).
Joshua Green of The Atlantic dissected the potential army of Colbert supporters in South Carolina.
Colbert’s viewers tend to be young, white, educated, and male. Their median age is 37 and there’s a 60/40 male-female split. So far this year, he’s drawn a nightly audience that averages 1.3 million viewers nationwide, 874,000 of them in the 18-49 year-old demographic. (Research leaked to me by Will Feltus, a national ad buyer, shows that Colbert’s viewers are the same demographic targeted by beer marketers: men ages 18 to 34 who are “above-average consumers of adult beverages.”) How many of them live in South Carolina? The U.S. Census bureau says South Carolina has about 1.4 percent of the nation’s population, which would suggest that Colbert has about 12,200 viewers there. [...]
Good sport that he is, Graham crunched the numbers anyway. About 2.4 million people voted in the last presidential election, only a fraction of whom will vote in the primaries. Graham estimated that about 600,000 will turn out for the Republican primary and about 350,000 for the Democratic primary. Colbert’s focus is on younger voters. Graham made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that 260,000 people between the ages of 18 and 44 will vote in both primaries: 169,000 in the Republican primary and 91,000 in the Democratic primary. That’s Colbert’s target.
2 Responses to “The Stephen Colbert Effect”
Sorry about that. It truly was funnier with Colbert beating Biden. I kinda like Richardson.
Something to say?
Biden actually beat Colbert. Colbert beat Richardson though.
Left by Noah
October 22, 2007 at 7:33pm