Remember when blogs were the New Thing that was changing politics? In case there’s any confusion, those days, from the Precambrian era of online politics know as Before YouTube, are over.
How presidential candidates are using the Internet to promote themselves--and whether it will work--is one of the hottest political stories this year. And there’s a lot to talk about. In this season of online brinkmanship, where each of the 19 candidates is loading websites with the newest features to stay ahead of the game, there is no shortage of stuff out there to write about.
To that end, a report out today from the Project for Excellence in Journalism has some useful stats on how the official campaign websites measure up with one another, feature by feature, and what role they are and are not playing in the candidate’s effort. They surveyed the 19 official sites of declared candidates, including Republican John Cox, who polls so low that he doesn’t even get invited to the debates, and found that many of the features that we thought of as novel even recently are now commonplace.
The campaigns, the report found, are producing a lot of original content for their websites, from frequent blog posts to detailed biographies and policy statements. (Dennis Kucinich had 81 detailed issues when the PEJ compared all the sites in June.) This may seem very “Web 1.0”--the old way of doing things, when the Internet was a one-way street from the campaign to the users--but with a nearly infinite amount of information out there about the campaign from hundreds of different sources, the campaigns clearly want to tell their side of the story loud and clear.
Of course, there’s also plenty of the new-fangled stuff. Seven candidates host citizen-created blogs on their sites, allowing volunteers to contribute their own content, and eight encouraged supporters to organize their own fundraising events.
Of the six criteria for user interaction that the project measured, only Democrat Barack Obama provided all of them. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson each had five of the six, which included categories like social networking platforms and voter registration information.
But if someone were to wake up today from a long coma and view each of the sites with no knowledge of polls, the report indicates that he or she would leave with very little sense of who is actually winning at this early stage. While the more popular candidates with more money tend to have more sophisticated websites, providing some clue to their success as a candidate, there is virtually no discussion of their opponents or responses to criticism anywhere on their site.
This is not particularly surprising, as PEJ Deputy Director Amy Mitchell points out. The websites are an extension of the campaign, and it’s still early enough that many candidates are fighting for name recognition, not attacking their competitors.
“There’s not even a comparison section to say, here’s where I stand and here’s where my opponent stands,” Mitchell says. “Part of this may have a lot to do with where we are in the campaign. As the race gets closer, as candidates start seeing who they need to attract, there may be more of that.”
The report also measured word frequency in official campaign material online, such as biographies, and found that some traditionally powerful words like “faith” don’t appear very often. Those results and discussion are here. (U.S. News did something similar with the debate transcripts.)
--Chris Wilson
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