User:Chris L

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How Much of an Effect is the Internet Having on the 2008 Democratic elections?

There sure is a lot of hype over the internet’s influence on the 2008 election cycle. It all started on the web, of course, but now that the primaries are in full swing and the candidates are raising tens of millions of dollars a month via the web, the main stream media are also covering the internet campaigns.

In early 2007 Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry of PersonalDemocracy.com launched TechPresident.com, a blog with the following motivation: “The 2008 election will be the first where the Internet will play a central role, not only in terms of how the campaigns use technology, but also in how voter-generated content affects its course. TechPresident.com plans to track all these changes in real-time, covering everything from campaign websites, online advertising and email lists to the postings on YouTube and who's got the fastest growing group of friends on MySpace.” Their site has become one of my dearest resources for information regarding how the primaries are playing out on the social networking sites. Using their homepage, I can quickly see that Obama’s YouTube views are up 3.9% this week to 38,343,844, compared to Clinton’s 11,231,780.

In a March article from Fortune's Devin Leonard, Rishad Tobaccowala, a tech executive with Publicis, a big French ad company, noted several ways in which Obama was winning the net battle. On the list, “his web site is amazing. It's completely and continually updated. It feels alive and energetic. His campaign also actively uses e-mail to keep you totally informed.” Tobaccowala also referenced an Obama fundraising example, “They also created these challenges - when Clinton donated $5 million to her campaign, the Obama campaign sent out a note saying we have to match this quickly. In 24 hours, people donated $8 million to Obama.”

In another March article in the NY Times, media journalist Brian Stelter wrote about Barack Obama’s video response to President Bush’s State of the Union saying it “elicited little attention from newspaper and television reporters in January. But on the medium it was made for, the Internet, the video caught fire. Quickly after it was posted on YouTube, it appeared on the video-sharing site’s most popular list and Google’s most blogged list. It has been viewed more than 1.3 million times, been linked by more than 500 blogs and distributed widely on social networking sites like Facebook.”

Compete.com is a great source for tracking the kind of web action Stelter was referring to. A recent post by blogger Matt Pace says the race isn’t even close when measured by FaceTime, Compete’s “holistic measure of web-wide candidate engagement based on the total amount of time voters spend with candidates across the leading social networks and video sharing websites.” According to Compete Obama dominates the FaceTime battle by more than a 4 to 1 margin. They also note that Obama raised about twice as much as Clinton in March. Based on the $40MM and $20MM figures used, though, it does not appear they were able to separate funds raised on the web from other sources. Showing that Obama leads Clinton in visits to the respective campaign websites Pace concludes “Don’t believe the media hype, this race really isn’t really that close.

If you live on the web, or spend a significant amount of time there, it sure does look like new media has created a seismic shift in political campaigns. And it looks like Barack Obama is capitalizing on that shift more than any other candidate. But, are some of us getting just a little irrationally exuberant? Are internet proponents so caught up in online happenings that we overestimate the web’s impact on non-virtual life? Sure Obama Girl has 10 gazillion views, and there are hundreds of videos of various Obama speeches on YouTube; sure Obama has 766,923 Facebook supporters and 345,443 MySpace friends, but do MySpace friends win elections. Let’s face it though; all of those Facebook and MySpace supporters combined only add up to a very small percentage of the votes it will take to win in November.

Approximately 121 million Americans voted in the 2004 general election. George Bush won by about 3 million votes. If all else stays equal, (Of course it’s not, I’m just using some generalities to make a point. Stick with me.) Democrats need to capture roughly 4 million more votes this time around. Is the millennial generation, the primary cohort of net denizens, enough to put Obama over the edge in the primaries (I include caucuses under the label of “primary” here.) and in Nov.? Are there enough of them? And more importantly, are they just creating and passing around videos, or are they going to the polls too?

To find out I first went to see how many “young voters” there are. According to a project at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management called Youth Voter Strategies there are currently about 50 million 18-31 year olds in the U.S.* According to U.S. Census data 18-29 years olds accounted for 16.8% of the population in 2006. With a total population of just below 300 million at that time, the 50 million GW figure appears accurate. But are they all voting?

In a recent Politico.com post blogger David Mark surveyed election turnout at the primaries and came to the conclusion that we could be looking at a “turnout tsunami” in November. He notes that “On Super Tuesday alone, turnout records were set in 15 states where both parties held Feb. 5 primaries. Twelve states saw record-breaking Democratic turnout while 11 set Republican turnout records.” Citing the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, Mark writes “Many state and local election officials expect turnout in the Nov. 4 presidential election to exceed that of 2004, when voter turnout hit 61 percent which was the highest level since 1968.” Regarding the youth vote, the CSAE report on the 2004 election results said “While there are no reliable figures on the much-publicized youth turnout (exit polls are notoriously and consistently unreliable on turnout questions), it is likely that college-attending youth substantially increased their turnout rate in the states in which they were targeted – the battleground states. It is also probable that college-attending youth increased their turnout much more modestly in non-battleground states. But it is likely that there were no increases in turnout of non-college-attending youth who were largely not targeted.” According to the same report battleground states had a 6.3% increase in turnout while the nationwide increase was 5.3%. Notwithstanding CSAE’s claim regarding unreliable figures, the above mentioned Youth Voter Strategies group at GW, in a May 2006 press release, found that “in 2004 turnout among 18-24 year-olds voters increased an unprecedented 11 percentage points over 2000 levels (US. Census), compared to a four point increase among all voters.” It has been widely reported that youth turnout this cycle is surpassing 2004.

A January 31 Time article titled The Year of the Youth Vote used Obama to illustrate increased youth turnout: “Combining digital-age technology with old-fashioned shoe leather, the Illinois Senator first rallied Iowa students to cancel Clinton's cakewalk. While enthusiastic Democrats of all ages produced a 90% increase in turnout for the first caucuses, the number of young voters was up half again as much: 135%. The kids preferred Obama over the next-closest competitor by more than 4 to 1. The youngest slice the under-25 set, typically among the most elusive voters in all of politics gave Obama a net gain of some 17,000 votes. He won by just under 20,000.”

So there are 50 million of them (please read “us” here, if applicable) and they/we are certainly turning out in larger numbers this cycle. At this point, though, it is hard to tell exactly how much of an increase there has been in 2008. If the Iowa example above stayed true for all states, the race would already be over.

It does seem clear that Obama is winning the younger vote. According to CNN exit polls, for instance, even in a state that Clinton won, like Ohio, Obama carried the 17-29 group by a 26 point margin. Likewise New Jersey, which went for Clinton overall, gave Obama a 20 point victory in the 18-29 age group. But is this enough to carry him to victory? I’ll stick with the Ohio example for the moment. Using U.S. Census data from 2000, the last comprehensive data set, we see that there are about 2 million millennials (defined as age 17-29 in this case) in Ohio. They make up about 17.25% of the state’s population. According to the CNN exit polls just under 350,000 of them voted in the democratic primary. That is just under 18% of the cohort. (Ohio was a pivotal primary state for democrats. Interest was extremely high on their side. The nationwide turnout average for this cohort so far is in the 12% range - based on my calculations using the CNN poll figures.) Whether that is a few percentage points more than turned out in 2004 or not, the number doesn’t seem substantial enough for us to declare that the youth vote has emerged as the deciding factor in this primary, or in November.

Based on the CNN numbers Obama received approximately 213,434 youth votes in Ohio. Let’s say that is a healthy 20% increase over the 2004 turnout. If there are 50 million millennials and we assume 95% of them are voter eligible (take out non-citizens and some felons), we get 47,500,000 potential young voters. If Democrats, as previously noted, need 4 million votes above and beyond 2004, and if those votes are to come from millennials, (the supposition I make if we are to attribute the increase to the internet and social networking) then they need an additional 8.4% of the total eligible cohort. We are not talking about an 8% increase in youth turnout over 2004, this is big numbers. Let’s go back to Ohio. The Ohio cohort is currently about 2 million strong. An increase of 8.4% requires 168,000 new voters. Forget about increases over 2004 numbers. That is a 48% jump from the little less than 350,000 that voted this March. And remember, this was a high turnout state.

Now I understand there is quite a bit of assumption wrapped up in this analysis. Things are different now. The President’s approval rating is at historic lows. People are unhappy with the situation in Iraq and with the economy. The Democrats can likely expect a little bump in support this time around even without a whole new crop of voters. Additionally, new Democratic support could easily come from voters above 30 years old. (In all this discussion of Obama and young voters, it should be noted that Clinton crushes him in the senior cohort. She has huge margins of victory among voters aged 65 and up in virtually every democratic primary so far.) But nobody has dubbed this “The Year of the Senior Vote” or “The Year of the Anti-Bush Vote.” It is “The Year of the Youth Vote,” the year of the first “Tech President,” the “YouTube election.” So I thought it important to see if the youth vote specifically, driven by new technology, would be the deciding factor in 2008. It is a contributing factor, yes, and an important one. But I think it premature and unwise to delude ourselves into believing that Facebook and YouTube will decide who our next President is. If they were going to we would already have a Democratic nominee. . So voter turnout is up this year, particularly among millennials, and indications are this will continue into the general election. They may not be creating the landslide some are trying to conjure up but young voters are definitely getting involved. Of those, a majority favor Senator Obama. Why? Well for starters, he’s 46. Clinton is 60. (McCain, if elected, will be oldest incoming President in history at 72.) But even though age helps young voters feel more connected to Obama, the real connection is in how his campaign has engaged them.

As various politicos have noted this year, the traditional campaign is a top-down enterprise. The candidate creates ads and messages and releases them to the “media” in the hope that they will get a lot of attention. The candidate does things to try and attract positive attention while attempting to draw attention to opponent’s missteps. This attention equates to television and newspaper coverage. The transformation Obama in enacting is a move to bottom-up content generation. His campaign is truly a “grassroots” movement. Instead of just creating and then broadcasting his message in the hopes of garnering attention, Obama has gone to the voter. He is campaigning where the voter is. Instead of hoping to grab their attention he has walked into their lives. We used to say that so and so TV personality came “into your living room.” Obama has come into our offices, our dorms, our kitchens and our bedrooms via our PCs.

A big portion of this is being accomplished by simply enabling and encouraging people to become advocates. This is one of the most profound changes in campaigning brought on by the net. We talk about raising money $100 at a time and that is indeed powerful. But think how many millions of $ worth of advertising Obama has gotten without spending anything. He did absolutely nothing for “Yes We Can” (if you discount the speech which inspired the video) yet the video has more than 12 million YouTube views, its own website, a Wikipedia page and received significant coverage in the main stream media. It may be difficult to measure this kind of thing in terms of votes but there is no question that it is influencing the debate. More people are engaged because of it. This engagement is rooted in the nature of viral networking. Millennials are net denizens; they are linked to and often emotionally dependent upon extended networks of friends. They access that network physically and digitally. If their friends are interested in a particular candidate, they are going to get lots of information about that candidate whether they like it or not. Not necessarily because their friends make a point of talking up the candidate all the time, which they may or may not do, but because the net allows their friends to link and forward copious amounts of candidate info - press releases, news coverage, commercials, Twitters, homemade videos etc. – with only a couple clicks on a mouse or an IPhone. In the above mentioned Brian Stelter article, Jane Buckingham, a market research executive, is quoted regarding a college student who attended one of her focus groups. Addressing the fact that youth are in constant contact nowadays, the student said “If the news is that important, it will find me.”

Whether or not Senator Obama ascends to the White House, the effects of his tech-savvy campaign will be widespread. Regarding the candidate’s speech on race relations the night before, TechPresident’s March 19 email round-up said, “The video of Obama’s 37-minute-long speech has been watched nearly a million times in less than twenty-four hours. Add the ability to get the YouTube generation to watch a 30+ minute political speech on their computer -- YouTube only counts full viewings as a "view" -- to the list of Obama’s accomplishments.”

The impact of the 2008 campaign goes beyond the youth vote also. In response to recent criticism of Obama regarding his comments about “bitter” Pennsylvanians, supporters quickly set up BitterVoters.org to admit they are bitter and show that is part of the reason they wholeheartedly support Obama. The site includes testimonial posts from admittedly bitter voters and a YouTube video clip of a 2004 Obama interview with Charlie Rose that sheds light on the reasoning behind the senator’s recent comment.

Bittergate, as some are now calling it, is the perfect example of the net’s other (as in, besides mobilizing the youth vote) effect on this election. The story originally broke in a 6:43am post this past Friday at Off the Bus, the political blog section of the Huffington Post. The post was written by Mayhill Fowler, Obama supporter and regular Off the Bus contributor, a citizen journalist. By 9am Sunday morning Clinton had responded, Obama had done a little backtracking and Tim Russert and company were debating the comment on Meet the Press. This is the power of new media and viral networks. We are watching this power evolve on an almost daily basis now. This is the first big story of this campaign, as far as I know, that was not about internet activity per se but broke on the net. We are going to see more and more of this. News stories generated by main stream media currently dictate most of the content in the blogosphere and on YouTube. Fowler’s post may be evidence that the tide is shifting the other way. The shift toward a situation where more newsworthy content is generated on the web was already underway before 2008. The huge interest in this election cycle, however, is catapulting this process forward and I’m starting to get the feeling that the news cycle as we know it today may not even exist by November 5, 2008.



Following are a couple other relevant links that didn’t make it into the paper above:

1) Obama’s November 2007 YouTube interview talking about his innovation platform http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1MGi12RspA 2) Obama girl’s “I got a crushon Obama” hit. The one that started it all. There are several now and BarelyPolitical.com is probably working on another one right now. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKsoXHYICqU

3) A good summary of turnout for the 2008 cycle thus far from The United States Elections Project at George Mason University http://elections.gmu.edu/Voter_Turnout_2008_Primaries.htm

4) An informative paper on the youth vote from The Century Foundation http://www.tcf.org/publications/electionreform/youthvote.pdf

5) Washington Post graphic showing how much more Obama spent on the web in January & February 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2008/03/28/GR2008032800293.html

--Chris L 17:42, 15 April 2008 (EDT)

Following is something else I thought was interesting and applied somewhat to a question asked in class about "disenfranchised" youth voters.

A 2004 article by the folks at workplace consultancy “The Learning Café” compared Gen X’ers and Millennials. The list below was part of their work and offers, I think, some pretty good insight into why the youth voter movement is more active today. Note that they optimistic, connected, confident and friend oriented. They are immersed in causes and idealistic about their ability to affect positive change in the world. Considering these traits, you can see how the viral nature of an internet-focused campaign could attract such attention and allegiance from this cohort. Obama responds to issues they care about in a medium that is their own.

Generation X - Born 1965-1976, 51 million, Accept diversity, Pragmatic/practical, Self-reliant/individualistic, Reject rules, Killer life, Mistrust institutions, PC, Use Technology, Multitask, Latch-key kids, Friends - not family

Millennials - Born 1977 – 1998, 75 million, Celebrate diversity, Optimistic/realistic, Self-inventive/individualistic, Rewrite the rules, Killer lifestyle, Irrelevance of institutions, Internet, Assume Technology, Multitask fast, Nurtured, Friends = Family


--Chris L 18:21, 15 April 2008 (EDT)

A point about political consultants and the web that did not make into the paper:

Chris Borick, a pollster and political science professor at Muhlenberg College’s Institute of Public Opinion, recently told me that the vast majority of all the political consultants he knows still view the internet as a fringe part of campaigning. He specifically mentioned the fact that they drive only a small portion of the budgets to online ads. Blog queen Arianna Huffington echoed that sentiment at a recent NYU panel discussion when she stated “we’ll never fully see the power of the internet in politics until the current generation of consultants retires because they are not really comfortable with the internet.” She also mentioned the fact that most fundraising still goes to support 30 sec. TV ads. Following that Jeff Jarvis, panel moderator and journalism professor at CUNY, noted that Obama spent $1MM in January on Google but Clinton spent about $100k. (Watch the panel discussion titled “New Media & the 2008 Elections” at GroundReport.com.) See this Washington Post chart depicting January & February web expenditures by the Democratic candidates.


--Chris L 18:33, 15 April 2008 (EDT)

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