Rock the Vote September 1, 2008
Posted by skmak in Uncategorized.Tags: Election 2008, Facebook, MySpace, Voters
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The Rock the Vote website says that there are 44 million eligible young voters for this year’s election. In 2004, 20.1 million voters between the ages of 18 and 29 years old turned out to vote.
Candidates John McCain and Barack Obama are using social media to appeal to a larger demographic. Both have launched Facebook and MySpace pages, as well as Facebook applications. McCain and Obama have also each launched their own social community sites – my.barackobama.com and mccainspace.com. Many people question why they would launch their own communities when Facebook and MySpace exist, but I’m sure they did so to 1) collect more information about their community users and 2) better control the messaging and format of the site.
The interesting question is whether the online “friends” of these candidates are any indication of how the election will turn out in November. Here is a few stats (as of September 1, 2008):
- Barack Obama has 1,511,638 Facebook supporters
- John McCain has 256,138 Facebook supporters
- Obama’s Facebook application (Barack Obama Supporters) has 19,975 active monthly users
- McCain’s Facebook application (McCain: Get Involved) has 1,324 active monthly users
- Obama has 488,838 MySpace friends
- McCain has 72,323 MySpace friends
These numbers are changing by the hour – especially now that both candidates have announced their running mates.
What do you think? Are these any indication of future votes?
A very interesting perspective on how things are evolving in cyberspace, presumably all tracing their origins back to the success Howard Dean had utilizing the internet… Still, despite all the added connectivity and reaching out to the populace, the candidates seemingly leave more and more to be desired.
For whatever it’s worth, I stumbled upon a political cartoon/graphic, compliments of Cafe Press, that you might find amusing.
http://www.cafepress.com/usa21stcentury
Is it a safe bet that more Democrats are more technologically tuned in? Is it a safe bet that older, dyed-in-the-wool Republicans barely use the Internet?
My hunch is that the numbers may be indicative of votes for Obama. However, there are likely to be many votes for McCain that are not represented in these numbers, because a greater number of those voters do not either know about or care about social networking.