So Far, GOP Candidates Shun the Web

The Center for American Progress has a nice page tracking the web presence of presidential candidates of the two major parties. NetTrends '08: The Online Race for the White House tracks which candidates have a website, blog, posts on YouTube and Flickr, and pages on Facebook and MySpace.

Democrats definitely have the edge here. Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson hit all six, with Tom Vilsack having all but the blog. Of the current frontrunners of both parties (Clinton, Obama, McCain, and Giuliani), Hillary Clinton comes out on top with a website, blog, and YouTube posts. Barack Obama has the website and YouTube posts but, surprisingly (to me at least) no blog.

Republicans aren't going for this whole newfangled web thing, though. No GOP candidate has anything other than a website and one -- Jim Gilmore -- doesn't even have that. Meanwhile, no dem candidate has a website alone.

So what's it mean? Who knows? Howard Dean famously used Meetup.com to do grassroots organizing and, despite his eventual burn out, it's widely considered the first interactive web effort by a presidential candidate. In terms of web organizing on the cheap, Dean broke ground.

Other ideas seem more questionable. In the last election, YouTube posts were extremely important, but in every case I can think of, they were used to hurt candidates (smile and say "Macaca," Senator), not help them. It's hard to imagine how a MySpace or Facebook entry would be real helpful, but you never know. Flickr, on the other hand, might be a real nice way to save a little campaign cash on bandwidth and put out promo photos supporters can use on their own blogs, forum posts, etc.

It'll be interesting to see how using the web will help candidates (or not). Personally, I'd like to see web campaigns grow -- if only because the idea's so geeky and nifty. It'll also be interesting to see if republicans build their web presence. It might be that the average GOP voter isn't all that into the web anyway and it'd just be a waste of time and money (campaign staffers keep all this stuff up, not candidates).

If the winner in '08 is the person with the biggest web presence, you can count on that being a strategy for every election afterward.

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