Total Coverage: Tracking the Online Election - Page 2

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It's not all fun and games

All those interactive bells and whistles that have made the campaign a more social affair are fine and good, but this year's election seems also to have conferred a new sense of legitimacy on the Web -- both as a source of information and as an influencer, for good or ill.

After all, it was the scurrilous rumors on the blogosphere that forced Sarah Palin to make a public announcement about her teenage daughter's pregnancy sooner than she'd planned.

And pundits commonly cite the Obama campaign's use of the Web -- as well as the candidate's reneging on his pledge to accept public financing -- with amassing a campaign war chest almost 80 percent larger than his opponent's.

The Obama machine's Web-based financing has been soliciting repeat contributions -- often of very small sums -- from its massive registry of supporters. McCain, by contrast, opted to accept public financing, which capped the amount of money he could raise. The disparity created by the new model of fundraising has reopened the debate over campaign finance reform.

Anyone who has watched television in the past two weeks can offer empirical evidence of the disparity in spending. McCain didn't have $4 million lying around to buy a half-hour infomercial on network TV. But the spending disparity carries over to the Web, according to the latest analysis from Nielsen Online.

When the meltdown in the financial sector intensified in late September, Obama started stepping up his online ad spending, both in display and search. Obama-branded display ads saw a 202 percent increase in impressions the week beginning Sept. 15, and a 94 percent increase the following week.

Nielsen also found that in mid-October, Obama eclipsed McCain in the number of sponsored search results for the first time in the campaign.

For politicians and pundits alike

This past Sunday on "The McLaughlin Group," the feisty and often combative TV political roundtable, host John McLaughlin asked Pat Buchanan to name the most reliable tracking poll -- Rasmussen? Gallup? Zogby?

"Real Clear Politics," Buchanan replied. Why? Because the site aggregates the major polls, feeds them into an algorithm that computes an average, weighted by factors such as sample size and margin of error. As of this writing, Real Clear Politics had Obama leading by 7.4 points.

Clarence Page, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, chimed in that he was a big fan of FiveThirtyEight.com, another online poll aggregator.

Sites like these, along with political blogs, have been experiencing meteoric rises in their traffic this year, according to online metrics firm comScore. Real Clear Politics saw its visitor count surge 489 percent from September 2007 to the same month this year. HuffingtonPost.com, the most heavily trafficked political blog, saw its monthly visitor count shoot up 474 percent to 4.5 million uniques in the same period.

The comments of Buchanan and Page, hardly fresh faces on the political scene, seem to underscore the emerging reality that the sites, strategies and content that have characterized this election are rewriting the rules, and that the term "new media" might be something of a misnomer four years from now.