Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the “gender gap”? Now it looks like there’s an “Internet gap.”
Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney ’04’s webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there’s mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, “tend to excel at the web-only kind” of e-activism, “while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline.” He continues:
And the web-only kind of activism has a mixed track record at best. At first, MoveOn’s “Bush in 30 Seconds” ad contest seemed like a trailblazing concept. Until you saw the God-awful ad that won, and realized that, like most MoveOn initiatives before or since, all that energy was simply being dumped into a rat hole. Just how credible and useful are online polls when your guy wins with 90% of the vote? And using a chat room or posting a comment on a blog is not in itself a productive political act; for one thing, you could be out talking to undecideds instead of preaching to the online choir, and secondly, in the blogosphere, quality matters more than quantity. A thousand blogs echoing the WaPo/NYT line will never be as effective as fifty blogs providing an interesting and original alternative voice, probing for weaknesses in the MSM Death Star.
My two cents: Like most debates about the relative merits of different political strategies, this one is colored indelibly by the fact that the Republicans won. GOP e-activists are also doing a good job of presenting themselves as the most net-savvy, most concerned with pushing power to the edges of their network, etc.
Personally, I think the truth is a lot more complicated. The fact that the Ds outpaced the Rs in online donations and in the amount collected from small donors (reversing a long era of Republican dominance) suggests that the party’s atrophied muscles and its relationship to its base may be reviving, aided by new technology that makes it easier to connect to likeminded activists. Yes, the Ds spent more of their time asking for money than engagement, but the fact that people responded also implies as certain feeling of ownership. You give because you belong.
Also, the rest of the survey belies Ruffini’s implication that Kerry voters are less likely to “have lives” and thus waste much of their time in front of a computer screen. Their rate of participation in other forms of online political engagement (getting information, finding out candidates’ positions, learning where to vote) essentially tracks with the Bush voters. Plus, to the extent that the general online population tilts slightly Republican (class matters), you won’t get very far arguing that Democratic voters are really such stay-at-home nerds.
Bottom line: Democrats were far more likely to find political community online in 2004, and to give to candidates, in part, as a result. Maybe that’s because Republicans already had a dense social network engaging their base (churches, the NRA clubs, etc). But however you slice it, it looks like the Democratic base achieved rough social capital parity in 2004, thanks to the net.