A few days ago, I started looking at the ground game of both presidential campaigns, sifting through the available data about all the events in the field that volunteers were creating using the campaigns’ online tools. The differences between Obama and McCain were stark. Now comes more evidence of a lopsided battle in their voter contact operations.
Right now, both the Obama and McCain campaigns are hard at work mobilizing their supporters to get out and talk to voters, either by knocking on doors or making phone calls. And both campaigns have built online tools designed to make it easy for volunteers to generate call lists or walk lists. Obama’s is called “Neighbor to Neighbor”; McCain’s is called “Voter to Voter.”
It’s impossible to glean precisely how much either of these tools are being used at the moment, but one thing is clear: Obama’s tool is much more deeply embedded in the ecology of the internet than McCain’s, by a factor of anywhere of a hundred to a thousand times.
If you do a Google search for the words Obama and “neighbor to neighbor,” Google returns 479,000 hits. A search for McCain and “voter to voter” returns 325 hits. In both cases, the link to the actual tool is the top hit, which is good, but these search results indicate a great deal more conversation about the Obama tool–and presumably usage.
Direct links to the tools themselves are another interesting indicator. According to Google, the total number of sites linking to my.barackobama.com/n2n is 475, with 396 of them being blogs. The total number of links to www.johnmccain.com/v2v is 18, with none from blogs.
If you design a tool to be used on a website, more links pointing to it and more web hits on its name generally are signs of greater interest. Each site pointing back to Obama or McCain’s voter engagement tool is a funnel of attention. For some time now, we’ve been saying that Obama’s continuous attention to network-building online was going to give him a huge advantage come the general election. McCain had several months earlier this year, after he had locked up the Republican nomination and Obama and Clinton were still engaged in mortal combat, to invest in building the same kind of online network. He didn’t. For a man who claim to know the difference between strategy and tactics, that is more and more looking like a huge strategic mistake.