Next Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts to fill the remaining three years of Ted Kennedy’s term in the U.S. Senate is drawing a lot of attention, not only as the latest test of the national political winds, but also because if Republican Scott Brown defeats Democrat Martha Coakley, the Democrats will be down to 59 votes in the Senate (counting the two independents) and the health care bill may die on the vine. Both national parties are pouring money and troops into the state and the polls suggest it could be a close race. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to see what the online metrics might tell us about next Tuesday’s vote. And on the face of it, Brown is surging.
On Facebook, Coakley has 10,454 fans at the moment, vs 49,086 for Brown. That’s quite a lead for Brown and shows he’s definitely caught the awareness of the right-roots.
On YouTube, both candidates have active pages. Brown has had about 340,000 views in all of his videos, and the top one, a response ad to an ad from Coakley attacking him, has gotten nearly 90,000 views in four days. Coakley has had just over 38,000 views of her videos, not nearly 1/10 Brown’s total, though her most popular video, “Lockstep Republican,” has gotten 20,000 in the three days since it’s been up. (It’s worth noting that her top viewed video has a pretty low average rating of 1.8 vs Brown’s 4.5–a hint that of where online energy resides.)
On Twitter,
January 15, 2010