Beyond Pew Survey: How Web Sparked Obama Win

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Beyond Pew Survey: How Web Sparked Obama Win
By Greg Mitchell - E & P
4/16/09

The new survey from Pew released late yesterday showed that more than half of all adults in the U.S. used the Web during the 2008 race for the White House for "political purposes," from just checking for news to sharing videos or Facebook postings. It also revealed that Obama backers used the Web far more extensively than McCain's fans, for everything from meeting up to donating money.

These are not exactly shocking and they not really do justice to the full impact of the Web in Obama's victory last year.

When the nearly two-year race for the White House ended on November 4, 2008, the solid win for Obama no longer seemed a surprise. Going back one year, however -- and finding Hillary Clinton labeled the clear frontrunner -- puts the Obama victory in perspective. Joe Scarborough wasn't the only pundit back then to pat Obama on the head for a nice effort and tell him to prepare to get ground up and "spit out" by the unstoppable double-Clinton machine. Instead, Obama, with the help of an unprecedented grassroots funding and organizing effort, battled that machine to a standstill, then knocked out McCain a few months later.

How did that happen? The Democratic insurgent made few poor moves, remained calm while avoiding, or wiping off, the mud thrown at him, and continually surprised the pundits, who overestimated both Clinton and McCain (and Sarah Palin) past the point that most voters abandoned them.

Then there was the Web.

The nomination of an African-American for president by a major party, and the Republicans' first selection of a female candidate for vice-president, were not the only historic aspects of the 2008 election campaign in the United States. This was also the first national campaign profoundly shaped -- even, at times, dominated -- by the new media, from viral videos and blog rumors that went "mainstream" to startling online fundraising techniques. You might call it Campaign 2.008.

James Poniewozik, the Time magazine columnist, observed at mid-year that the old media are rapidly losing their "authority," and influence, with the mass market. "It's too simple to say that the new media are killing off the old media," he declared, while highlighting a pair of influential scoops for Huffington Post by a hitherto unknown "citizen journalist" named Mayhill Fowler. "What's happening instead is a kind of melding of roles. Old and new media are still symbiotic, but it's getting hard to tell who's the rhino and who's the tickbird." He concluded, with an oblique reference to the late Tim Russert: "Maybe we'll remember this election as the one when we stopped talking about 'the old media' and 'the new media' and, simply, met the press."

Simply put: The rules of the game have been changed forever -- by technology. It was more than the "YouTube Election," as some dubbed it, or "The Facebook Election," or "hyper-politics." James Rainey, the longtime media reporter for the Los Angeles Times, declared that there is a "new-media revolution that is remaking presidential campaigns. Online videos can dominate the evening news. Or an unpublished novelist 'with absolutely no journalism training' can alter the national debate," a reference to Mayhill Fowler.

Case in point: In June, the alleged Obama "terrorist fist bump" went from viral to The View in just three days. Fortunately, the candidate was able to laugh it off, which was certainly not the case after the Rev. Wright videos went viral -- another example of the unpredictable power of Web politics. More evidence: After wrapping up the nomination in June 2008, the Obama campaign launched an extensive Web site devoted solely to shooting down viral rumors and innuendo.

"What's different this year is that the entire political and media establishment has finally woken up to the fact that the internet is now a major player in the world of politics and our democracy," said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the TechPresident blog and annual Personal Democracy Forum. "We are watching a conversion of our politics from the 20th century to the 21st."

How did sites with names like Politico and FiveThirtyEight and Eschaton and Crooks and Liars collectively come to rival the three television networks in influence, even if partly by influencing the networks themselves? It's been more than thirty-five years since "The Boys on the Bus" were anointed and celebrated. Now Huffington Post's "Off the Bus" site often made headlines with on-the-scene bulletins and audio/video snippets from some 3000 contributors. It was there that Mayhill Fowler's two major scoops in the campaign were posted.

Defending her second one -- on Bill Clinton's "sleazy" attack on Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair captured along a rope line in South Dakota -- Jay Rosen, who runs that section of the Huff Post site, said, "Professional reporters are going to have to decide whether they want to view citizen journalists as unfair competition, which is one option, or as extending the news net to places that pro reporters can't, won't or don't go, which is another -- and I think a better -- way to look at it."

I would argue that videos featuring Bill, not Hillary, Clinton led to the true turning point in the primary race, when on three separate occasions he was caught making what some took to be "racial" remarks and/or losing his temper with voters or reporters -- all in informal settings captured by amateurs or small town reporters and then beamed to millions. Countless Democrats, and particularly African-Americans, who had always revered the Clintons, switched to Obama in the space of a week or two. Even if they still liked Hill they did not want another four or eight years of Bill. Obama won eleven primaries in a row and the race was all but over.

Early in the final Obama-McCain showdown, a leading campaign charge from the Democrats was that the Republican wanted to stay in Iraq "for 100 years." What was the source for this? An amateur video of McCain making a remark to that effect at a small campaign gathering months earlier, spread widely on the Web -- in the usual fashion, first by liberal bloggers, then by the Obama campaign itself. Soon it turned up frequently on network and cable TV shows and even in Democratic commercials.

Some Republicans lamented that McCain was getting killed on the Web, and he didn't help his image any when he admitted that he was still an internet neophyte. In June, when Obama passed the magic barrier of one million Facebook friends -- a measure that didn't exist four years ago -- it was noted that McCain only had 150,000.

Don't forget: Last autumn, the turning point for the entire campaign might have come when McCain's gamble, picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, was undermined by the CBS interview with her by Katie Couric and the Saturday Night Live parodies starring Tina Fey. Yes, they were generated in the mainstream but they gained tens of millions of additional viewers online in the days that followed.

Another key factor: After the TV pundits scored each of the four big debates about even, instant polling and Web commentary, nearly all giving the the Democrat the win, carried the day.

Today, old media still plays a strong role, of course, but even when it is at center stage, which is often, it now comes under withering review from the world of the Web -- and in turn, responds to those critiques, and the cycle goes on and on. Even mainstream figures such as Couric, Brian Williams, and Keith Olbermann write blogs, which are quite popular.

Yes, the networks and cable news outlets hosted almost all of the candidate debates, but this year they were joined by partners such as Facebook and YouTube. The YouTube debate provided some of the best, and goofiest, questions of the whole primary season (who can forget the query about global warming from a melting snowman). One of the lowlights of the primary season for the networks was the public flogging of ABC anchor Charles Gibson for his often inane questions during one debate. The uproar from the Web was so strong that Gibson had to respond -- on the air the next night.

As the final week of the campaign approached in October, Howard Kurtz ventured out on the campaign trail for a few days for The Washington Post and then asked: Have the Web and the digital age doomed the "boys on the bus"? He sketched Obama about to speak to 10,000 screaming fans at a state fairgrounds but observed that before he "took the podium, the text of his speech arrived by BlackBerry. The address was carried by CNN, Fox and MSNBC. While he was still delivering his applause lines, an Atlantic blogger posted excerpts. And despite the huge foot-stomping crowd that could barely be glimpsed from the media tent, most reporters remained hunched over their laptops.

"Does the campaign trail still matter much in an age of digital warfare? Or is it now a mere sideshow, meant to provide the media with pretty pictures of colorful crowds while the guts of the contest unfold elsewhere? And if so, are the boys (and girls) on the bus spinning their wheels?"

Then, on the morning of Election Day, the New York Times presented, as its banner headline on the front page, "The '08 Campaign: A Sea Change for Politics As We Know It." Adam Nagourney opened it with, "The 2008 race for the White House that comes to an end on Tuesday fundamentally upended the way presidential campaigns are fought in this country, a legacy that has almost been lost with all the attention being paid to the battle between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama.

"It has rewritten the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organize supporters, manage the news media, track and mold public opinion, and wage -- and withstand -- political attacks, including many carried by blogs that did not exist four years ago."

So blogs, which rarely drew wide notice in 2004 and were derided by some as a silly, passing fancy, now earned a place in the second paragraph of the top Times story on Election Day 2008. "I think we'll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race," said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush's campaigns in 2000 and 2004, in that Times article. "The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down."

Terry Nelson, who was the political director of the Bush campaign in 2004, said that the evolution would continue in 2012 and beyond. "We are in the midst of a fundamental transformation of how campaigns are run," Nelson said. "And it's not over yet." As Sarah Palin might say: You betcha.
---------------------------------------------------------

Much of the above is excerpted from Greg Mitchell's latest book, "Why Obama Won," his ninth book.

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@BumbleBeeBoogie,

The Internet's Role in Campaign 2008
By Aaron Smith, Research Specialist
Pew Internet & American Life Project
April 15, 2009

Three-quarters (74%) of internet users went online during the 2008 election to take part in, or get news and information about the 2008 campaign. This represents 55% of the entire adult population, and marks the first time the Pew Internet & American Life Project has found that more than half the voting-age population used the internet to connect to the political process during an election cycle.

We call these individuals "online political users," and we employed three separate metrics to identify them:

Going online for news about politics or the campaign. Fully 60% of internet users did this in 2008.

Communicating with others about politics using the internet. Some 38% of internet users talked about politics online with others over the course of the campaign.

Sharing or receiving campaign information using specific tools, such as email, instant messaging, text messages or Twitter. Fully 59% of internet users used one or more of these tools to send or receive political messages.
If a respondent answered "yes" to any of the above questions, s/he was included in the overall population of people we counted as online political users in 2008. Of course, many respondents said "yes" to several of the online activities, but they were counted only once as a member of the online political user group.

This post-election survey finding comes after a similar poll in the spring of 2008. At that time, our survey found than 46% of Americans were online political users. In 2004, using a somewhat different set of metrics to define online political users, we found that they comprised 37% of the adult population.

As the online political news audience has grown, the importance of the internet has increased relative to other news sources.

Six-in-ten internet users went online for news or information about politics in 2008. This represents 44% of all American adults. Nearly one-fifth of the online population got political news on a daily basis during the campaign, as 12% of internet users said they got political news every day and 7% said they did so multiple times over the course of typical day. All told, the overall size of the political news audience has more than doubled since the 2000 elections.

As the overall size of the online political news audience has grown, the internet has taken a front-and-center role within the media environment. Among the entire population, the internet is now on par with newspapers as a major source of campaign news -- 26% of all adults get most of their election news from the internet, compared with 28% who get their election news from newspapers -- although television remains the dominant source of political news in this country.

For internet users and those under the age of 50, the internet plays an even more central role. Fully 35% of those who use the internet get most of their election news online (compared with 25% who point to newspapers), while 34% of both 18-29 year olds and 30-49 year olds rely on the internet, compared with the 20% of those in each age group who rely on newspapers as a major source of campaign news.

This trend is even more pronounced among those internet users with a broadband connection at home. They are twice as likely to use the internet as they are newspapers to get political news.

Politically-active internet users are moving away from news sites with no point of view to sites that match their politics views; this is especially true among younger voters.

Fully a third of online political users (33%) now say that when they get online political information most of the sites they visit share their point of view -- up from 26% who said that in 2004. This rise in partisan information-seeking matches a decline in the number of online political users who say most of the sites they visit do not have a particular point of view. In 2004, 32% of online political users said most of the sites they visited had no particular point of view and that percentage dropped to 25% in 2008. There was no difference between 2004 and 2008 in the number of online political users who said most of the sites they visit challenge their point of view.

Both Democrats and Republicans are now more likely to gravitate towards online sites with an explicitly partisan slant than they were in 2004. Fully 44% of Democratic online political users (up from 34% in 2004) and 35% of Republican online political users (up from 26% in 2006) now say that they mostly visit sites that share their political point of view. However, the biggest change between elections occurred among the young. In 2004, 22% of online political users ages 18-24 said most of the sites they visit shared their views. That doubled to 43% of online political users in that age range in 2008.

Those who are most information hungry are the most likely to browse sites that match their views. Politically interested internet users have access to a wealth of political content online, along with new tools for finding, customizing and filtering highly targeted political commentary. As a result they are delving more deeply into the "long tail" of online political content, where they frequently seek out information that carries a distinct partisan slant and comes from sources beyond traditional news content.

In this survey, we asked online political users whether they got political news or information from 13 specific online sources. Although the most commonly mentioned sources of online political news are traditional media sites, online news consumers also sought out a wide range of non-traditional content-from portal news sites to user-generated content such as blogs and commentary sites. In total, nearly half of online news consumers accessed five or more different online types of news content in 2008.

This greater involvement with the online political debate seems to change some users' relationship to news content. As online political users get deeper into the world of online politics (whether by visiting a wider range of news sources or taking part in a wider range of political activities) they exhibit a pronounced shift towards news with an explicitly partisan slant.

Obama voters took a leading role engaging in online political activism this election cycle.

Supporters of Republican presidential candidate John McCain were more likely than backers of Barack Obama to be internet users (83% vs. 76%). This reflects the fact that McCain supporters and Republicans in general have higher amounts of education and income than Democrats - and those are two of the strongest predictors of internet use. However, online Obama supporters took part in a wider range of online political activities-from posting their own thoughts and comments about the election online to going online to volunteer for campaign activities or donate money.

In addition to participating in a wider range of online political activities, Obama voters also took the lead in the use of email and text messaging for political communications. Among email users, 48% of Obama voters and 38% of McCain voters received email directly from a political party or candidate for office in 2008. Additionally, among voters who use text messaging:

49% of Obama voters shared text messages related to the campaign with others; 29% of McCain voters did so.

17% of Obama supporters and 7% of McCain supporters got text messages directly from a candidate or party.

When these two activities are taken together, 22% of all Obama voters (text messaging users and non-users alike) communicated with others about the campaign or got information directly from a campaign or party on their cell phone, compared with 14% of McCain voters.

Nearly one in five internet users belongs to the online political participatory class.

Voters are increasingly taking an active role in the political process by contributing their own thoughts or comments to the online debate. In 2008, nearly one in five internet users posted their thoughts, comments or questions about the campaign on a website, blog, social networking site or other online forum.

This online participatory class is composed largely of politically active young adults -- fully 30% of those who post political content online are under the age of 25, and more than half are younger than 35. Political content creation is also tightly linked with the use of social media platforms such as online social networks, video sharing sites, blogs and status update services such as Twitter.

Young Americans engage most deeply in the online political process, but online political involvement is something all generations do to some extent.

More than half of the internet users in every major age cohort took part in the political process in one way or another during the 2008 campaign. Indeed, the oldest Americans (those individuals age 65 and older) are the only age cohort for which substantially fewer than half of all members of that cohort are online political users. This is due to the relatively low levels of internet usage by seniors -- although 60% of online seniors are online political users, just 37% of seniors use the internet. As a result, 22% of the entire senior population got engaged politically online in 2008. For other age groups (including those only slightly younger than age 65) half or more of all adults took part in the online political process in 2008.

Although online political involvement is widely dispersed throughout the population, young adults tend to be the most intense of the online political user cohort. Online political users under the age of 30 are much more likely than other age groups to:

Get customized political or campaign news (as through an RSS feed, automated email updates or a customized web page);

Post their own original content online;

Take part in political activities on social networking sites.

However, other online political activities are far from dominated by the youngest of online political users. While two-thirds of online political users under the age of 30 watch online political videos, this activity is relatively popular among other age groups as well. And online political users in all age groups are equally likely to share or forward interesting political nuggets to others. Indeed, older online political users are actually the group that is most likely to forward political content or commentary to others. Since seniors are regular users of email in other contexts (such as communicating with family members) it is a small leap for these individuals to share political content.

Technology helped Americans to navigate the voting process and share their experiences at the polls.

In addition to using technology to help make sense of the campaign, voters also went online to help prepare for Election Day and to share their experiences at the polls. Fully 26% of all wired voters used the internet to help them navigate the voting process, as one in five (18%) went online to find out where to vote; 16% did so for information about absentee or early voting; and one in ten (9%) went online to find out if they were registered to vote. Young voters and those who were politically involved online during the campaign were especially likely to turn to the internet for assistance with the voting process.

Voters also jumped at the opportunity to share their experiences on Election Day with others, mainly in person and over the telephone but also using digital technologies such as email, text messaging and social networking sites. Again, young voters were especially likely to go online to share their voting day experiences relative to older voters.

These results come from a national telephone survey of 2,254 American adults between November 20 and December 4, 2008. Some 1,591 of them are internet users and 1,186 are those we call online political users. This sample was gathered entirely on landline phones. There was no extra sample of cell-phone users, who tend to be younger and slightly more likely to be internet users.

Read the full report at pewinternet.org.

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Beyond Pew Survey: How Web Sparked Obama Win

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