Do Political Blogs Matter?
By: Mark Poloncarz
Date: July 8, 2006
Last month hundreds of progressives descended on Las Vegas for the first annual YearlyKos Convention, what could only be described as an in person and Internet meeting of many of the new online media representing the progressive/liberal/democratic viewpoint. Organized by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, it brought together politicans, party leaders, activists and bloggers from around the country to celebrate and flex the muscles of the new found power of the "netroots."
Prospective 2008 presidential candidates were there as well as members of the old media in the must be seen at progressive political event of 2006. Not having attended the convention I can only gather from news reports the impact of the event, which basically said something big was happening there, if no one could really put their finger on it. Which in turn begs the question, if everybody turned out for this show of Internet force, what impact do blogs really have on the political process, and especially on influencing elections?
If you believe the online pundits, the political ways of the old are dead and everything revolves around the blog and online organizing. While the Internet is a force in politics, it might not be because of blogs, but the content available for viewing. For example, last year the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a division of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, issued a report examining the Internet's role in the 2004 political campaign. They concluded that the Internet was a "key force" in 2004, and that about 63 million people, or about 52% of all Internet users, went online to get news about the election, and more than 13 million people "went online to engage directly in campaign activities such as donating money, volunteering, or learning about political events to attend."
Over 122 million people voted in the 2004 election, which means that more than half of those who voted went online to receive news about the election at some point during the campaign, and approximately ten percent were actively engaging in the campaign through the Internet. There is no doubt that these numbers are significant, and that it signals the political importance of the Internet as a tool to reach a vast audience. However, while Americans are reading news online, they are not necessarily reading blogs.
The Pew Center report noted that only 3 percent of those who received their news from the Internet regularly read blogs, and only 2 percent sometimes, leaving 95 percent as hardly ever reading blogs (newspapers and television being the 2 main sources). These numbers are somewhat disputed by Harris Interactive's Online Poll which reported in April of 2005 that 44 percent of persons online have read a political blog (though only 7 percent of those online have commented). However, Harris’ report noted that only 12 percent of those online read a political blog either daily or 2-3 times a week. Thus according to these polls from reputable national organizations the total group on Americans actually reading political blogs on a regular basis is small. These numbers are not surprising when you look at actual traffic of blogs.
While there are literally millions of blogs, and thousands dedicated to politics of some form alone, it is generally agreed that one of the largest read political blogs is Moulitsas’ Daily Kos. In less than 3 years it has grown from one man’s despair over the war in Iraq to the most influential progressive blog. It was a key factor for the meteoric rise of Howard Dean’s campaign in 2003 (a campaign that eventually ended up like a meteor: burning bright early but eventually falling harmlessly to Earth). Senators, Congressmen, Governors and ordinary Americans make up not only its readership, but its writers. Based on its purported influence one would think that millions of activists and voters read the blog on a daily basis. Yet reported evidence does not support that assertion.
Neilson/NetRatings reported in August of last year that Daily Kos charted in as one of the ten fastest growing blogs by readership between January and July of 2005. According to Neilson’s figures, Daily Kos’s unique audience increased by 37 percent in 6 months and was the 5th fastest growing blog. But a close up look at the numbers reveals that Kos’ daily unique visitors averaged about 476,000 in July of 2005. 476,000 individuals is very large readership for a political blog, but when compared to the actual number of voters in the 2004 election it turns out to be roughly .0039 percent of the electorate (for comparison, the 6th fastest growing blog was “The Smoking Gun” which really isn't a blog but had an average audience in July 2005 of over 2.2 million). Even if we increase the average daily readership of Kos from one year ago to 1 million unique visitors, assuming his readership has doubled in a year, it is still less than 1 percent of those who voted in 2004 (and by corollary less than 2 percent of those who voted for John Kerry in 2004).
So if the most widely read progressive political blog is only read by a small fraction of national voters, what influence could it really have? There are no easy answers to the question. As noted, Daily Kos was instrumental in helping to kick off the Howard Dean bandwagon, but in the end voters rejected Dean. Reports of what happened on the ground in Iowa during the 2004 caucuses note that old fashioned grassroots politics mixed in with new methods of identifying voters won the day for John Kerry. Dean may have had the troops on the ground and raised plenty of money because of the Internet efforts of his campaign and bloggers like Moulitsas, but Kerry’s folks used that tried-and-true method of identifying voters and making sure they made it out to the polls to spur his come from behind triumph.
So if blogs don’t actually get voters out to vote for a specific candidate, how can they rate so highly such that politicians will attend the YearlyKos Convention and spend so much time reaching out to those who read Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, MyDD, Democratic Underground and other national blogs? I think it is because of the way blogs influence the message and give an almost instantaneous response back to the issuer on the effectiveness of one’s argument.
If a candidate wants to see how an issue will play among a certain voting population, say the left wing of the Democratic Party, he or she can reach through an intermediary (the blogger) to voters and receive a response in a very short time and at almost no cost. In that way, a blogger can be the messenger and audience for a candidate’s message – helping to spread it while the blogger influences its ultimate result. This in itself may not influence a national campaign, but does help to form a set of issues/values that are important to at least to the online activists.
There is no doubt that bloggers or similar sites now form a new online media where the message sometimes is more important than the result, which leads to second impact a blogger can have. Sites that focus on the substance of a race or a candidate’s positions often can influence an election by identifying factual inaccuracies, or for that matter spreading rumors that the mainstream media would never touch. The Drudge Report, while not a blog per se, is notorious for rumor mongering in the hope that one may end up being real. Conservative bloggers were instrumental in bringing down Dan Rather at CBS for his story on the president’s exploits as a member of the Alabama National Guard, while sites like David Brock's Media Matters help expose not only inaccuracies, but lies and other falsehoods from the right. These quasi-blog sites aren’t dedicated to spreading a certain message, but rather exposing items that could negatively impact the examined subject matter.
If blogs are to have any substantive impact such that they actually affect an election’s results it probably is not in the national scene, but local. Political blogs make up a small fraction of the total blogging community because most blogs are just about a person’s normal daily life. And of those, if any political comment is made it is usually about a local issue just as much as it might be national (confirming Tip O’Neill’s sage advice that “all politics is local).
In my opinion, local bloggers have a greater opportunity to influence a local election than a national one because local elections have a much smaller overall electorate, and thus it does not take as much to turn a few heads one way. One local blogger writing about a village or town election where a few votes either way can make the difference can impact the final result. There is a much greater chance that a vote will be swayed when family, friends and neighbors read a particular blog that advocates on behalf of or against a specific candidate. Additionally, a local candidate can reach voters through positive blog comments that he or she might not otherwise have the time or money to do on their own. So while blogs might have a negligible impact on national or even statewide elections, small local elections can be influenced by a local blogger with a regional audience.
This is not to say that national blogs are not important; they do help to frame a message. It is just that the influence a blog has on 122 million voters, or for that matter 50 million renders their impact almost non-existent on the end result of who votes for a candidate. Their influence is not on the actual election result, but the earlier part of the campaign when a certain message is being formulated or a certain buzz about a candidate is growing.
The attention paid to national bloggers might be exaggerated based on their actual impact on an election, but they certainly can influence a certain base of voters, identify falsehoods and inconsistencies, or help form the message that carries a candidate forward. It remains to be seen what impact they will have, if any, on this year's mid-term elections or the 2008 presidential election. However, if the 2004 results are any indication, while a blog might help carry a candidate forward, that candidate just might not make it over the finish line, or for that matter, get very far past the starting gate.
Mark Poloncarz, a founding member of the WNY Coalition for Progress, is comptroller of Erie County, New York, former WNY coordinator of the John Kerry for President campaign, and prior to his 2005 run for political office was the host of a political commentary website since 1998 - before blogs even existed.
© Mark C. Poloncarz, 2006.
The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the WNY Coalition for Progress.
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