Election 2008

The e-President?

According to Mashable, a new poll released by Global Market Insite (GMI) shows astonishing results regarding the impact of social networks on the upcoming presidential election.

17% of respondents said they had looked at a candidate’s profile on some social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook, and 53% of them said they were more likely to vote for that candidate after seeing their profile! 53% of those who had looked is equal to approximately 9% of the total survey sample, which may sound low, but MySpace has well over 100 million users and Facebook boasts 35 million (and growing by approx. 1 million/wk), so a 9% win-over rate is a pretty health showing! (I realize that not all users are in the US, or registered voters, etc…but you get the idea that it is a lot of people)

What might be the most astonishing statistic to come out of this survey is that 62% of those people who browsed a candidate’s profile, were over the age of 30! This is a huge development that shows how much these online arenas will be changing the political world int he near future. The are no longer a child’s playground, but adults are using them too…if it were all college-aged users browsing these profiles, the numbers wouldn’t be very exciting since the 18-27 age bracket is the least democratically involved at the polls. However, the 30-45 age bracket is very active in elections, making these survey results very important to the upcoming election.

One thing to say about this survey, however, is that I haven’t seen the actual text of the complete survey or the methodology behind it, so I can’t vouch for its integrity. And it may well be that people who look at candidates’ profiles were more inclined to vote for them before and that is what drove them to the site…but even if this is the case, this data shows that the face of politics is changing in America.

The emergence of the YouTube debates, the explosion of social networking site users, and the expansion of each candidate’s online presence is a sign that the old-media way of vetting candidate’s is shifting and the public is adopting its own way of doing things. With the hotly contested elections in the recent past, it is very possible that whoever manages to capture the largest portion of that 9% of users could tip the election in their favor by the slimmest of margins…and we are still over a year away from the general election: there could be ways of voter organization and online political advertising that we haven’t even though of yet that could spring up and have a major impact on the 2008 election.

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