As a follow-up from our post earlier today – The Web 2.0 Election: Does the Internet Matter in Election Politics? – The Washington Post is reporting that online “friends” could be pivotal in the 2008 U.S. race. But it seems Democrats have a big advantage on popular social networks:
“Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1 on Facebook and 3-to-1 on MySpace, said Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who studies online politics.”
So far Barack Obama has 299,000 supporters on MySpace and Facebook, compared to 169,000 for Hillary Clinton. John Edwards ranks third among Democrats with 64,000 supporters, says the Washington Post – noting that Edwards is also using lesser-known social networks like Ning, Bebo and Care2.
On the Republican side, Ron Paul leads with 75,000 supporters – even though he barely registers in most opinion polls, a point made by Josh Catone in our post. Giuliani has only 7,400 supporters on MySpace.
Proving how web 2.0 hip he is, Obama even has a digg profile! Although judging by the amount of homepages he has (zero), Obama has my luck getting to the digg frontpage.
