(Crossposted from Comment is Free at Guardian Unlimited:)
In the US, the left is declaring victory … in the battle to win the internet. The Washington Post today declares a digital divide between Democrat and Republican online. I just got off the phone with a BBC reporter working on a story with a similar premise. They wonder whether the GOP has a prayer of catching up and whether there’s something inherent in their character that would prevent them from doing so.
But I say that the web efforts of all parties are so far pathetic. At the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York on Friday, the assembled politicogeeks agreed that no one in this race has embraced technology in the disruptive manner Howard Dean did in his advanced but otherwise losing campaign in 2004. This is a race of tortoise v tortoise. And it’s typically US-centric of us to ignore the greater strides made online in the UK, France, and Germany - by the right, as it happens, in all three.
Still, it’s true that among the slow, the Democrats are far ahead here. As the Post reports:
Looking at the websites of presidential candidates from the two parties, it found that former senator John Edwards’s site had about 690,000 unique visitors in March, when the Democrat’s wife, Elizabeth, announced that she had a recurrence of cancer. That was more than the combined number of visitors to the sites of the three leading GOP contenders, Rudolph W. Giuliani (297,000), Sen. John McCain (258,000) and Mitt Romney (76,000).
There are other measures as well. No Republican comes close to matching the popularity of another Democratic candidate, Sen Barack Obama of Illinois, on YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, the social-networking triumvirate. The Democrats are ahead in the online money race.




