Back in early March of 2006, I started monitoring
MySpace in order to gauge periphery netroots support among potential 2008 Democratic contenders. At the time, the numbers were fairly anemic: Clark, Clinton, Warner and Feingold all had unofficial groups that came in at around 1,000 friends each. That situation almost immediately changed after Feingold introduced the censure resolution. Starting in mid-March,
his unofficial MySpace page, founded independently by an enthusiastic supporter, began steadily rising at a rate of about 350 new friends every week. This was particularly amazing because it was a MySpace page rather than a far more visible MySpace group, and thus did not benefit from being
listed among popular Government and Politics groups. In other words, this was hard growth--it was growing despite lacking the bandwagon effect that often characterizes watershed netroots moments.
By mid-July, Feingold's unofficial page was larger than the unofficial groups for all other potential 2008 Democrats combined. I remember thinking at the time that if Feingold were to announce he was running, or even set up an official MySpace group just for his
Progressive Patriots Fund, that it would quickly become viral and probably grow larger than even the
MySpace Democrats group. Considering the numbers he was putting up on
Dailykos Straw polls, and in
the BlogPac netrotos survey, a 100,000 member MySpace group struck me as well within reach by the end of 2006. Use an adder robot to start, flog it via your email list, make sure the group had regular updates with good multi-media and MySpace specific content, and it would be off to the races. Although I did not look into it to the same degree, I imagined the same thing could be replicated for Feingold on Facebook and other social networking sties that allowed politically oriented groups. Obama's recent Facebook success has confirmed my suspicions on that front.
Alas, I could never test my theory, as Feingold chose not to enter the 2008 campaign, and his leadership PAC never set up an official MySpace page (or, for that matter, any official page on any social networking site, at least that I know of). However, as of this writing, that same unofficial page started by an enthusiastic supporter still has
a remarkable 9,408 friends. Considering that Feingold is not even in the race, and that this is a page rather than a group, I think the number of friends on the unofficial Feingold MySpace page is now a useful benchmark to monitor candidate progress on the so-called "netroots primary." Simply put, any candidate with whose official group or page has fewer friends than Feingold's unofficial page is not doing very well online. Any candidate with more is at least performing adequately.
Micah Sifry has the tale of the tape:
MySpace friends as of January 28th
Obama: 26,779
Clinton: 19,093
Edwards: 10,046
Biden: 1,343
Vilsack: 1,169
Kucinich: 649
Richardson: 611 (note: started last week)
Dodd: 95
I should also note that although he has not declared,
Clark's official group from WesPac has 43,032 friends. That group was started in early August, and roughly 80% of its members joined up within the first month. I do not understand the reasons behind the stagnation, but I can speculate. The group is only updated about once every week or so, does not seem to feature MySpace specific content, and Clark has not exactly been the most visible potential candidate of late. However, to tell you the truth, I really do not know.
Looking at the totals for the other candidates, we are starting to see similar patterns emerging online that we see within the Democratic field as a whole. Obama, Clinton and Edwards are way ahead of the second tier. Among the second tier, no one seems to be emerging just yet. Further, it actually does not surprise me that Clinton's position in the MySpace primary (2nd) is quite different from her results in Dailykos straw polls (5th or 6th). For starters, she is throwing a lot of resources to compete online. Second,
as we saw in the netroots survey, the less often a Democratic-leaning netroots activist reads blogs, the more that activist's opinion of Hillary Clinton approximates those held by rank and file Democrats as a whole:
The million-dollar question is whether or not regular blog readers are influential enough first to influence the wider range of the progressive netroots, and next to influence the Democratic rank and file as a whole. Right now, Clinton seems to be doing OK among the wider netroots, even if she is not very popular in the blogosphere. Perhaps the equation is changing.
What does surprise me as how poorly Edwards is doing on MySpace. Right now, he is barely above the Feingold benchmark, despite being in the campaign for an entire month, despite
raising a lot of money on Act Blue, despite leading Dailykos straw polls, and despite, from what I hear, hiring a lot of internet staff. To say the least, I am surprised his campaign is not more on top of the online social networking front than it appears to be. If they don't fix this fast, the bandwagon effect for Clinton, and especially Obama, might get out of control on MySpace to the point where there is not much oxygen left for anyone else. Since he is already being pushed to the side by the establishment media who want to see a Clinton vs. Obama campaign, the last thing Edwards needs at this point is for either of these candidates to start dominating him in the netroots primary. Even if it is "only" MySpace, it is still an emerging netroots center, and as such it should be taken seriously by anyone who wants to carry the mantle of the progressive movement.
Update:
The actual official DNC MySpace page can be found here.
