Bias Disclosure: I'm a yellow-dog democrat, solid ABB, and
presently backing Dean.
There's a lot of speculation in this campaign about grassroots
and its effect. Indeed, this election cycle may be viewed as a
critical turning point in the power dynamics of American politics,
due primarily to uptake of new technology by the various campaigns.
It would be nice, however, to be able to experimentally measure a
candidate's grassroots, particularly with regards to candidates such
as Clark where there has been much debate as to the nature and depth
of his grassroots.
Some questions that have been asked, which would be useful to answer:
How large is candidate X's grassroots? Will candidate X's grassroots
actually vote? Do candidate X's grassroots have depth? Ethnicity?
Regional breadth? Are they insiders or outsiders? How effective is
their community? How much does the campaign listen?
I propose that analysis of participation in an official blog is a
good indicator of grassroots participation, and that answers to these
questions based on blog traffic may reflect ground truth accurately.
My hypothesis is that these blogs are serving as the key new
mass-listening technology which is enabling the new grassroots seen in
this campaign.
As a test, I summed the number of blog comments for all 10
presidential candidates on 10/28/03. In addition, I chose an
open thread on each site and read the tone of the commentary to
try to get a sense of the depth and vigor of the grassroots.
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