SALON

Wednesday, Nov 3, 2010 11:35 PM UTC

In social media election, the GOP capitalizes

Campaigns, ads and voting all filtered through Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare this year

By

Topics: Social Media, 2010 Elections, Facebook, Republican Party,

In the final minutes of one of the most watched and fiercely contested races of Tuesday’s midterm elections, the campaigns of both Sen. Harry Reid and the Republican challenger to his Nevada Senate seat, Sharron Angle, were working social media.

“Thirty-five minutes to go-every vote is needed!” read Angle’s Facebook page shortly before polls closed. “You, your neighbor, your mother-in-law … GET OUT & vote, NV!”

Reid, who was also exhorting his followers to relay his messages online, ultimately prevailed. But the postings showed that at the most crucial moments in the 2010 election, social media was in the thick of it.

For an entity that effectively didn’t exist just years ago, social media has rapidly flourished as a political force.

“This is the election when it became more deeply embedded in the rhythms of campaigning,” says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “It’s not so much that as a single thing it influences people’s votes but that it’s now so inextricably a part of the political communication landscape.”

The 2010 elections may also have been when Republicans truly embraced it. The change was evident at the finale, when House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner tweeted congratulations to a litany of triumphant Republicans and fellow Twitter users.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin played an active role in the elections with posts on Facebook that were instant news; the 10 most popular political videos on YouTube were all Republican videos.

“There was much hand-wringing over whether the Internet was a fundamentally democratic or liberal platform for communication, versus a conservative one,” says Steve Grove, the head of news and politics at YouTube. “We always felt like the reason that it was more used by Democrats was just they weren’t the party in power, and parties not in power look for innovation when trying to communicate with voters in new ways.”

The reverberations the Internet can have on an election cycle have been well-known at least since Howard Dean let out an unusual battle-cry during the 2004 presidential election. But 2010′s election was the first where social media was virtually ubiquitous.

In 2008, Facebook had one-fifth the active members it now has. Twitter was nascent, its news value not yet realized. Location-sharing services such as Foursquare and Gowalla didn’t exist or had just been created.

This year, most major candidates had a Facebook page. Election night results went directly to smart phones. And everything — the campaigns, the ads, the voting — was filtered through social media.

More than 12 million clicked Facebook’s “I Voted” button on Tuesday, more than twice the 5.4 million from two years ago.

Asked if Facebook is contributing to a heightened awareness of elections, Adam Conner, associate manager for privacy and global public policy at Facebook, said that he’d “like to think that we are.”

“It’s important when the message comes from places like Facebook but I think it’s really exciting when people’s friends are telling them, ‘Hey, it’s an election. Make sure you vote. Make sure you participate, it’s important to me,’” says Conner.

Networks and news organizations sought to weave social media into their coverage. Reporters and TV anchors tweeted through the night. ABC partnered with Facebook, NBC posted video on Twitter and CBS worked with Google. The Washington Post was the first news organization to sponsor a “promoted trend” on Twitter with the hash tag “Election.”

The flow of Twitter updates from selected sources was enough to usurp TV coverage for some users.

“By ‘tuning into’ Twitter on election night, I was able to get timely updates on the races that mattered to me from people I’ve already decided that I trust,” said Mark Rosch of New Mexico. “Social media, particularly Twitter, gave me the ability keep up with the far-flung contests I was most-interested in, as well getting more information more quickly on local races.”

Foursquare encouraged users to vote by awarding a special “merit badge” to those who went to polling places. More than 50,000 of its 4 million users received it.

Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others used their power to get out the vote, supplying easy links for locating one’s nearest polling place. That could have helped voter turnout, which was projected at 42 percent of registered voters, about 1.2 percentage points higher than the 2006 midterms.

Mindy Finn, co-founder of the online political media firm Engage, said politicians are spending less than 5 percent of their budgets on social media. She cautioned overestimating its effect.

“Do we assign impact to people talking to their friends and neighbors in the same way we assign impact to people knocking on doors and making phone calls for a particular candidate or political party or cause?” said Finn. “On a basic level, it’s the same and things haven’t changed. Friends are still contacting friends and neighbors are still talking to neighbors.”

One of the most buzzed-about candidates of the election didn’t win. Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate who ran for the Senate in Delaware, had the most-viewed politician channel on YouTube. (YouTube counted 450 candidates with official channels.)

Her campaign ad in which she began by saying, “I’m not a witch,” was watched by millions. It was parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” set to song in a popular “Auto-Tune the News” video and creatively co-opted by countless YouTubers with their own political messages to distribute.

Those clips, combined with the many older videos of O’Donnell that circulated widely, made her one of the most viral candidates — yet she still lost badly to Democrat Chris Coons.

Facebook claimed correlation between social media buzz and election success. It said that 74 percent of House and Senate candidates with more Facebook fans than their competitors won on Tuesday.

The social networking platform also co-hosted a town hall meeting with ABC News. The sight was telling: a room full of people on laptops gazing at a giant Facebook “buzz wall.”

They were far from alone in their Internet-tethered election experience. Akamai Technologies Inc., which delivers about 20 percent of the world’s Internet traffic, showed traffic peaking around 6 p.m EDT at over 5.6 million global page views a minute. That’s one of Akamai’s highest traffic rates in five years of measurement — even more than during President Obama’s election night win in 2008.

Come two years and the next presidential election, social media is likely to be vital territory sought by Democrats and Republicans.

“In 2012, this will be a very contested battlefield,” says the Pew Internet’s Rainie. “It’s not a sidelight to politics right now. This is a central venue.”

——

Associated Press writer Leanne Italie contributed to this report.

More Jake Coyle.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 2 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
187 points188 points | 7 comments
vote
New Yorker launches tool by Aaron Swartz to protect leaks: Strongbox, co-created by the persecuted late technologist, is an open-source drop box for leaked documents
141 points142 points | comment
vote
Obstruction will ruin the GOP: Playing politics and abusing the system can excite the extremes, but it's a recipe for long-term political disaster
41 points42 points | 8 comments
vote
Loaded terminology like "entitlements" and "welfare" skews the debate and alters America. How right-wingers use semantic tricks to kill government.
31 points32 points | 16 comments
vote
With the help of Photoshop, artist Yao Lu has made shanshui — traditional ink paintings — of China's landfills
19 points20 points | comment

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations