Scary-Don’t let Internet excitement fool you: Uninformed voters still run things in this country.
YouWho?
Ronald Brownstein, LA Times, August 17, 2007
On YouTube, Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's "channel" has attracted more than three times as many viewings as the videos from any of the other 2008 presidential contenders. That total doesn't even include the sultry Obama Girl video, whose, er, charms have drawn literally millions of gawkers, but was independently produced outside of his campaign.
Given Obama's appeal to young people and better-educated voters, his online popularity isn't surprising. But few would predict the candidate who ranks second behind Obama in YouTube popularity (as of Thursday morning): Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the quirky, anti-Iraq war libertarian.
The same pattern is evident in studies tracking traffic on the candidates' websites. Obama's website attracts more viewers than any other candidate's — about 26% of all the traffic at 2008 contender websites, according to the Internet market research company Hitwise. But Paul again ranks second, with just over 20%. That's significantly more than New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (at 12%) and about triple the next-closest Republican (former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at just under 7%). Looking solely at Republicans, Hitwise calculates that Paul's website is drawing five times as much traffic as the site for former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Yet, needless to say, in national polls of support in the 2008 Republican race, Paul is the one looking up from near the bottom while Giuliani consistently leads the pack. There's a similar, though far less pronounced, pattern on the Democratic side, where Clinton this summer has widened her lead over Obama in national surveys, while trailing him badly online.
The gap between the leaders in cyberspace and the old-fashioned corporeal world offers one measure of the complexity of the communications environment facing the candidates running to succeed George W. Bush. This campaign has generated an unprecedented level of early attention — whether measured in online activity, coverage from the mainstream media, or polls assessing the interest of ordinary voters. And between talk radio, cable television, network television, newspapers and magazines, candidate websites, social networking sites such as MySpace and massively popular new online venues such as YouTube, the candidates have more options than ever for reaching potential supporters.
But determining which of those options most effectively cut through the clutter of campaign news and chatter to influence actual voters — much less the uncommitted voters the candidates most want to reach — isn't easy. Which may explain why these early stages of the 2008 race have featured a combination of intriguing new communications strategies and familiar approaches that haven't changed much since the days of Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan. The common theme on both fronts is an ever-increasing desire for candidates to control their messages — and the continuing limits of their ability to do so in a campaign environment that is, ready or not, barraging voters with information.
Howard Kurtz, the media reporter for the Washington Post, spotlighted one measure of this desire for control in a column this Monday: a movement toward narrowcasting in the candidates' television appearances. As Kurtz noted, the leading Republican presidential candidates have dramatically tilted their television appearances toward a single source: Fox News Channel. According to Kurtz's calculations, Romney has appeared on Fox News 13 times this year, while appearing only once on a Sunday morning network interview program; Giuliani's only Sunday appearance has come on "Fox News Sunday. "Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator who's been "testing the waters" since spring, has concentrated his television appearances this year almost exclusively on Fox News.
Meanwhile, the Democratic candidates have largely ostracized Fox News— even withdrawing from two debates the network intended to co-sponsor. On the other hand, as Kurtz noted, in just the last two weeks the Democrats have made themselves available for forums sponsored by Logo, the gay-themed cable channel; the pugnaciously partisan Daily Kos website; and an AFL-CIO forum moderated by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who regards President Bush pretty much the way a fire hydrant regards a dog (to borrow from former House Speaker Jim Wright's pungent description of his feelings toward Newt Gingrich.)
Audience figures make the parties' posture toward Fox News relatively easy to understand. A survey released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that nearly three in 10 Republicans cited the Fox News Channel as their principal provider of news - more than cited any other single source. By comparison, only about one in nine Democrats named Fox News as their principal news source (which ranked it eighth).
Perhaps even more revealing of the campaigns' growing desire for control is their bipartisan caution about dealing with the broadcast networks — which, as Pew found, maintain substantial audiences in both parties. Candidates from both parties are making themselves available for interviews on the morning news programs — which provide broad exposure while subjecting the candidates to relatively brief questioning — and, to some extent, the evening news broadcasts as well. But with the exceptions of Democrat John Edwards and Republican John McCain, the leading contenders so far have ducked the Sunday interview shows traditionally considered a rite of passage for presidential candidates. Clinton and Giuliani have not yet appeared on "Face the Nation," "Meet the Press" or "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," while Romney has only submitted to one of Stephanopoulos' somewhat more informal "on the trail" interview segments. (Full disclosure: I have appeared on all three of the programs over the years.)
Jim Dyke, who was the communications director of the Republican National Committee and is now advising Giuliani, says the relative blackout reflects a straightforward cost-and-benefit calculation by the candidates as their options for reaching the public expand. "If you do a Sunday show and you get through it unscathed...then nobody cares," Dyke said. "Maybe the inside-the-Beltway types notice a little bit, but it's not going to change the narrative of what you're doing...that week. But let's say you go on and you have to face all this 'gotcha' stuff and you don't get through it very well, you have at least a day's worth of stories about how you're...not ready for prime time. They used to be big because they defined the commentary and punditry so much. I'm not sure they do that anymore. Plus it was an opportunity to reach so many people, which you have so many ways of doing now."
Betsy Fischer, the executive producer of "Meet the Press," believes that eventually all the candidates will decide they need to demonstrate the credibility that comes from handling sharp questions on the Sunday shows. "It's up to voters to decide if they are getting as much from a candidate watching their canned remarks on a website rather than watching them undergo tough questioning," she said.
But for now, alternatives such as YouTube and the candidates' own websites are attractive precisely because they allow the candidates to control their message in ways they cannot do on the Sunday shows, which are dominated by hosts who earn their pay cuffing around guests.
For some candidates, the new Internet tools are producing tangible benefits. Obama, the online leader, has clearly harvested at least one advantage from his popularity in cyberspace: a steady stream of online donors. Bill Burton, Obama's campaign spokesman, said the senator's online visibility has also helped recruit volunteers and raise his visibility in states beyond Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and the handful of others where the candidates are focusing their initial advertising and campaigning.
The other likely candidate who has gained the most from the internet is Thompson. He launched his possible candidacy through a series of postings earlier this year on right-leaning blogs that drew wide attention across the conservative movement. "Every time he popped up on one of those blogs, they just about shut down from the traffic," said Mark Corallo, a Thompson advisor. The Internet has also helped Paul reach an ardent, if limited, audience drawn to his libertarian message.
But it is still far from clear that the Internet is an effective way to reach persuadable voters in the early states that will decide the nominations. Many analysts believe that uncommitted voters, who tend to follow campaigns less closely, are probably less likely than voters already committed to a candidate to seek out new information sources such as YouTube or candidate websites. "It is my sense that it is easier to speak to supporters via [the new Internet options] and harder to use those mediums to speak to voters who are undecided," said Howard Wolfson, communications director for the Clinton campaign, in a judgment seconded by Corallo and others.
That helps explain why, despite all the buzz around the new Internet options, the contenders are already betting heavily on the most venerable tool of political communication: paid television and radio advertising. Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of TNS Media Intelligence/CMAG, a firm that tracks political ad buying, says that the 2008 candidates are purchasing television ads in Iowa at a far greater rate than contenders in the 2004 election did. Romney, he says, has already spent as much on Iowa advertising as the eventual Democratic nominee John Kerry did in the entire 2004 race. And for all the focus on "micro-targeting" and finding new ways to slice and dice the electorate for potential supporters, Tracey says, candidates are mostly buying ads where they always have — adjacent to the morning, afternoon and bedtime local news, what Tracey calls "the oceanfront real estate of political buying."
None of that surprises Andrew Smith, the director of the University of New Hampshire's survey center. His polls this spring found that the local New Hampshire and Boston television stations combined rank far above any other any option as the principal source of information for Democratic and Republican primary voters. Activists may be stampeding to watch the latest candidate clips on YouTube or the arguments between talking heads on Fox News and CNN, he says, but the undecided and softly committed voters who might tilt the critical New Hampshire primary next January are more likely today to be flipping through network summer reruns.
"To get to YouTube, you have to be driven there somehow — you already have to have that hook in your mouth," Smith said. "Those voters are the ones who are already paying attention. These voters, the marginal voters, are the ones who aren't paying attention. You have to force something in front of them. And the way you do it is by interrupting them when they're watching local news, or "Grey's Anatomy," or whatever. That's how you get the marginal voters: You force them to watch."
In other words, even in a political world where more information is available than ever, the voters who exert the most influence over the election's outcome may remain those who pay the least attention to the campaign. And that's something no candidate can control.
Ronald Brownstein is The Times' national affairs columnist.< |
