Pine Tree Politics

The Online Enthusiasm Gap

By Matthew Gagnon
January 15, 2010

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Republicans, it seems, learn quickly.

This time last year, the “old” in Grand Old Party seemed to epitomize the disease within the party – an aging demographic, complete incompetence in the online space, and little to no enthusiasm or energy.

Flash forward to today, and take a look at the Maine gubernatorial election, and you are likely to find something very different.

Thus far in the cycle, Republicans have demonstrated a clear and decisive advantage in online competence, and the grassroots online enthusiasm that such competence generates.

Consider some of the following Twitter stats:

Republicans

• Matt Jacobson – 1314 followers
• Bruce Poliquin – 288 followers
• Les Otten – 281 followers
• Peter Mills – 217 followers
• Paul LePage – 194 followers
• Steve Abbott – 51 followers
• Bill Beardsley – 15 followers

Democrats

• Rosa Scarcelli – 536 followers
• Steve Rowe – 507 followers
• Libby Mitchell – 152 followers
• Pat McGowan – 84 followers
• John Richardson – None

By any sense of measurement, Republicans have embraced and succeeded on this platform more than Democrats.  Republicans average 337 followers, and that is with Abbott and Beardsley literally just launching accounts in the last week and having low follower counts.  Democrats average 259 followers.  The top Republican is roughly 800 followers ahead of the top Democrat.

They send more messages, they interact with the community a great deal more than their Democratic counterparts, and they have attracted so much attention that there have even been attack accounts set up to push back at some of them.

If you go to Facebook you will find much of the same.

Steve Abbott in the course of a single week has captured 713 fans of “Abbott for Governor”.  In one week.  Peter Mills has 1934 friends on the platform.  Matt Jacobson has 1880 friends.  Steve Rowe, who was essentially the first one out of all of these candidates on Facebook, only has 1016 fans.  Libby Mitchell?  687 friends.  Scarcelli? 406 friends.  John Richardson isn’t even on Facebook.  Why does he hate new media so much?

But hey, this might just be nitpicky stuff.  Just how far does this disparity go?

If you look at the candidate websites, the differences are even more striking.  By a lot.

The Republicans are below, according to Compete.com – which measures absolute unique visitors to a website per month.  This is not page views, this is unique people going to the site.

You will note that the websites for Peter Mills and Paul LePage are not on this chart (obviously Abbott and Beardsley are not as they launched their sites AFTER December, which is the last point on the graph).  They are not there because they have too small of a sample size for compete to register.  This usually means they have low traffic, making them hard to track – but doesn’t always.  Sometimes there is a lag with compete (as there was for this website) – so that shouldn’t be taken to mean nobody is going to their sites.

None the less, Bruce Poliquin, Matt Jacobson and Les Otten all have had very substantial traffic to their sites monthly, averating between 1500 and 2000 unique visitors per month over the last three months.  If you go back further, you’ll notice that Otten’s site spiked big time when it was launched, for obvious reasons.

The Democrats, in contrast, are below.

As you can see, the same problem that afflicted Mills and LePage has done the same to John Richardson and Rosa Scarcelli, while McGowan’s website is (like Abbott’s) too new to measure.

But it is quite obvious what is happening here regardless.  Unlike the Republican trend line which is going up, the Democratic line is trending down.

More than that, the average traffic for the Democrats is roughly 500 unique views per month over the last three months.  Libby Mitchell got a lowly 137 uniques in December.  Rowe?  Even more impotent – he only netted 70 unique visitors.

For the record, Pine Tree Politics has been averaging between 2500 and 3500, and this month, we expect that to push well beyond 5000 uniques.  Just saying.

Okay, so you say new media penetration and website viewership aren’t enough to convince you?  How about interest on Wikipedia?  Wikipedia is the single most used research tool on the internet, and tends to be a remarkably useful tool to benchmark interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, etc.  In short:  when you want to know about something, you go to Wikipedia first.

Let us take a gander at how many people have been looking up our candidates in the month of December (Abbott has only had an article in January, so I took the first 15 days of January as our sample there):

Republicans

• Les Otten – 1039 views
• Peter Mills – 375 views
• Steve Abbott – 315 views in only the last 15 days
• Matt Jacobson – 212 views
• Paul LePage – No article
• Bruce Poliquin – No article
• Bill Beardsley – No article

Democrats

• Libby Mitchell – 429 views
• Steve Rowe – 352 views
• John Richardson – 203 views
• Rosa Scarcelli – 177 views
• Pat McGowan – No article

Some decent performances from a couple Democrats – but it should be noted that some of that performance is atypical – Libby Mitchell, for example, was profiled by Politico as one of the up and coming politicians to watch in 2010 – something that no doubt generated interest, but mostly national interest.  The strong performances from Otten and Mills is standard, Abbott has not had any kind of national interest bump from the media, and Jacobson is actually in a down month – he typically does better than 212.

The disparity is not nearly as bad on Wikipedia as it is everywhere else, but it still exists, and fits directly into this narrative.

So what does all of this mean?

Well, we are talking about vague and general assumptions and observations here, but one thing I think should be unmistakable:  the Republicans have identified online grassroots organization and activation as a major priority and are putting in some genuine effort into exploiting this former weakness.

The Democrats by comparison seem to not place this as a priority.  You can tell from looking at most of their activity (Scarcelli seems to be the one exception, though her efforts have not netted her quite the success of the Republicans none the less) that many of them are just engaging in this space because somebody told them that if they didn’t they would be mocked.

But more than that – the Republican horse race is simply more interesting.  The characters are more dynamic it seams, with more storylines, more conflict, more variety, and overall more energy.  This has translated in more curiosity, more interest, and more enthusiasm in these early stages of the campaign.

Will that momentum hold as we move into the spring and summer, and the primary season is eventually left behind us?  Will Democrats catch up in interest and engagement?  Will Republicans continue to innovate?  Will any of this matter to boots on the ground?

These are open questions.

But as a Republican new media communications consultant myself, it does make me damn proud to see these candidates identifying their previous weaknesses in this area, and addressing them.

Tags: 2010 Democratic Gubernatorial Primary, 2010 Gubernatorial Race, 2010 Republican Gubernatorial Primary, Bill Beardsley, Bruce Poliquin, Eliot Cutler, John Richardson, Les Otten, Libby Mitchell, Matt Jacobson, Pat McGowan, Paul LePage, Peter Mills, Rosa Scarcelli, Steve Abbott, Steve Rowe