The art of campaign politics is, in many ways, the art of networking. It’s a practice that’s hard coded into Washington’s DNA. Washington, or at least political Washington, lives and breathes by endless, obsessive networking — coffee meet-ups, happy hours, cocktail parties, and business cards power-blasted at anyone with a pulse and a Blackberry. To live and work in D.C. is to be caught in the perpetual rush to know and befriend — or at least make genial contact with — everyone. During election season, the town’s network culture expands as candidates take their campaigns — which are really just massive networking drives — on the road. But even the most relentless parade of stump speeches and town halls can only touch the few souls who are physically present. Consequently, candidates are increasingly using the Internet, with its limitless geographic scope, to connect with voters, substituting human interaction for web-based interactivity. And what better way to press the digital flesh than via the new wave of social-networking sites?
The top-three candidates on both sides of the aisle already have some sort of presence on either MySpace or Facebook, the two most popular social-networking sites. These sites allow users to join up, create profiles with pictures and descriptions of themselves (favorite movies, activities, astrological sign), and then create networks by adding other users as friends. Each user’s friends appear on his profile page, and users can browse the friends list of their friends, as well as invite these friends-of-friends to be on their own friends list (a practice that has come to be known as “friending”), creating increasingly larger concentric friend circles. So far, candidates on Facebook cannot add friends themselves, but other users can create lists of candidates they support and can post comments to the candidates’ profiles.
Facebook users can also join and create groups. These groups carry titles as basic as “Fans of the Politico” (74 members) and as detailed as “I Live In Florida and I Don’t Care How Cold it Is….i Will Continue To Wear Flip-flops Year Round!” (2,272 members). These groups serve mostly as markers of one’s affiliations, but they can be used by their organizers to send out messages to members.
The basic approach from each candidate is similar: post a profile; allow users to discuss and show support for the candidate; use system functions to alert users to upcoming events and campaign developments. But the degree to which the candidates utilize site features varies, as does the success that each has had at attracting supporters. As Internet campaigning becomes more prevalent, the profiles posted on these sites, as well as the users and comments they attract, are emerging as useful, if sometimes odd and incomplete, guides to the candidates, their supporters, and the always-changing face of online politics.
Obama’s success puts all the other candidates to shame. With more than 71,000 friends listed on MySpace and by far the most active candidate page on Facebook (his “wall,” the space on the profile where other users can post messages about candidates, has more than 4,200 posts), Obama is the crown prince of political social networking. With My.BarackObama.Com, he’s even created his own customized social-networking site.
This is perhaps not surprising considering his charisma and youthful appeal. Although social-networking sites are slowly gaining prominence amongst the older set, they are primarily the domain of the young. Facebook, in fact, initially allowed only college students to join, and only recently opened its virtual doors to the masses.
Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, the two other top-tier Democratic contenders, have also waded into the social-networking waters, but neither have received the same gushing response as Obama. Clinton, generally perceived as the Democratic frontrunner, has fewer than 30,000 MySpace friends on her most popular profile, which is supporter run (her official candidate page currently has less than 2,900), and just over 2,500 Facebook wall posts — numbers that pale in comparison to Obama’s. A search for Clinton-related groups turns up several hundred results, most with just a few members, though one titled “ANTI Hillary Clinton for President” has more than 53,000. Titles like this can lead to the creation of counter-groups and group wars, though seeing as its opposition, “Anti-ANTI Hillary Clinton for President,” has only 76 members, this barely seems to rank as a skirmish.
Despite Edwards’s support from the Democratic “netroots,” he has only 13,855 MySpace friends and less than 1,000 wall posts as of this writing. His fan-created Facebook group has 767 members and just under a hundred wall posts. The group’s description energetically declares, “This man will be the next President of the United States and he will rock at it. Give him your support and screw Hillary!” (Even amongst Democrats, Hillary-bashing is something of a trend on Facebook.) One recent wall poster enthuses that “a vote for Edwards would be like a vote towards awesomeness,” [sic] while another succinctly sums up his support with: “John Edwards. White. Male. Smooth talker. Good enough for me.”
Social-networking activity on the Republican side is comparatively sparse, and there is no clear leader. Mitt Romney leads the way on Facebook, with 946 wall posts. John McCain, in contrast, has less than 150, and though Rudy Giuliani has no official Facebook profile, his largest fan-created group, “America’s Mayor, America’s President, Giuliani 2008,” has less than 100 wall posts.
None of the three leading Republican candidates has managed to rack up the friends on MySpace either: McCain leads with 1,567, while Romney trails with 1,442. Giuliani’s official profile is not public, but fans have created an unofficial page titled “Rudolph Giuliani for President!!” It prominently features a picture of a Giuliani bobble-head doll and lists only 1,310 friends.
Of the Republicans, Romney seems to have made the most of Facebook’s features. He posts on his Facebook wall (mostly announcements) and is connected to 48 supporter-created pro-Romney groups. McCain, in contrast, is only connected to three. Romney provides the most information on his profile, which lets us know that he likes, among other things, waterskiing, watching movies, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Drive Life, and the music of Garth Brooks. Among his interests, where most people might list things like “long walks in the park” or even “politics,” he lists “strengthening this country and our economy,” “fixing our failing schools,” and “winning the war against the jihadists.” Let no one accuse him of not taking his presidential run seriously.
McCain’s Facebook profile is more sparsely filled out, but it still lets us know that he enjoys “sports,” “history,” Seinfeld, and Letters from Iwo Jima. Despite McCain’s minimal Facebook usage, he may still be the social-networking winner amongst the Republicans — not by virtue of what he’s done with the existing social-networking sites, but because he, like Obama, has created an “online community” of his own in McCainSpace.
Just as political blogs lit up the elections of the last few years by giving voice to the keyboard tapping masses, social networking sites — whether the name-brand entities like MySpace and Facebook or the custom created sites like McCainSpace — look to provide a similar forum for public discussion and connection in upcoming elections. Right now, Democratic candidates lead the way, but, as demonstrated by McCainSpace and Romney’s Facebook use, Republican candidates are clearly looking to get into the game.
What does it say that Democrats seem so far ahead right now? In some senses, it’s probably inevitable: Democrats have long played better to the activist youth that make up a large portion of current social-network users. But maybe it’s also yet another sign of the current, much-talked-about Republican struggles to find a satisfying candidate. As Epictetus wrote, “In prosperity, it is very easy to find a friend; in adversity, nothing is so difficult.”
(All numbers current as of the afternoon of March 20th.)
–Peter Suderman is managing editor of National Review Online.