Now that this year's Senate races are over, I wanted to take a quick look and see how our political bloggers fared in the election. It turns out that out of the 26 total campaign blogs, 13 were for winning candidates and 13 were for losing candidates. This factoid surprised me because I expected the Internet would play a more effectual role in this cycle's elections.
Joe Lieberman (I, CT), who recently defeated democratic candidate Ned Lamont and his netroots, recently described his triumph as a "victory of the mainstream over the extreme". This statement, along with his explanation of political bloggers, appeared in a November 9 article in the Hartford Courant:
In response to a question, he had trouble describing how the energy exhibited by the bloggers and other Lamont supporters might contribute to politics. He saw many of them as 'destructive.' 'There's too much venom in our politics. There's too much hatred,' Lieberman said, adding that his comment applied to both parties.
Perhaps Lieberman was right. Many of the Senate blogs were dominated by harsh criticism of opponents. It's possible that this negativity translated into bad press and actually turned voters away.
At any rate, Democratic candidate blogs, which tend to be a bit more well-developed than their republican counterparts, fared slightly better in this year's elections than Republican candidate blogs. Democratic candidates with blogs had a record of 11-5, while Republicans were 3-8. In the six races where both Republican and Democratic candidates had blogs (VA, PA, CT, WA, NV, UT), Republicans won 2 races and Democrats won 2 races, and Joe Lieberman, an independent, won the race in Connecticut.
Overall, the average margin of victory or loss by candidates with blogs was 20%. This figure was significantly smaller in 2-blog races, where the margin of victory/loss was just 5%.
I believe that these results indicate that there are many factors that contribute to a campaign victory. The presence of a campaign blog or aggressive campaign Web strategy may contribute to the outcome of the election, but will not be the deciding factor.
Below I've outlined the various candidate blogs and how they fared in Tuesday's Senate election:
