Calling All Bloggers: Who Are You Endorsing?
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, October 3 2007
While a quick glance at the biggest political blogs suggests that none of the presidential candidates have caught fire, lots of political bloggers are declaring their allegiance to a candidate, either with a post or by putting a button or badge on their site.
But it's not all that easy to find those blogs. There are a couple of great sites devoted to particular candidates that serve as hubs or aggregators of bloggers devoted to that person. Those include Blogs for Fred (Thompson), RudyBlogs (Giuliani), The 35Percenters (Kucinich), and the DailyPaul (Ron Paul). (And if you google for "blogs for hillary" the top result is a site called Blogs Against Hillary, which has dozens of sites listed in its blogroll. I couldn't find a good Blogs for Hillary aggregator, though the campaign's HillaryHub obviously points to the best pro-Clinton blogging.) But as far as I can tell, none of the campaign websites have put up a big blogroll of all the bloggers supporting their champion. If you're a reporter looking to find local bloggers backing a particular candidate, good luck.
So, here's a call to bloggers everywhere: If you've decided on your presidential candidate, let us know. You can start by just adding a comment with your name, blog url, link to a post with your endorsement (if any), and if you feel like it, your city and state. We'll build a directory to make it easy to find out who is supporting whom, and we'll make it in such a way that it's easy to add additional names.
I spent a few hours today looking for this information, and emailing campaign internet staff to ask for their help. So far, here's what I got:
The Fred Thompson campaign was among the fastest to respond, and they sent me a list of more than 200 bloggers who have signed up to place a Thompson widget on their site. A random sample includes: Ordinary Everyday Christian, Exposing the Left, Alpha Patriot, The Real Gun Guys, Conservative Girl, Irate Nation, HolySmokeHams, and my favorite, Mike Turk's KungfuQuip. (Thanks Mike for helping out in responding so quickly.) Also, there's a big list of self-identified of Fredheads here, at Blogs for Fred.
Tracy Russo at the John Edwards campaign pointed me to this recent blog post on their site, which lists several bloggers for Edwards. Those include Dana Blankenhorn, David Mizner at MyDD, Perry Dorrell at Brains & Eggs, Mooncat at Left in Alabama, Jordan Klein, and Vince Leibowitz of the Texas blog Capitol Annex. Liebowitz lists several more bloggers who are Edwards fans here. They are The Texas Clover Leaf, TXSharon at Blue Daze, Refinish69 at Doing My Part for the Left, Hal at Half Empty, Neal A. at The Texas Liberal, Asa Hopkins of The Means and the Ends, and The Pennsylvania Progressive. Edwards also has earned the backing of Kari Chisholm at Blue Oregon.
Katie Harbath at the Rudy Giuliani campaign sent a nicely organized list, including: RudyRoots, Social Conservatives For Rudy, Flap's Blog/Giuliani Blog, Texans For Rudy, Vets4Rudy, Draft Rudy Giuliani, Students for Giuliani, and Bloggers 4 Rudy.
Matt Browner-Hamlin at Chris Dodd's campaign wrote back with these names: Big Tent Democrat of TalkLeft & MyDD, Dean Barker of Blue Hampshire, Gabe of CT Local Politics & Left Coaster, and Joh Padgett of Monticello & Blue Indiana, among others.
I'd love to add lists for all the other campaigns not mentioned here, but they haven't responded yet. I'll update this post as they do. And as I said above, if you're an individual blogger who wants to declare him or herself, chime in in the comments below.