Daily Digest: Caucus Day is Finally Here

The Day Is Finally Here Edition

The Web on the Candidates

• A couple of days before today’s Iowa caucuses, MySpace held its own “MySpace primary.” We had reservations about the format — mostly, the fact that participants could apparently vote as many times as they like — but, for what it’s worth, the winners were Barack Obama and Ron Paul. According to the press release, more than 150,000 MySpace users voted, 83% of which plan to vote in the primaries and 91% of which plan to vote in the general election, and the average age of the respondents was 29. Those are certainly hopeful numbers, but but we think this could have been a bigger deal if Myspace had wanted it to be.

• If you check out Eventful’s Hottest Demands Worldwide page you’ll find none other than Barack Obama at the top of the page (just above the Wu-Tang Clan!). He isn’t alone among candidates; Dennis Kucinich is ninth on the page (just above a band called The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus), Mike Huckabee is 14th, and John McCain and Hillary Clinton are much further down. What does it all mean? It could have some connection to today’s caucuses, though the top spots demanding the candidates are places like Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, and College Station, TX. Of course, Iowans don’t have to demand candidates since they’ve been there nonstop for the last year.

• OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers has had three “primary season epiphanies,” a couple of which are pretty interesting. “I am tired of people telling me that the world is watching our elections,” Bowers says while describing epiphany #1. Me too! “No, they are not,” says Bowers, who points out that they the primary elections are the “17th highest rated story on the ‘World’ section of Google News
  .” It’s good to keep that in perspective. His third epiphany (I’m skipping #2) is that there “are about four million regular participants in the progressive blogosphere, and no group of that size acts with once voice.” Yes!

• Writing at the Huffington Post, Beverley Davis describes a new site called Earfl that, quite simply, lets people record audio testimonials on the site. Its’ a perfect way for voters to voice their support, so the site coincided its launch with the caucuses. While it’s a pretty basic site at the moment, it’s easy to click on a “Joe Biden” tag and hear supporters’ statements. Pretty cool.

• Data analyzer supreme Matt Pace of Compete looks through Mike Huckabee’s Attention metric — the “time spent on his campaign website as a share of all time spent online in the U.S” — and finds that Huck peaked on December 3rd, exactly a month before today’s Iowa caucuses, and his numbers have been dropping significantly ever since. Our own Hitwise charts show pretty much the exact same thing, except according to our stats his drop started later, around December 20th. This may not bode well for Huck.

• While you’re busy chartin’ around, check out our Technorati charts. Blog mentions for most of the candidates have predictably shot up in the last three or four days, but mentions of Hillary Clinton, which have always been higher than her competitors, are particularly high.

The Candidates on the Web

• Townhall’s Matt Lewis notes that Mitt Romney has taken to a new technology to get to Iowa voters. About 5,000 households apparently participated in a “tele-townhall” conference call with Romney Tuesday night, and were even asked to press ‘1’ if they wanted to caucus. The comments below Lewis’ post are worth checking out — is using a new technology enough to win over voters still skeptical about Romney’s commitment to conservative values?

• Mitt also has a new feature that, as techPresidenter Colin Delany writes, is “taking robo-calling to a whole new level.” You put in your name and a friend’s name, and an application will record a personalized message from Mitt himself!

• Is Barack Obama advertising on Drudge? Marc Ambinder has a screenshot of an Obama banner ad, targeted at Iowans, running across the Drudge Report. But the Obama campaign told Ambinder that the appearance is just a mix-up. Josh Marshall, no stranger to the vagaries of online advertising, reminds us that online ads are usually managed by third-party vendors, and sometimes they can show up in the darndest places (just ask Mitt Romney, whose ads showed up on Gay.com).

• Mike Huckabee has taken his close relationship with the blogosphere to the next level. Liberal watchdog site Think Progress reports that, while speaking to a group of bloggers, Huckabee joked that they should clog up the hotel’s wireless network to stop journalists from filing negative reports about him and that, if they managed to do so, they’d be “doing the Lord’s work.” I always knew bloggers had something special going on. Weird theology aside, Think Progress might want to get new batteries for its humor detector; it’s making too much out of a patented Huckabee quip.

• Remember TV Bloopers and Practical Jokes, the show with Ed McMahon and Dick Clark? Maybe we should resurrect it and make it about politics. If we did, this video, of David Beasley, former Governor of South Carolina, messing up a Mike Huckabee pitch, might make the cut. One problem: I don’t find the blooper that funny. Of course, neither was the show… (via PrezVid)

• Chris Dodd recorded this nice New Year’s thank-you video to the blogosphere this week. It’s a very grateful message to a group that’s helped keep his campaign alive, but he can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a hint that he’s about to call it a day. We will see.

In Case You Missed It…

Micah Sifry had a trifecta yesterday with three great posts:

He discovers a DailyKos poll that reveals how little online activists visit the candidates’ home pages.

He reports that a MoveOn poll of Democratic primary voters shows how crowded the Democratic field still is.

He announces the Facebook Youth Primary, a production of the League of Young Voters and MoveOn Political Action.

He has two speeds. Walk, and Kill.