Daily Digest: Clinton Discovers Young People!

The Web on the Candidates

• Everyone was wrong! Hillary Clinton pulled out a victory last night in the New Hampshire primary. See Mike Connery’s excellent analysis of how Clinton captured more of the youth vote (which doubled from 2004) and took a bite out of Barack Obama’s base.

• John McCain also won last night, and though his victory was more accurately predicted in the polls, he won by a wider margin than expected. This is two down for Mitt Romney, though he did win Wyoming.

• Before Clinton won yesterday’s primary, Jeff Jarvis wrote the he wonders “whether, quietly, Barack Obama is to become the first candidate elected by the internet.” It’s not that Obama ran his campaign online, Jarvis says, but that “he used it to speak to the right people and in ways that weren’t noticed or understood by big media.” That’s definitely part of the reason for Obama’s success, though in the comments Ed Cone is right to say that “It has to start with the candidate and the message. The net adds tools that enable the campaign.”

• The Bivings Report’s Todd Zeigler has been somewhat critical of Barack Obama’s website design in the past, remarking that the designers couldn’t find a place to put all of the site’s great features. Last week Obama unveiled a new design, and it’s more to Zeigler’s liking, though he complains about high loading times, courtesy of Flash and javascript. I agree: out with the Flash, back to HTML!

• After Obama’s Iowa victory, when the media immediately proclaimed Obama as the inevitable Democratic nominee, the Washington Post’s Jose Antonio Vargas looked at the netroots’ tepid reaction to his candidacy. Vargas makes it clear that liberal bloggers have “no leader or spokesman,” and he describes them as “a loosely knit community of intense partisans who want to elect Democrats and move the entire national conversation to the left” who are suspicious of Obama’s cross-partisan message of unity. But in the wake of Hillary’s New Hampshire victory, yet another media-constructed narrative has been deconstructed, and everything is again up in the air. Yay for democracy!

The Candidates on the Web

• Wired’s Sarah Lai Stirland highlights a surprising bit about government transparency from Hillary Clinton’s closing campaign speech Monday night. “We should even have a government blogging team where people in the agencies are constantly telling all of you, the taxpayers, the citizens of America, everything that’s going on so that you have up-to-the-minute information about what your government is doing, so that you too can be informed, and hold the government accountable,” Clinton said. Wha? Where the heck did that come from? As Stirland notes, the position, which may have been designed to appeal to younger voters, sounds very similar to the position Barack Obama outlined late last year. We’re not complaining, of course — we hope more candidates come around with these kind of statements. (You can view video of the bit here.)

• Stirland also points to the somewhat stale statements offered by the RNC and DNC in response to last night’s victories. The RNC posted a video from chairman Robert Duncan mouthing standard Republican talking points, and the DNC offered up a one-sentence rebuttal to John McCain and links to past blog posts about McCain on its website. Maybe it’s too early for the party committees to commit many resources to these rebuttals, but they could have been a tad more imaginative.

In Case You Missed It…

Joe Trippi is one of the few political consultants who speaks frankly, even to the detriment of his clients, and loves democracy even more than he loves politics. Ari Melber caught up with him for an hour-long conversation about his work for the John Edwards campaign, why Hillary Clinton might be the Howard Dean of 2008, and how the Iowa caucus is like the Internet.

Which would you rather have: A million-member email list or a network of 25,000 bloggers and 20,000 fundraisers? A look at Clinton vs Obama’s metrics leads Micah Sifry to one answer: a network is more powerful than a list.

The political web can be so hyper-focused on the moment that I’m still surprised when folks take a step back and produce in-depth videos and analyses about what makes voters tick. Yet two projects — Purple States and Hope for Change — do just this.