Next Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts to fill the remaining three years of Ted Kennedy's term in the U.S. Senate is drawing a lot of attention, not only as the latest test of the national political winds, but also because if Republican Scott Brown defeats Democrat Martha Coakley, the Democrats will be down to 59 votes in the Senate (counting the two independents) and the health care bill may die on the vine. Both national parties are pouring money and troops into the state and the polls suggest it could be a close race. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to see what the online metrics might tell us about next Tuesday's vote. And on the face of it, Brown is surging.

Here's a rough draft of what I'm going to say at tonight's "Digital Democracy Debate" with author Matthew Hindman at Yale. Let me know in the comments if you think I've missed anything or gotten anything wrong.

Hindman is the author of "The Myth of Digital Democracy," which argues that a) the internet is just reinforcing elite voices in politics rather than opening the process to more diverse voices, b) that we live in a "Googlearchy" ruled by search engines that concentrate attention on just a handful of "winner-take-all" sites, and c) that the idea that the internet is empowering more ordinary people to be active participants in the process is basically a myth. You can read shorter versions of his argument in his recentinterview with NPR's On the Media, or this article he wrote for the Berkman "Publius" Project last year. Or read his book. It's well-written and provocative, even if it's basically wrong.

It appears everybody is putting the wrong headline on the new report on "The Internet and Civic Engagement" from the experts at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Online politics reserved for rich," says BBC News. "Study finds web no equalizer for civic engagement," says the Associated Press. "Internet still not for everyone," says the Columbus Dispatch.

Well, duh! Participation in civic life has long been stratified by income and education in America; in 1948, people in the bottom one-sixth of all earners voted at less than half the rate of people in the top one-third bracket (33% to 74%). In 2004, that gap was just slightly smaller, though overall participation rates had improved (respectively, to 56% and 90%). [Source: the American National Election Studies, the best longitudinal data on American political behavior.] Expecting the Internet, which has only become a mainstream arena for politics in the last four years, to somehow erase, overnight(!?), decades of deeply ingrained cultural habits and deliberate governmental policy designed to reduce political participation strikes me as, um, a bit silly.

For some time now, we've been hearing that conservatives dominate the usage of Twitter when it comes to online politics, and the appearance of TweetProgress, a new aggregator for progressive twitterers, only appears to be reinforcing that notion. For example, today The Hill's story on this topic notes that "many more conservatives use #TCOT than liberals use #p2," citing the leading hashtags employed by conservative and liberals, respectively, on the messaging platform. David All, a leading conservative consultant who has written a popular guide for rightwingers using the site (and a techPresident contributing blogger) was on Twitter today pointing out that there were 3,911 uses of the #TCOT hashtag today alone, compared to just 2,396 of #p2, and "almost all" of the former were "conservative/on-message" while the latter were a "mix of libs/cons/media" posting.

Leaving aside how David managed to sift through and characterize more than 6,000 individual tweets (yes, he's energetic, but that energetic?), I'm not convinced that this is the most salient metric for judging which side is more dominant on Twitter. For one thing, it wouldn't be hard for an intern (or a bot) to simply re-tweet every tweet that appears with #tcot in its text for anyone to artificially inflate the hashtag's usage numbers. David notes that over the course of one week's analysis, he found 5,500 unique users who employed #tcot, which may be a more telling sign of how well the Right is using the platform, but I think this is still oversimplifying the question.

Are conservatives out-organizing progressives on Twitter, as a recent story on CNN reported? And does their seeming dominance matter?

For online activists in America, these are hard questions to answer, not least because a) "organizing on Twitter" is still (and may always be) a very loose process; b) usage of popular hashtags like #tcot ("top conservatives on Twitter," launched November 28, 2008) or #p2 ("progressives 2.0, launched in response February 13, 2009") is an imperfect measure of strength; c) judging by top follower numbers, Twitter's audience appears to lean liberal (more on that in a separate post); and d) we're still figuring out what Twitter is, and isn't, good for in terms of political battles (i.e. it's clearly good for rapid-response message wars, but not [yet?] good for raising money, judging from the closure of TipJoy, for example).

Future Majority's Mike Connery points us to an innovative new campaign that lets cash-strapped college students contribute activist dollars while doing nothing more than buying their required text books. Through Textbooks4Change, about 7% of the cost of books purchased through the Amazon.com Associates program goes directly to the Courage Campaign's work to repeal California's Prop 8. Since the percentage is skimmed off Amazon's share of the profit, the student-activist's wallet isn't any lighter than it would otherwise be.

And considering that college text books are often so expensive that you think they must be priced in Zimbabwean dollars, that money could add up. Details here.