Does the Republican Base Skew Old?
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 22nd, 2007 4:01 pmThe lively conversation about the GOP online continues. This time, Eric Frenchman, John McCain’s Internet advertising guru, weighs in.
Eric’s argument basically boils down to: the Republican base skews older, hence they’re less likely to be online. It’s a compelling argument, and one I’ve heard before, but one I’ve got to swat down.
The last two elections in particular have seen a pronounced young voter skew towards the Democrats. Here are the exit polls from 2006 and 2004, Democrats first:
2006
18-29: 60% - 38% Dem (D + 22)
30-44: 53% - 45% Dem (D + 8 )
45-59: 53% - 46% Dem (D + 7)
60+: 50% - 48% Dem (D + 2)
2004
18-29: 54% - 45% Kerry (Kerry + 9)
30-44: 53% - 46% Bush (Bush + 7)
45-59: 51% - 48% Bush (Bush + 3)
60+: 54% - 46% Bush (Bush + 8 )
In these elections, young voters were very much the outliers, supporting Democrats by far more than any other group. And older voters, relatively speaking, did realign with Republicans. In 2000, Bush and Gore were even stevens in every age bracket.
But that assumes that the Internet as a political medium is still dominated by 18-29 year olds — the only age bracket where you could justify a huge Democratic edge based on body count alone. Which runs against every shred of evidence I’ve seen about the online world. I’m 28, and it seems like just about everyone in the blogosphere is older than I am. Quantitatively, the numbers hold up. According to last year’s Blogads survey, the average age of a conservative blog reader worked out to about 47. For liberals, it was 43. Not exactly a huge age gap.
(This hypothesis might validate when you’re talking about MySpace/Facebook, which are composed almost exclusively of 18-29 year-olds. But is anyone willing to argue that these sites now occupy prime position when it comes to online politics? That they’re more important than YouTube or blogs?)
The Demographic snapshot of DailyKos.com readers reveals that while all adult age groups are represented, there is a very large skew toward adults 65 and older. In fact, this age group is nearly four times as likely as the norm to visit the site.
And here’s the full breakdown of DailyKos readers from comScore:
| % Composition of Unique Visitors | Composition Index | |
| Persons - Age | ||
| Persons: 18-34 | 20.7 | 79 |
| Persons: 35-44 | 17.5 | 95 |
| Persons: 45-54 | 27.7 | 137 |
| Persons: 55-64 | 12.2 | 104 |
| Persons: 65+ | 21.9 | 375 |
The age differentials between the parties are nothing compared to the age skew of primary voters and non-voters within the parties. I’ve done voter file analysis before and the median age of a primary voter can range upwards of 55 — in both parties. So, Eric is right to caution a balanced approach online and off — but that advice probably applies about equally to Democrats.
In the Blogads survey, there’s support for another theory often advanced to explain the difference between the online right and left. That Republicans have kids. Here’s a breakdown of household size; over 100% indicates a greater liberal propensity in that group.
| 1 | 143.4% |
| 2 | 109.5% |
| 3 | 102.2% |
| 4 | 82.6% |
| 5 | 49.7% |
| 6 | 33.1% |
| 7 | 28.4% |
| 8+ | 34.6% |
These are fairly staggering numbers. Liberals are fully 40% more likely to live by themselves. Conservatives are twice as likely to have 3 kids, and 3 times as likely to have 4 kids or more.
Intuitively, I think that has a lot more to do with levels of activism than age. After all, retired people should have a lot of time on their hands and are outsized participants in other aspects of the political process. But someone with kids (and presumably a steady job to support those kids) is a lot less likely to have time to refresh Daily Kos. My household size recently exploded from 2 to 4, and I can safely say that my blogging output has gone down. Paging Henry: I want the next Blogads survey (probably in 2008) to break down how much time conservatives and liberals spend online in a week. And I want a breakdown of activism levels by household size (doable this year).
Ultimately, I not only believe the age analysis is inaccurate. I think it’s poisonous. To claim that the Internet is primarily a venue for young people cheapens it. The Internet is more mainstream than that. Yes, teen texting fiends are the most voracious users, but by and large, they’re not interested in politics yet. There’s another audience of people who do go online and do vote and that’s who you should be focused on. Remember, that when we’re talking about online politicos, 35 is still young. The average online citizen is 45. It’s in that late 30’s, early 40’s age range that online news consumption hits its sweet spot. And that demographic was the second most Republican group in the last Presidential election.
Tagged: demographics 
online politics
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Dirty Laundry on A1 of the Post
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 21st, 2007 10:02 amRepublican Internet strategists David All and Mike Turk have been very critical about where our party is online. Today, those concerns are channeled on the front page of the Washington Post in a piece by Jose Antonio Vargas.
What are your thoughts on this article and how does it mirror your experiences online? In my pieces on online activism last week, some of you left extremely informative comments on why you do or don’t get involved online. I’d like to drill down some more. How do you see the blogosphere? As a tool for getting informed? Getting involved? Or both? And if you don’t participate, why not?
Without disagreeing with the entire piece, I’d like to point out a couple of substantive flaws in the article. While not exactly the world’s biggest deal, this is illustrative of how reporters spin the facts:
Furthermore, ABC PAC, the conservative fundraising site, has raised $385 so far for Republican presidential hopefuls; Act Blue, its liberal counterpart, has collected about $3 million for Edwards alone.
Yes, but as I pointed out last January, Edwards is using ActBlue as his fundraising vendor. Edwards is using the tool to drive all of his online donations while, by and large, no other candidate is using either site to drive to donations. Big difference. The true apples-to-apples comparison is with ActBlue’s “draft” and other candidate accounts, which to be fair, isn’t exactly favorable to our side either, but not exactly the $3 million to $385 blowout Vargas says it is. For perspective, Hillary Clinton has raised a grand total of $416 through ActBlue.
In light of current developments, I also find this observation pretty amusing:
“What was once seen as a liability for Democrats and progressives in the past — they couldn’t get 20 people to agree to the same thing, they could never finish anything, they couldn’t stay on message — is now an asset,” Leyden said. “All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it.” …
Moulitsas will concede the influence of conservative blogs and Web sites in the successful attack on Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during his 2004 presidential campaign, when he was accused of exaggerating his service record during the Vietnam War, and on CBS News for its reporting on Bush’s war record. He also concedes that Republicans have their own popular blogs, such as InstaPundit, RedState and Michelle Malkin’s — sites, he asserts, that are parts “of the Republican noise machine, affiliated to talk radio and Fox News.” Malkin, the doyenne of the conservative blogosphere, is a frequent contributor to Fox News.
I’d just point to the last 72 hours: the blogs absolutely raging against the President and Senators of their own party on the immigration deal. Or the RedState “war” on the House Republican leadership, which has inspired some over at Townhall to take issue. I don’t think that’s exactly the picture of drones marching in lockstep with our leadership.
Both sides absolutely love to paint themselves as paragons of tolerance and open-mindedness. The Democrats are disorganized and can’t get on message. You also hear the same from conservatives, who often say of ourselves that we don’t fear open debate — we’ve got fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and national security conservatives.
Seriously — stop. If either side were completely right, they’d have serious trouble winning elections because they could never get their people in line. And the notion that the left-blogs harbor open debate is pretty laughable. On what? The Iraq war? Tax cuts? Name a serious policy issue where Kos, Atrios, Hamsher, and Aravosis disagree. As a matter of fact, the left-blogs have largely conceived themselves as an effort to get their party to speak with a single voice on Iraq.
Tagged: online politics
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links for 2007-05-21
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 21st, 2007 7:29 am-
NZ Bear strikes a blow for open source government by putting the entire immigration bill online and letting everyone comment.
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links for 2007-05-17
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 17th, 2007 7:22 am
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The Future of Politics
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 16th, 2007 9:39 pmWhat does the conservative movement need now?
There seems to have been a lot of debate on that question lately, but I think the answer is simple as ever: ideas. Innovations in public policy in the ’80s and ’90s — from privatization to school choice to full-throated support for lower taxes to personal accounts for Social Security — reinvigorated our movement. This agenda is not complete by any stretch of the imagination — but what are the new ideas that will keep our movement fresh and on point for 2008?
Congressman Eric Cantor’s Solutions Factory is a great attempt at tackling this central challenge for our party. There you can submit your ideas for America, and rate and comment on others’ ideas. And as with most things that come directly from the people, a lot of the ideas are actually pretty good. I think sites like this have the potential to revolutionize policy formulation, and done right, serve the purpose that great think tanks like AEI and Heritage did in seeding the ideas for the Reagan Revolution.
What’s your idea for the future?
Tagged: eric cantor ideas infrastructure strategy
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Blogging Is Not About Writing
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 16th, 2007 2:38 pmMy Townhall colleagues Dean Barnett and Matt Lewis seem to have gotten into a bit of a scrape with my friend Rob Bluey (of RedState) on the merits of activism vs. punditry in blogging.
On one level, I agree with Matt that a fusionist approach is needed. To harken back to the analog era, conservatives would never have gained power had it not been for institutions like AEI and Heritage whose ideas gave our movement a driving impetus. But we’ve also had to master the instrumentality of elections to sustain that power. More to the point, Morton Blackwell famously said, “Personnel is policy.” That applies just as much to political leaders as it does to the appointees Blackwell was referring to. The blogosphere has expended a lot of energy trying to convince politicians who aren’t very ideological of the pressing need to control spending. Wouldn’t that energy have been better spent recruiting, training, and electing a new generation of political leaders who believed in smaller government to the core?
That means we need more activism, not less. It’s what the netroots has done in elevating people like Jon Tester and Jim Webb who are far to the left of their respective states but convey a red state, tough-guy aura that trumps ideology. It’s easier to influence policy when you’ve helped to put people you trust on the inside.
All in all, I think Dean’s final statement captures the dilemma in full:
I’m a writer, not an activist, and I have no interest in changing. Although, come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind 600,000 visits a day like Markos gets.
But isn’t that the point? We can’t magically snap our fingers and get 600,000 visits just doing what we’re doing now. We’ve made a conscious choice to sacrifice quantity for quality. The same 50-100K daily readers that the top conservative blogs get are the same 50,000 people who will buy a well-written conservative title from Regnery and the same 150,000 who subscribe to National Review. That’s just the market for conservative opinion content.
Blogging on the left succeeds because it’s not about writing. It’s no coincidence that Kos’s writing style is almost comically pedestrian. It’s not about wordplay. It’s about attitude, and expressing a basic world view that millions of people share — only more so. In the same way that Tom Paine got more readers than Montesquieu, Kos gets more readers than Dean. If Dean wanted to be Kos, he’d need to drop about 50 IQ points.
Tagged: activism blogging redstate townhall
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links for 2007-05-15
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 15th, 2007 7:23 am-
Great and timely response from the NRSC
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links for 2007-05-13
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 13th, 2007 7:20 am-
Very interesting rundown on FF3 and microformats. As an aside, there’s a serious case to be made that Mozilla (and not Google) is the Great Web 2.0 Company.
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links for 2007-05-12
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 12th, 2007 7:26 am-
Our candidate in MA-5 (via Liz Mair)
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The Richardson ads are good ads for a back-of-the-pack contender. Even better is the subject line of a Richardson campaign email driving me to this page: “Freaking Great.”
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Philly Politics: A Contact Sport
by Patrick Ruffini :: May 9th, 2007 9:09 pmPhiladelphia politics is one subject MyDD’s Chris Bowers and I could probably have a civil conversation on. City Democrats go to the polls next Tuesday to choose their Mayoral nominee for the fall election, and here’s Bowers’ rundown of the state of play. With all due respect to the local Republican party, this year the Democratic primary is tantamount to the general election. The only wildcard being a potential independent run by former GOP standardbearer Sam Katz, for whom I worked in the 1999 election.
The charm of Philly politics, despite it being virtually impenetrable for Republicans, is this: for good or ill, it has the most metrics-driven elections in America. Anyone who’s done GOTV there knows what I mean — on Election Night, you know exactly how many votes you’ve moved. I ran the 27th Ward for Katz in 1999 (where Bowers lives, providing some color on the Democratic Ward Leader’s drug issues) and I knew exactly the difference we made through voter registration and turnout. Identity politics (read: race) has tended to make Philly politics a zero-sum game. Here’s another not so pleasant aspect: In one election, we were banking on a strong showing in a cluster of divisions (the vernacular for precincts). And it came, except one division, where we got killed. Was there some secret demographic sauce we missed? No — our opponent had simply bought the committeeman in that holdout division.
I know what many of you are thinking: fraud. And though I’ve never personally seen it (intimidation and violence, yes), I will say this. In the 2000 Bush vs. Gore race, I was part of a roving poll-watching operation in three wards. And when I looked at the precinct-by-precinct returns some weeks later, I noticed that the pro-Gore swing from 1996 was persistently about 3 points less in the areas we visited than in a similar divisions we did not have a presence in. Again, I can’t document any foul play here, but this pattern (and I follow this stuff pretty closely) has always struck me as more than mere coincidence.
With all this said, a lot of attention lately has focused on how the current mayoral field has broken the mold of Philly’s divisive, racialized politics. Until recently, self-funding businessman Tom Knox, who is white, dominated the field in a primary electorate that is probably 60% or more African American. The two candidates with the best name ID and organization at the beginning (Congressman Chaka Fattah and Bob Brady, who is also the local Democratic boss) are putting in middling performances at best.
Though the choices are less awful than they were in the last contested primary, the same patterns are reasserting themselves, and it now doesn’t look as though Knox will prevail. Support seems to be coalescing around black former City Councilman Michael Nutter, who has sparred with the incumbent mayor John Street — whose eight years have been an unmitigated disaster. Bowers seems in awe of Nutter’s performance, but what he is really doing is recreating the white liberal + middle class black coalition that got John White 24% in 1999 and adding to it some outstanding low-hanging fruit in both the black and white communities. Knox looks like a less offensive version of Marty Weinberg, a well-funded Rizzocrat hack who ran in ‘99 — add together where Knox and Brady are polling now, and you get Weinberg’s 31% from the ‘99 primary. Clearly weakened is Fattah, who seems to be filling the John Street slot — except after eight years of skyrocketing crime and corruption, it’s not the most compelling message. At the end of the day, I’m still willing to bet that the number of voters who cross racial lines will be relatively small.
My Philly days are behind me, but its politics continue to provide endless fodder for good conversation. But things seem to be dead serious now. The city is now the murder capital of the U.S. While most American cities held steady after the urban renaissance of the ’90s, Philadelphia slipped back. Our worst fears about Street and his band of inept cronies proved to be true. And 1999 was probably the last year in which the city could have even conceived of electing a Republican mayor. Here’s hoping the current crop of contenders can do better.
Tagged: michael nutter philadelphia tom knox
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