Analysis - As Americans prepare for November 2008, the "cyber election" mandating much of the focus on campaigns has come into full swing. TG Daily had a look at the divide in how Republicans and Democrats are handling the new technology.

The history books may document the 2006 midterm election as the first major election to have the Internet as a significant influence, as it was the first one to see YouTube and official candidate MySpace pages.  However, because of the increase in popularity in these and other online services, and by the enormous impact of a presidential election, the 2008 race is poised to use the World Wide Web like never before.

One of the main things seen for the first time in the dawning of the 2008 election is the addition of a special "face the candidates" page on YouTube.  Sixteen candidates, eight each on the Republican and Democratic side, each have their own official YouTube pages with anywhere from a couple dozen to hundreds of campaign videos.  Users can also filter official videos by issues such as education, immigration, and health care.

YouTube has made this presidential debate the first one where voters can literally see the candidates at every one of their campaign stops, see their best debate moments, and watch over specially made video blogs or commercials. And with YouTube available on various mobile phone services, the official videos are viewable on demand anytime, anywhere.

The data used for this article was limited to the top six candidates, because candidates beyond that on both the Republican and Democratic side havean estimated support of only 1% or less of the voters.  The popularity information was based on the latest USA Today/Gallup poll dated December 2. The YouTube view numbers were recorded during the evening of December 6.  The top five videos were determined by ranking the number of views of video clips that have been officially posted by each respective campaign.



One of the most intriguing facts we found was that the number of views of the Democratic candidates' top five videos is almost perfectly correlated to their respective poll rating from USA Today/Gallup. In fact, the correlation value is an astounding 0.982. That is about as linear as it can get.

Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, and Joe Biden, each with 4% of the vote, are clustered together in relation to where the top three candidates are.  John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton have all pulled out of the pack. Clinton is way out in front with more than 2.6 million views, followed by Obama and Edwards, right in line with where they fall on the primary poll.



Obama has the greatest lead over his competitors with regard to the number of users who have subscribed to his YouTube page.  He takes the top spot with just over 13,000 subscribers.  That's almost twice of his closest competitor, Clinton, who has around 7000 subscribers.

Kucinich's devotees pull him ahead of Biden and Richardson with nearly 5000 subscribers, which even puts him ahead of Edwards, though just barely.  



Obama also takes top rank in the Democratic party for having the most official YouTube videos, at just over 300.  Edwards is close with 270 videos, followed sequentially by Richardson, Biden, and Kucinich. Surprisingly, Clinton has the fewest official videos at 116.

Clinton's campaign is clearly going for quality over quantity, given the fact that the top five videos on her page have a combined 2.6 million views, which puts her ahead of all Republican candidates as well.



The biggest disparity within the Democrats is in the number of comments received for each candidate's official videos.  John Edwards, who kind of just blends in the background most of the time, actually had the most actively commented official videos on YouTube.  His top five videos in terms of number of comments reach a total of nearly 9000.

Obama is next at just over 8000, and then no other candidate comes close.  Kucinich is third, benefiting from being the oddball of the group.

Overall, though, the top three candidates seem to be the ones who stand out the most on YouTube's official channels.  However, there's actually a completely different phenomenon happening on the Republican side.

Read on the next page: How the Republican side compares.