By DAVID HERBERT
Barack Obama's followers are ready, willing and able to continue their grassroots support for the president-elect -- and at higher rates than their Republican peers are willing to help the GOP -- according to a study released Tuesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Obama supporters have already been active on the Web: According to the report, 27 percent of wired Obama voters (those who use the Web) have gone online to find news about the transition or used the interactive transition site change.gov.
That these users tend to be younger and more affluent is no surprise. But black voters, who traditionally have less of a presence on the Web, are going online at higher rates: 31 percent of wired black Obama voters are getting involved online, compared to 25 percent of their white counterparts. And according to Quantcast, an Internet audience measurement service, 20 percent of the visitors to change.gov are black, far surpassing Internet averages.
Meanwhile, the GOP continues to struggle to draw its faithful online, continuing their comparatively poor online fundraising and netroots support from the 2008 election. Since Nov. 4, just 9 percent of wired voters who cast their ballots for John McCain have visited Web sites related to GOP rebuilding efforts.
The report also found that not only are Democrats more politically active online than Republicans, but they expect more outreach from their candidates. Among those who use social networking sites, 37 percent of Obama voters expect to be contacted through those sites by the president-elect, while just 8 percent of McCain voters believe the GOP will contact them this way. And among users of e-mail, 34 percent of Obama supporters anticipate e-mails from the White House, while only 20 percent of McCain voters expect the Republican Party to be in touch.
McCain's defeat may contribute to this expectation gap, but that isn't the whole story, according to Aaron Smith, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
"Even accounting for the tendency to have lowered expectations in the aftermath of an election loss, that [difference in social media usage] speaks to some key partisan differences in how voters -- at least at the moment -- view the Internet as a political communications medium," Smith said.
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