Several candidates now are using blogs and personal websites to stay in touch with voters and supporters. Using the internet to help support and run their campaigns is a great way to connect communities due to the mass number of people who use the internet on a regular basis. Having all of their information posted on the internet for anyone to see makes it easier to access and can be done whenever someone has free time. In communities where people are working hard and don’t have set leisure times worked into their schedule, watching the news to see updates on political campaigns can be hard. Internet sites created by these political people really cater to these types of communities.
Another important community that is truly benefitting from political campaigns being posted and run on the internet are young people and especially new voters. These new voters are inexperienced in terms of the voting experience, and are usually not as educated in politics and candidate stands as veteran voters. Having the candidates use the internet to post information about where they stand on issues regarding their election makes this information more accessible for young new voters who are more internet savvy than older voters who do not use the internet as much. Most canidades agree that the new voter vote is one of the most crucial groups of people to win over because their numbers are so huge. Having the internet on a candidate’s side will more likely bring young voters to their site where they can learn where a candidate stands on certain issues. If a candidate does not use the internet to cater to this community of voters, they are only hurting themselves.
To me, I see more positive things coming from using the internet to post blogs, information, videos, and forums than harmful things. Sure if a candidate uses the internet more to keep communities involved with their campaign they will shrink the older audiences who do not use the internet and get most of their information from the newspaper or television, but they will be attracting a greater number of internet users to their campaign and hopefully win their vote. I feel that a candidate that uses the internet primarily for their campaign will gather more communities to their campaign than a candidate who refuses to use the internet to aid them in their campaign. In this case, I’d have to argue that internet campaign information connects more communities than it divides. I guess we’ll just have to see how successful candidates are who use the internet than those who do not. Although just because you are using the internet to attract people, you still have to stand on the right side of issues so you can get people’s votes. It’s your political stance that wins votes, not how many members you have on your Facebook.
Below are a few graphs that I found regarding the political race of 2008. Here I have graphs that show the number of people who visited political websites during the election.
This chart shows the number of hits on Hillary's, McCain's, and Obama's website.
This is a graph of Democratic Candidates and the number of people who visied their websites.
Interestingly enough, this graph shows the number of people in the United Kingdom who vivited U.S. political websites. This shows that with the use of the internet, Candidates are able to get their message out to the people on a much larger scale. Also if people from outside the United States are interested in reading information about candidates can do so easily on their website.
I think that more people outside the US are watching the Presidential election more intently than people inside the US. I have had family outside the US during the past two Presidential Elections and the people in Brazil and New Amsterdam are extremely interested in what is happening on the campaign trail.
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