The North Carolina Senate Election on the Social Networks

Since Twitter and Facebook are being taken down by cyber-attacks today, it seems like a good time to survey the increasing use of social networks by politicians and candidates for political office. Let's use the developing 2010 election for Senator from North Carolina as an example.

The incumbent, Republican Richard Burr, replaced some guy named John Edwards back in 2004. Burr has been rated the 3rd most conservative Senator in a state that voted for President Barack Obama in 2008. He has also become infamous for his actions at the height of the financial collapse: he attended a briefing by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson on the freeze in financial markets where he was told that banks had stopped lending to each other. Before the general public were to discover the dire state of the economy, Burr called his wife and told her to take out as much money as possible from their bank account. This reckless incident led to him being nicknamed Richard "Bank Run" Burr. Just recently, he made this statement: "When people ask me if I enjoy what I’m doing, now is the time that I try not to answer the question."

There are many voters in North Carolina who want to relieve Richard Burr of the job he appears to loathe. He has a 36% job approval and hasn't been able to poll above 50% against any challengers. At the moment, the race is focused on who the actual Democratic challenger will be. There is an announced candidate, Kenneth Lewis, and a number of other prospective candidates, most prominent among those being Elaine Marshall and Cal Cunningham. Since two out of these three candidates haven't announced that they are running yet, it is difficult to gauge the comparative strength of each of them (we don't have fundraising numbers, or organizational strength, etc.). This is where reading the tea leaves of the reach of these politicians on social networks may be helpful.

As a standard, we can take a look at how the incumbent is currently running online. On Burr's website, there is a boilerplate box of different social networks. I have added the number of contacts/friends/followers for each network:

His campaign is on Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, MySpace, Digg, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Flickr. That is an impressive lineup. Taking a closer look reveals it to be somewhat hollow.

The Flickr account has one picture and it is just the same profile image he uses for his Facebook, Digg, and MySpace pages; furthermore, the account has zero "Contacts" (Flickr's equivalent of Friends or Followers).

There are no uploaded videos on his Youtube page and he has 8 "Subscribers".

The Digg profile is barren, with no "Favorites" and no "Friends".

His MySpace has 35 friends, which is less than my sister in high school has...

He does sport a respectable following on Twitter as well as Faceboook. These are the best metrics for social networks generally. Let's now check out the Democratic candidates.

Kenneth Lewis is the only prominent candidate who has announced, and he has raised over $100,000. He has a Facebook page with a healthy 701 followers. Unfortunately, he lacks any Twitter account that I could find easily. He does have a LinkedIn profile with 29 connections.

Elaine Marshall is the Secretary of State for North Carolina. She is rumored to be the presumptive front-runner for the nomination and Public Policy Polling (who has been doing most of the heavy lifting polling for the race so far) just put one out in the field this week and sent out a teaser tweet that Marshall was running around five points ahead of the other two Democrats. In addition to a draft Marshall Facebook group with 259 members, her Facebook account has 742 Friends. No Twitter to be found.

Cal Cunningham's campaign has been boosted by a robust draft Facebook group with 997 members and his personal Facebook account has 762 Friends. While he doesn't maintain a personal Twitter account, there is a draft Twitter account with 354 Followers. He also has a LinkedIn profile with 151 Connections, though it seems to be more of a professional networking tool for his legal practice than a political organizing tool. All in all, Cal seems to be the leader among the Democrats here, not a bad present for his birthday.

That's the basic picture of where things stand in North Carolina at the moment on the social networks. Richard Burr obviously has an advantage, but that is too be expected of an incumbent. All three of the Democratic challengers are making a decent showing, hopefully portending a very strong presence once the race heats up and candidates formally jump in. At that point, we can take another look and see how far each of them has come in organizing online.