Forget all that talk about how the 2008 campaign is being revolutionized by the Internet, out in Iowa, things are still done the old-fashioned way:
IOWA CITY, Oct. 6 — Jean M. James, a retired art historian, has never read a blog, visited a candidate’s Web site, watched a video on YouTube or lingered over a MySpace page.
“I can’t be bothered,” Ms. James, sitting at a barbecue for Johnson County Democrats, said crisply before burying her nose in a Seymour Hersh article in The New Yorker.
It’s not that the Democratic presidential campaigns in Iowa haven’t tried to reach out. Their staffs have bombarded prospective caucusgoers with e-mail and text messages and with recorded voice mail from celebrities. They have built elaborate MySpace and Facebook pages in the candidates’ names, adding thousands of online “friends.” And aides adorned with new titles like “director of e-strategy” talk rapturously of how the Internet is transforming politics.
Yet even the campaigns concede that many caucusgoers in Iowa are happily encased in an old-media bubble, immune to the digital overtures of the modern presidential campaign and much more tuned in to commercials on television than to videos on a candidate’s Web site.
“It’s clearly true,” said Joe Trippi, a senior adviser to former Senator John Edwards, “that blogs and Web sites, and even some of the cool stuff that our team is doing in Iowa, has got less of an impact in Iowa.”
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According to a poll commissioned by The Des Moines Register, newspapers and television are still the predominant sources of information for likely Iowa caucus voters.
The poll, conducted by Selzer & Company, a firm based in Des Moines, asked likely caucus voters in May how they got their information, and found that the traditional media were still the favorites.
While more than 70 percent of the respondents said they watched candidate debates, read newspaper articles about campaigns and took in campaign advertisements on television or radio, only about 7 percent visited candidate pages on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook.
Given the relative age of the voting population in Iowa —- nearly 1/3 of the caucusgoers in 2004 were 65 or older — this isn’t entirely surprising, but it holds a lesson for the nation as a whole. While the Web, Facebook, and MySpace may be a great way to reach the 35 and under crowd, there’s an entire group of voters out there who still get their news and information the old fashioned way. In other words, the fact that a candidate is popular online doesn’t necessarily mean that their online popularity is reflected in the population as a whole.
