Digital divide separates GOP from Democrats

Republicans playing catch-up in Internet strategy as disparity grows

May 21, 2007

When David All, a former Republican congressional aide, launched a blog recently that he hopes will spur his fellow Republicans to bridge the digital divide, he did his best to sound upbeat. "Today our Revolution begins," he wrote. "Tomorrow we fight."

But implicit in his cheerleading was the acknowledgment that there is a widening gap between Democrats and Republicans on the Internet, and that his party will have to scramble to catch up. "For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000," he said in an interview.

Another Republican -- Michael Turk, who was in charge of Internet strategy for President Bush's 2004 campaign -- puts the problem his party faces more bluntly: "We're losing the Web right now."

The most recent figures from Nielsen/NetRatings provide one measure of the gap. Looking at the Web sites of presidential candidates from the two parties, it found that former senator John Edwards's site had about 690,000 unique visitors in March, when the Democrat's wife, Elizabeth, announced that she had a recurrence of cancer. That was more than the combined number of visitors to the sites of the three leading GOP contenders, Rudolph W. Giuliani (297,000), Sen. John McCain (258,000) and Mitt Romney (76,000).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18774299/


-- I thought the Republicans were stuck in 1951, not 2000...

:kick:

the only alernative place for "fair and balanced" news and information.

I think most internets-ers under age 40 don't have enough denial in them to completely ignore all the signals and indicators of Republican B.S. they are bombarded with in those tubes.

...they're stuck in Usenet circa 1987.

They're still shopping for Super-8 movie cameras... with sound.