MoveOn Endorses Obama
In what will probably be the big Democratic political news of the day, MoveOn.org announced its membership had decided to endorse Barack Obama for president. It appears that Obama narrowly got over the two-thirds-vote hurdle that MoveOn had created for this cycle in terms of an endorsement. In 2000, Howard Dean narrowly missed a lower majority-vote threshold for the endorsement.
What will the impact be? The MoveOn press release linked to above unsubtly notes that 1.7 million members of the organization live in Super Tuesday states. There will also almost certainly be an unsubtle effort in the news media to link Obama to some of MoveOn's more controversial actions, particularly the famous "General Betrayus" ad last September. But at a time when the Super Tuesday competition was already tightening up, the endorsement will most likely be viewed as another contributor to a late surge by Obama.
Comments
One of the things I'm very curious about is the synergies betwee MoveOn's network-style organization and the Obama campaign's use of social network sites like MySpace and Facebook. A thread just started in the discussion group on Obama's Facebook profile ... any idea where this is likely to be discussed on MySpace?
Posted by: Jon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 1, 2008 02:42 PM
There's a fascinating thread in the Obama discussion groups on Facebook tracking the number of people joining the group. The trend started a couple of days ago, and really accelerated today. Worth checking out.
http://www.facebook.com/board.php?uid=6815841748
Posted by: Jon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 1, 2008 05:30 PM
Add the endorsement to the fact that Obama has been outperforming the polls in each state primary by 7-8% - when the votes are finally counted. That includes Hillary's AMAZING NH, NV and FL wins... Hold on to your seats America - it's Obama time!
Posted by: tmadl![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 1, 2008 10:06 PM
On Facebook over the last day, an order of magnitude more people have added themselves as supporters for Obama than Clinton: 15,000+ to 1,400. Hard to know what percentage are eligible to vote but it's a pretty impressive ratio.
Also I've been tracking the views on the "Yes We Can" video’s on YouTube. It's up over 2,000,000 views, with the most popular instance having entered the top 10 of videos about Obama.
http://www.talesfromthe.net/jon/?p=81#comment-492 has statistics for those who are interested in playing along at home.
Posted by: Jon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 4, 2008 11:56 PM
From Sarah Lai Stirland's Obama Campaign Used Spanish-Language Phone Banking, Texting to Get Out the Potomac Vote in Wired today:
"Online groups have also helped Obama. MoveOn.org, whose members recently endorsed Obama, raised $500,000 for him. MoveOn also created an online Endorse-O-Thon widget that enabled its members to engage in a peer-to-peer online endorsement campaign by sending out 500,000 e-mails and Facebook messages to their friends recommending the candidate."
Posted by: Jon![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.thedemocraticstrategist.org/strategist/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 14, 2008 01:44 PM