This is the second of three posts addressing the question: Do political blogs have predictive power? 

In the first post, I made the following general arguments, which I will generalize to Le Wonkosphere. 

A. Political blogs are important to the political process because they surface more news and opinion, and disseminate it more rapidly, than MSM.  This can be both a threat and an opportunity. 

B. Campaigns use the political blogosphere as a laboratory to test the stickiness of the candidate’s messages, about themself and the opponents.

C. MSM looks to the political blogosphere as an “early adopter”, and thus the political blogs, by paying attention to certain things and ignoring others, drive a part of MSM’s agenda.

So are political blogs predictive?  Short answer: Yes.

Not every story that breaks in our community is going to be a big deal; but many stories that are eventually big deals in MSM will likely first be a big deal here. 

Personally, I think the political blogosphere will impact the 2008 campaign in the following ways:

1. Throughout the fall, campaign-specific blogs will be important to organize grassroots, state-level enthusiasm.  Paul, Huckabee, Thompson, Obama, and Edwards appear well-positioned in that regard.

2. MSM will look in part to our community for signals on who is really number two, and number three and four.  MSM has limited bandwidth, and so they need someone like the blogosphere to help them decide who to pay attention to. 

3. There are one or more last-minute stories waiting to break.  24 to 48 hours before any of the early votes, it would be shocking not to hear something break in our community which spelled bad news for one or more of the candidates.  If I had something on one of them, I certainly wouldn’t release it now.  Even if it’s only a 72 hour story, a few percentage points here and there can make the difference between moving on and going home. 

   

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Politics 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.