A Tale of Two Spheres
by Chris Bowers
For information on how to travel to the OH-02 and help Hackett, call his campaign HQ at (513) 735-4310--Chris
In the midst of a full-out progressive blogswarm on Paul Hackett's behalf, conservative blogs, who love to boast of their ability to swarm, have done nothing to help out Schmidt in OH-02. In fact, they aren't even writing about it. Look at the result of these searches from Blog Pulse ( I filtered out the stories about other Paul Hackett's):
614-6/20: 50, including 19 from conservative blogs.
6/21-6/27: 6, all from progressive blogs.
6/28-7/4: 29, including 2 from conservative blogs.
7/5-7/11: 30, including 14 from conservative blogs. Mostly small blogs were discussing the race at this point, but it was enough buzz for larger blogs to soon take notice. Hackett has raised around $16K online at this point.
7/12-7/18: 47, including 7 from conservative blogs. More importantly than the number of blog posts, this is a week where things really started to change in terms of who was writing about Hackett. Now, the progressive blogs writing about Hackett were no longer pretty much just OH-02 and MyDD. Several big names, including Atrios, the Stakeholder, Jesus' General, Swing State Project, and Dailykos diarists jumped in at this point. This set the stage for the storm that was to come.
7/19-7/25: 162, including 11 from conservative blogs. If the previous week had set the stage, Blogopshere Day on July 19 was opening night of the main show. There were as many progressive blog posts on Hackett this week as there had been posts on Hackett from both sides combined since the primary election. It included nearly every major activist progressive blog as well. The Blogswarm had started.
Tuesday, July 26: 79, including only 2 from conservative blogs.
Wednesday, July 27: 76, including 4 from conservative blogs.
Thursday, July 28: 111, including 3 from conservative blogs. This blowout is really getting absurd now.
Friday, July 29: 98, including 5 from conservative blogs.
Now, even though it is an excellent resource, Blog Pulse is slow, and won't record Saturday articles for a while. Still, with the info we have, a very clear picture emerges. Since the primary election, there have been 63 conservative blog posts about Paul Hackett, while there have been as many as 683 progressive blog posts about Paul Hackett (some, but not many, of the non-conservative posts were from general news aggregators). Even when the news aggregators are removed, progressives blogs have written roughly ten times as much about this election as conservative blogs. What's more, since Blogopshere Day, the advantage in liberal blog posts has been around 20-1. Even further, the vast majority of conservative blog posts on Hackett over the past two weeks have been from a fairly unknown website, Weapons of Mass Discussion, which averages a whopping 130 page views per day (less than 1,000 per week). By contrast, I believe that literally every single blog in the Liberal Advertising Network, all of which have vastly more traffic than Weapons of Mass Discussion, has discussed Hackett.
Those action-oriented conservative bloggers have completely ignored this race, while us divisive liberals have engaged in an all-out blogswarm that has gone a long way toward making this campaign close. While the MSM cannot help but fawn over the media scalps most often associated with conservative blog influence, the fact is that outside of a select (and admittedly very capable) few, such as Red State, Captain's Quarters and Patrick Ruffini, conservative bloggers are straight up ineffective when it comes to actually influencing electoral politics. How many elections have gone by now where conservative bloggers offered almost nothing in the way of resource support to conservative candidates? If they had jumped into the OH-02 race (or SD-AL and KY-06 special elections for that matter) with the same force as the progressive blogosphere, Hackett would probably still be way, way behind.
They haven't however, and Paul Hackett is now close. However, the same cannot be said of the current capabilities of the progressive and conservative blogospheres. For more on this subject, check this post of mine from January. For a retort to what I imagine would be the conservative response, check out this post
Blogosphere :: Sat Jul 30th, 2005 at 06:58:01 PM EDT
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/7/30/18581/0546 
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