Republican and Conservative political analysis and commentary

Micah Sifry at the Personal Democracy Forum says Republicans running for president are behind their Democratic counterparts in online grassroots support. Waaaaay behind. And he's got the data to prove it.

They're almost invisible on the web. Compared to the Democratic presidential field, which I posted on a few days ago, the Republican contenders are playing bush league ball online. Not even Triple A.

To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the friends the Ds have, the totals will amaze you: 4,007 to 51,471. If I take fringe candidates Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo out of that equation, the Republican total drops below 2,000.

Same with total incoming blog links, which for the Republican are woeful in part due to the fact that most of them don't have serious websites yet. Counting links to their primary unofficial sites along with official sites (and in some cases, like Newt Gingrich, George Pataki, Chuck Hagel and Mike Huckabee, none of whom are officially in the race, I'm counting links to their government sites or, in Newt's case, to his personal site, and in Hagel's case, to a draft site), we get a total of 3,069 incoming blog links. That compares to 8,488 to the eight sites of the Democratic candidates who are officially in the race. If I included some of the Democratic non-candidates who might still get into the race, like Al Gore, I'm sure the totals would be even more imbalanced.

By and large, none of the Republican presidential candidates appear to be making a serious effort to garner support online through MySpace or Facebook; nor do they appear to have much outreach to blogs going; nor do any of them have a clue about Flickr. In fact, while several of the Democratic sites have front page links to many of those sites (and others), I don't think I saw one on any Republican site. Is entrepreneurial behavior dead in the Republican party?

That said, the tremendous skew in expressions of affiliation online toward the Democratic field can't just be explained by GOP cluelessness about e-organizing. Rightwing talk-radio host and new media maven Hugh Hewitt has some interesting theories, including the idea that the right side of the web is smaller because Republicans have been in power for so long.

Read the entire article here. And then, if you work for a Republican campaign go hire the right talent and do something about it.