The Impact of FiveThirtyEight.com
The only state their [fivethirtyeight.com’s] model got wrong was Indiana, where they expected a narrow Obama loss. He won the state by a hair. Nate Silver owned this election on the polling front: one young guy with a background in baseball stats beat out the mainstream media in a couple of months. … If you want to know why newspapers are dying: that’s why. They’re just not as good as the web at its best.
When we look back on the U.S. election of 2008, it will be significant not only because Americans elected the first African American president. It also represented the first election in which the so-called “new media” — blogs, SMS, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook — played a significant role in how the story was told and, ultimately, in the outcome itself.
As much as Nixon-Kennedy in 1960 was decided based on who best leveraged the new medium of television, Obama-McCain in 2008 will be regarded as the first election in which the candidate who best capitalized on the Internet won the day. The Obama campaign’s use of technology to tell its story, raise money, combat rumors, connect voters to each other and recruit volunteers was transformative. This was an election where the half-life of a smear was measured in hours, where news hit Twitter before mainstream media cold react and where voters were engaged directly in a campaign like never before.
Obama’s tactics will be dissected and duplicated by every politician from here on forward. What I suspect most will miss, however, is that Obama did not control the new media. He enabled it. What he did was place the ingredients of reportage in the hands of everyone. What was once only available to the professional media was suddenly open for all-comers. Everything — where the candidate was, what he said, his record, his policy, his response to attacks — was posted to the campaign’s website, shared over Twitter, posted to YouTube. When news broke, any voter with an internet connection could share the story, fact-check a claim and refute a lie. Twitter, Facebook and blogs would literally light up with videos, quotes and analyses within minutes, using the raw material found on the web. Everyone was a reporter. Every report was the ultimate mash-up.
When Obama said to his supporters at his acceptance speech in Chicago that “this is your victory,” it was perhaps never more true. The age of political campaigning being engineered by a small group of political insiders and executed through a small set of media elites passed into history with this election. And as FiveThirtyEight.com’s superior analysis shows us, this is a change most definitely for the better.
From Andrew Sullivan.
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