In order to take the edge off of my poll watching withdrawal, I’ve gone back to one of my favorite poll-meth (I would be dating myself to call it crack?) dealers… Nate Silver’s Fivethirtyeight blog has a nice breakdown of Obama’s performance among a range of demographic groups compared to Kerry in 2004.

Obama outperformed Kerry in every demographic except seniors, gays and lesbians and “other” religions. What’s most astounding is the breadth of his gains. He made gains among liberals, moderates and conservatives. Which begs a question we discussed in our thick culture podcast today (coming soon!) — do campaigns even matter? Did the lousy economy and unpopularity of President Bush preordain a Republican victory this year? If you’re making gains in groups all along the ideological spectrum, does it really matter what you’re saying?

Those Google folks are just brilliant, aren’t they? In yet another moment of insight about human behavior, Google Trends has developed a map to track rises and falls in flu-related searches by location, working off the assumption that people suffering from the flu are more likely to search for information about it. One can track the total volume of flu search, study a national map of flu search trends, or enter your zip code and learn about local trends.
While it is unclear how accurately such a map can track the spread of flu, it potentially offers a powerful public health tool. I can’t get over what a clever use of search data this is.

Let’s think of the next big thing! What are some other forms of internet data that (if made public) could be of great value to the public interest?

Matt Bai wrote this piece a few months back where he makes the argument that Obama’s candidacy signals the end of black politics. he references a new ethos among post civil-rights era African-American politicians that resist being pigeonholed as “simply” black. These younger African-American politicians, like Artur Davis (U.S. Rep. Alabama), Harold Ford (former U.S. Rep. Tennessee), Corey Booker (Mayor Newark, NJ), Deval patrick (Governor – Massachusetts), tend to be Ivy League educated and, to use the language of diversity, effective at “cultural switching” – the ability to be conversant in a diverse number of cultural settings.

This “vanguard” of Black politician doesn’t see their rise to power as uniquely tied to the black community so they don’t feel obligated to serve that community’s interests exclusively. As Corey Booker explains in the Bai piece:

“I don’t want to be pigeonholed,” he said. “I don’t want people to expect me to speak about those issues.” By this, presumably, he meant issues that revolve around race: profiling by police, incarceration rates, flagging urban economies. “I want people to ask me about nonproliferation. I want them to run to me to speak about the situation in the Middle East.” Since the mayor of Newark is rarely called upon to discuss such topics, I got the feeling that Booker does not see himself staying in his current job for anything close to 20 years. “I don’t want to be the person that’s turned to when CNN talks about black leaders,” he said.

Politicians like Booker aren’t intending to deny their race. Rather they are challenging what it means to be “raced” in fundamental ways. In this passage, he seems to suggest that “blackness,” at least for middle-class blacks, is becoming what Mary Waters famously called an “optional ethnicity”

Even so, Booker told me that his goal wasn’t really to “transcend race.” Rather, he says that for his generation of black politicians it’s all right to show the part of themselves that is culturally black — to play basketball with friends and belong to a black church, the way Obama has. There is a universality now to the middle-class black experience, he told me, that should be instantly recognizable to Jews or Italians or any other white ethnic bloc that has struggled to assimilate. And that means, at least theoretically, that a black politician shouldn’t have to obscure his racial identity.

In Booker’s first run for Newark mayor against Sharpe James, his “in between-ness” for lack of a better term was a major obstacle in his election. This excerpt from Streetfight, a wonderful film chronicling the first Booker-James mayor’s race highlights the contradistinction between “old” and “new” politics.

It does say something revealing that Booker lost this bid to be mayor of Newark (although he won his second). Similarly, is says something that Obama lost his first Congressional race in Chicago to Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther. In both cases, the “new politics” candidate was painted as an ivy-league outsider who didn’t understand the predominantly African-American community they were running to represent.

I don’t agree with Bai that we’re at an end in identity politics. What I think it means is that identity politics will have to be employed in more sophisticated, less transparent ways to be effective. Bill Clinton serves as an object lesson in how not to play identity politics.

This ham-handed effort to racialize Obama only allowed him to portray himself as “above” the old politics of racial division. If you recall, his gauzy South Carolina primary victory speech, the subject of the celebratory Wil-I-Am song, is what sling-shot him into Super Tuesday. This here’s good identity politics.

This “new” identity politics is defined by pivoting from identity to talk about transcending identity. “We are one America” only has resonance if you’re speaking from the experience of someone who has historically been viewed as part of the “other” America. This speech wouldn’t work very well if it was John McCain making it.

What do you think about Bai’s argument?

Don has a thought-provoking post on the use of Facebook in mass-interpersonal persuasion.  In a post-lection analysis at CLU, José brought up the idea of how Obama created what is tantamount to a social movement using web 2.0 tools.  I was reading a US News article on the use of YouTube in the 2008 campaign and couldn’t help but recall the ParkRidge47 spectacle from early 2007 and the role of viral multimedia in politics and mass-interpersonal interaction.  In this video, the creator, Phil de Vellis, talks about how politicians should inspire content and how his Vote Different mashup went viral despite his posting anonymity.

The rise of political video watching is evident from Pew Research Center figures, going from 24% in December of 2007 to 39% in late October.  What I find interesting is how video is being used by both the public and the candidates.  The USNews article talks about how Obama’s campaign posted on YouTube a rebuttal to clips of Rev. Wright’s inflammatory remarks going viral, which were being used against Barack.  Obama Girl, the Yes We Can video, and Obama Art are all examples of Web 2.0 tools of video sharing and blogs being used to create meaning.  Add into the mix, the fourth estate (the press) with conservative Glenn Beck posting a video on the Obama National Anthem.

José noted how the Obama campaign will be written up as a “how to” guide on Web 2.0 campaigning, but what will the Web 2.0 president look like?  Given the “social movement” created, will this foster a technologically-mediated interactive democracy or will it just be more clutter?  How will meaning and relevance be maintained and how will the Republicans use Web 2.0 to rebuild?

There is some remarkable new research out on the persuasive dynamics of Facebook. Stanford researcher BJ Fogg argues that a new form of persuasion has emerged in the structure of Facebook, namely, “mass interpersonal persuasion. . . . This phenomenon brings together the power of interpersonal persuasion with the reach of mass media.” In particular, Facebook has brought together six dynamics of persuasion for the first time in history, such as an automated structure, rapid cycle, and measured impact—in a way that goes far above and beyond what is often called “viral adoption” (www.bjfogg.com/mip.pdf). Weiksner, Fogg, and Liu also find another six patterns of persuasion in more specific Facebook applications, such as provoke and retaliate, reveal and compare, and expression (some of which are native to Facebook)—which invoke many persuasive norms such as “reciprocity,” “cognitive dissonance,” and “social proof” (www.springerlink.com/index/20652047j6801376.pdf).

I believe that mass interpersonal persuasion and the confluence of these influential techniques bear heavily upon the design and articulation of future public sphere activities. While there is much about Web 2.0 worth critiquing, we might remain critically hopeful about the possibilities for Facebook to create online cultures of trust and risk that perform valuable functions for deliberative democracy. Running through Facebook’s post-election newsfeeds, I noticed the remarkable degree to which many people engaged their online friends, of many political persuasions, in discussions over the results. Even when some of this communication was quite divisive, people still carved out an interactive space for engagement. Beyond my own experience, however, there are two connections I would like to make between Facebook and the public sphere.

First, in ideal public spheres individuals should be able to talk in an “unrestricted fashion” about matters of general interest—and these arenas are instantiated through conversation “in which private individuals assemble to form a public body” (Habermas). There are thus some bounded communicative conditions that individuals commit themselves to in order to democratically advance as much of the public interest as possible. In the same way, when Fogg mentions that Facebook makes it easy to build a “high-trust culture” due to a number of agreements and assumptions users make when joining and using the service, we can see that the structure of Facebook appears to lay the groundwork for communicating upon which much public sphere activity relies.

Second, what Fogg terms “automated structure” evidences how Facebook sets in motion persuasive experiences. As he puts it, “computer code doesn’t take a vacation or go on coffee breaks.” As such, this is one place where I see Facebook perhaps promoting civic engagement even more than, say, face-to-face communication. Facebook actually encourages members to further online interaction without their having to do anything. We’ve all been to public meetings where someone forgets to send out the minutes afterward, or follow up with an important e-mail to the group. Facebook has no such qualms, its computer codes make sure that we receive news of important events, and can even see public conversations occurring between others in ways unrestricted by the demands of time and space. If someone else joins a group protesting global human trafficking, they don’t need to tell others that they have joined, Facebook structures the experience in such a way that everyone will rapidly receive the message. 

TechPresident posts on change.gov, a website the Obama campaign has created to encourage a more open, participatory governing process. The site contains the standard fare, like a “share your vision” site where you can post your vision for the country. The site, of course, also has a blog where I’m sure the president-elect will comment on the latest spat on The View or who Miley Cyrus is dating.

What concerns me about this site is that it is set up to provide the appearance of a participatory culture without much of an infrastructure to deliver on that promise. How do you go from collecting “visions for America” from random posters to leveraging the “wisdom of the crowds” to produce better policy outcomes? There are innovative ways to get citizens directly involved. One exciting example of this is publicmarkup.org, a wiki site that allows users to markup legislation as if they were committee members. This process of self-aggregating public input is more likely to lead to direct citizen input. Another interesting experiment is the Future Melbourne project (HT: TechPresident). Where citizens were asked to contribute input to the Australian city’s master plan directly by making changes to it on a wiki.

These projects do not guarantee direct citizen input, but if the campaign is serious about being more collaborative in its governance, and there’s no reason to suggest that they aren’t, there are more sophisticated tools they could be using to leverage the power of citizen input.

I couldn’t resist posting this as a follow-up to my previous note about the use of political culture in advertising. On my Gmail today, I saw a link that said, “Michelle Obama in J.Crew® – www.JCrew.com – Get the Look Michelle Obama Wore on The Tonight Show Only from J.Crew.” Clicking through it brought me to this page:

This is a very clever use of Michelle Obama’s mention of wearing J. Crew clothes. It seems to be capitalizing on her status as a new style icon (a la Jackie O). Also, it’s an interesting example of our gendered ideas about what products are associated with a male vs. female public figures. Somehow I don’t imagine that President-Elect Obama would be found discussing his clothes on Jay Leno or have his outfits available for purchase at popular retailers.

José offered up observations that the Presidential race might tighten up.  I’ve been thinking that the election is likely to be closer than the polls are indicating.  One hunch of mine that explains the discrepancy is that those supporting a candidate losing momentum are less likely to participate in a poll, along the lines of CORFing (cutting off reflected failure), but in this case it’s cutting off impending doom.  I also wonder how many people who didn’t even vote will jump on the bandwagon after the election, claiming to have voted for Obama–Fauxbamamaniacs?

At any rate, I was in New York (Westchester) last week and read an article by John Heilemann in New York magazine on the next steps for Obama (with the assumption that he will win) and what the margins will be in the House and Senate.  Heilemann notes how Bill Clinton’s first 100 days were chaotic and while Bill also had a Democratic House and Senate, he suffered from a lack of legitimacy in Congress.  Obama, on the other hand, is highly strategic and has a transition plan in the works and will be working with Reid and Pelosi who are likely to need him more than the other way around.

This got me thinking about what I think the political landscape will look like in 2009.   I had my marketing students create electoral map predictions, but unfortunately I saw this compilation on PoliticalMaps after class:

• FiveThirtyEight.com : Obama 340, McCain 198
• Electoral-Vote.com : Obama 353, McCain 185
• Princeton Election Consortium : Obama 363, McCain 175
• CQ Politics : Obama 311, McCain 160, Toss Ups 67
• Real Clear Politics : Obama 278, McCain 132, Toss Ups 128 | No Toss Ups: Obama 338, McCain 200
• Pollster.com : Obama 311, McCain 142, Toss Ups 85
• Karl Rove : Obama 311, McCain 160, Toss Ups 67
• CNN : Obama 291, McCain 157, Toss Ups90
• Marc Ambinder : Obama 291, McCain 163, Toss Ups 84

Click here to join our foray into the wide world of pod. In this podcast, four of our regular contributors here at California Lutheran University (Jose Marichal – Political Science, Ken Kambara – Marketing, Don Waisenan – Communication/Rhetoric, Russell Stockard – Communication/Cultural Studies) elaborate on some of our earlier posts. Below is a link to the three blog posts we reference in the podcast. I hope you find it a pleasant and intellectually stimulating auditory companion.

Palin’s Persuasion by Don Waisenan

Unlucky in Love, Lucky (in)Justice by Russell Stockard

Where did Race Go by Jose Marichal (unfortunately the recording cuts out in this middle of our discussion of this post)

We’d love to hear what you think.

I apologize in advance if this is post is of interest only to survey research nerds. But I find the following chart from FiveThirtyEight fascinating:

It seems to suggest cell phone-only users (presumably young people) are enough to swing most polls about 2 points toward Barack Obama. No telling how this translates into voter turnout and actually results.

One more thought: while many may think of cell phone-only users as just young people, it is increasingly common way for working class and poor people have phones. So, it may include many black and lower income voters, too.