New Pew Report

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on the impact of the internet on the 2004 elections. It concludes:

The internet became an essential part of American politics in 2004. Fully 75 million Americans — 37% of the adult population and 61% of online Americans – used the internet to get political news and information, discuss candidates and debate issues in emails, or participate directly in the political process by volunteering or giving contributions to candidates.

A lot of the trend data is unsurprising (internet usage is increasing!), although there are some interesting tidbits, such as the numbers for the comparative use rates of different media. More surprising to me, though, is that 39% of online Americans claim not to have used the internet politically at all, which matches almost exactly the percentage of eligible voters who didn't cast a ballot in the Presidential race. While I couldn't find internet usage stats broken down by voting behavior in the Pew study, it might be that the conventional wisdom that internet users are more politically engaged is no longer correct.

It is also nice to discover that Democrats were more active online than Republicans. It certainly seemed that way to me during the campaign itself, but I'm hardly an unbiased observer.

Don't forget to read Michael Cornfield's commentary. In some ways, it's the most interesting part of the report.