Reel Pop

Can YouTube help predict an election?

If the paucity of political videos on YouTube is any indication, nobody's going to voting at all.

While browsing YouTube the other day I noticed that there weren't very many political videos. I don't mean copies of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. I mean videos uploaded by politicians running for office, or video mashups by voters or other footage from live events.

So I started researching the midterm Senate races on YouTube. I copied this Wikipedia list of Senate races and searched on YouTube for each candidate's name, taking note of the number of videos that search returned. I also noted the most popular or interesting videos, and the number of views and comments they received. The results for the first ten states of the Union (in alphabetical order) are here.

The results aren't encouraging. If viewing political videos is any measure, YouTubers aren't very engaged with our government. Of course, YouTube may not be an ideal test bed for measuring engagement. But in an Internet era supposedly dominated by social media, it doesn't hurt to test our assumptions on what should be the most democratic medium of them all.

Here's what I've learned so far:

• Television ads predominate. But they're not very popular. Politicians either don't have time to speak directly to video-sharers, or they don't know how. The most successful television ads on YouTube seem to be the funny ones. Such as Ned Lamont has a Messy Desk. (143,468 views)
• Candidates don't typically upload their own videos or go to pains to "own" their keywords on YouTube. Most videos are copied segments of national TV shows.
• If a race or candidate isn't covered by the national news, it probably won't be very popular on YouTube.
• Dark horse candidates don't appear very often on YouTube. This may be because they don't have television ads, and thus nobody copies them to YouTube.
• If a candidate doesn't try to control his/her keywords on YouTube, their opponent can use that weakness against them. For example, Michigan incumbent Debbie Stabenow (D) doesn't have a good presence on YouTube. The most popular videos containing her name were uploaded by her opponent, Mike Bouchard (R). Those videos have titles such as Debbie Stabenow Doesn't Want You to See This and Shh...Don't Let Debbie Know You've Seen This.
• Videos about female candidates seem to concentrate on their sexuality. For examples, see videos about Florida's Katherine Harris or Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar.
• Mashups of political ads are funny. One of my favorite's in a mashup of Mark Kennedy's (R-Minnesota) TV ad with this footage.  Politicians should fear these mashups. But they could also use them to great effect. The ones they put on TV now are too slow. Guess they're just playing to the base of older voters.
• The apparently don't like the Internet in Indiana. None of the senate candidates have any type of video on YouTube.
• Barak Obama is popular.
• Ted Kennedy is not unlike Bluto Blutarski.

So go ahead. Check out the 2006 Midterm Senate Races According to YouTube. Let me know what you think. The next ten states will be uploaded later this week.

p.s. I can't promise there won't be a broken link or some such. Lots of copying and pasting. If you find anything, please let me know and I'll fix it.