Comments on: Low Voter Turnout at Daily Kos?

By: Turkey in the Straw Poll at Blog P.I.

Turkey in the Straw Poll at Blog P.I. — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:36:21 +0000

[...] I wonder if Kos announced that he was going to do a straw poll in a week, would any of the presidential candidates whip for it? Send out a blast to their lists? Might that also increase the number of participants? Share and share alike These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

By: Not Paul Begala

Not Paul Begala — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:07:44 +0000

Ian– thanks for the ideas, I’ll look through the archives to see if that’s ever happened.

By: Ian

Ian — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 18:25:05 +0000

Two things:
1. Results of an Internet poll will have absolutely no effect on a person, whereas a national election will actually have a marginal impact on an individual. I would be curious to see if a straw poll asking dKos visitors if they approved of a proposed change to the site (i.e. a new design or posting policy that would affect usage) would have a higher turnout– I’d bet that it would.
2. The 25k “turnout” is inflated since unregistered users (such as myself) are allowed to vote.

By: Not Paul Begala

Not Paul Begala — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:12:49 +0000

Thanks for the comment Pete.

Is there a good metric? Otherwise we're left to assume that 5% of Dkos readers per day are "active" just by measuring who actually vote on the site.

As a political guy, we always say, anecdotally of course because we have no evidence, the bloggers and blog readers don't do anything but post and occasionally send you $25 bucks. They don't do the hard work like calls and doors. I'm willing to be a large % of the active members do that work, but if there are only 25,000 nationally, that's pretty small.

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 19:54:56 +0000

The number of registered users and the number of active users on a site are very different things. I’ve been registered on DailyKos for a couple years, and read it daily, but honestly can’t recall the last time that I logged in, commented, or voted in a poll… so I am registered, but not “active” for the purposes of this discussion. You see such registration / participation divergences on most sites, which suggests that the number registered users isn’t really a good metric of community size.