News: Fox had its second debate this week for the Republican presidential candidates. The best, most substantive exchange occurred between Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul.
Analysis: The debate format should allow more of these exchanges, where the candidates can engage each other in a more open debate. CNN and YouTube should take notes for their Republican debate in December. If you’re wondering, the FOX Internet poll after the debate had, you guessed it, Ron Paul winning the debate.
News: For the past couple months, I’ve been collecting data on all the presidential candidates’ videos on YouTube. Today, I’m publishing my first report, “Analyzing the Presidential Candidate Videos on YouTube August 2007.”
The report reaches two basic findings for the presidential candidate videos thus far:
(1) The presidential candidates have gained only a relatively modest amount of views and subscribers to their YouTube videos; and
(2) Republican candidate Ron Paul is, by a wide margin, the most popular candidate on YouTube, in terms of the average number of views per video and the number of subscribers to his YouTube channel.He also has the most total views on YouTube for any presidential candidate.
Here’s one slice of the report:
View the report: Click here. I’ve also set up a new blog called The YouTube President with a copy of the report. I’ll be collecting my reports there.
(Copyright permission: Please feel free to copy the report and re-use it, including the graphs, in other works, as long as attribution is given to Professor Edward Lee and The Utube Blog. Thanks.)
So YouTube is doing a great job in featuring the presidential candidates on You Choose. This week, Jim Gilmore (R.) gets a chance in the Spotlight to ask YouTubers a question here. Each candidates gets 1 week.
News: Scarborough had an interesting discussion about the role Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert played in the 2006 elections. The discussion soon devolved into a debate about how much influence YouTube had in the Democrats winning the Senate races in Montana and Virginia.
During the campaign, Senator Allen in Virginia got caught on video calling a Webb volunteer who was of Indian descent a “macaca,” which means a kind of monkey. Senator Burns was caught on video several times saying that we should be worried about enemies “who drive taxi cabs during the day” and who kill at night. Burns was also caught nearly falling asleep during an agricultural committee hearing.
Analysis: Senator Allen’s double digit lead soon evaporated after the “macaca” incident, so there’s probably little doubt the incident seriously hurt his campaign. I didn’t follow the Burns campaign as closely, but will check to see if I can find any numbers from his campaign.
As far as YouTube’s role in all this, the Allen “macaca” video did generate over 400,000 hits (in today’s count), so in an election that Jim Webb won by fewer than 9,000 votes, the video probably did matter. To the extent YouTube gave people access to the video, it probably had an effect on the election.
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CNN/YouTube debate, Ron Paul, democracy, elections, presidential campaign, youtube president | 
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