For all the buzz about the youth going crazy for Obama, it's taken his largest Facebook group "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" 9 months just to reach 382,000. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's not going to reach a million before the first primaries. The "Stop Hillary Clinton: One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary" group is still a ways away, just recently breaking the 500,000 member barrier.
But who are the predominately young Facebook members really rooting for? Rudy Giuliani? Mike Gravel? Apparently, they most passionate fans of none other than Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart's former protégé, who announced his presidential run (although only in his home state of South Carolina) 2 weeks ago. His Facebook group, "1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T. Colbert" blew past 1,000,000 members on Friday morning. Their newest goal is to become the largest group on Facebook (in other words, more than 1.7 million members).
This is incredible to me. Since Facebook has about 39 million members, that means about 1 out of every 39 Facebook users are a member of that group. What's more, a recent Rasmussen poll found that in a 3 way match-up between Clinton, Giuliani and Colbert in the general election gives Colbert 12% of the vote total, and almost a third of those 18-29, MORE than Giuliani receives in this match-up.
What is going on here? It seems a substantial portion of the population, especially young people, is willing to vote for a satirist with no political experience. If that's not a startling indictment of our political system and how desperate people are for real, paradigm-shifting political change, I don't know what is.
UPDATE: I didn't notice Andrew Voss had a similar post earlier. Sorry for the repetition. I still think the new polling data that shows a large percentage of people (especially young people) is willing to vote for Colbert is worth mentioning.
UPDATE 2: Colbert also narrowly beats Dennis Kucinich when running as a Republican and Ron Paul when running as a Democrat.
But who are the predominately young Facebook members really rooting for? Rudy Giuliani? Mike Gravel? Apparently, they most passionate fans of none other than Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart's former protégé, who announced his presidential run (although only in his home state of South Carolina) 2 weeks ago. His Facebook group, "1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T. Colbert" blew past 1,000,000 members on Friday morning. Their newest goal is to become the largest group on Facebook (in other words, more than 1.7 million members).
This is incredible to me. Since Facebook has about 39 million members, that means about 1 out of every 39 Facebook users are a member of that group. What's more, a recent Rasmussen poll found that in a 3 way match-up between Clinton, Giuliani and Colbert in the general election gives Colbert 12% of the vote total, and almost a third of those 18-29, MORE than Giuliani receives in this match-up.
What is going on here? It seems a substantial portion of the population, especially young people, is willing to vote for a satirist with no political experience. If that's not a startling indictment of our political system and how desperate people are for real, paradigm-shifting political change, I don't know what is.
UPDATE: I didn't notice Andrew Voss had a similar post earlier. Sorry for the repetition. I still think the new polling data that shows a large percentage of people (especially young people) is willing to vote for Colbert is worth mentioning.
UPDATE 2: Colbert also narrowly beats Dennis Kucinich when running as a Republican and Ron Paul when running as a Democrat.
2 Comments:
Wait, how do you make the jump from joining the group to willingness to vote? Maybe people just think it's funny...
I think it's also pretty funny to be in law school half way across the country, yet still harass the College Democrats about their posts.
If you read the piece you'd see the argument about how many 18-29s would vote for him.
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