Twitter #NY20 Dominated by the Right

The other day, I shot out a tweet essentially asking, why have conservatives been so much better at using Twitter as an organizing device than liberals? A brief conversation pointed me towards the hashtag #topprog, which proved to be nothing more than a thus-far sad attempt to counter the outstandingly popular #tcot.

The New York 20 special election is today and, as one might expect in 2009, it has a Twitter presence. And it is completely lopsided.

This is the race to fill the seat vacated by Kirsten Gillibrand when she was chosen to replace Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate. It's a big race, in part, because it is alternately seen as a referendum on Obama, and the first salvo in a Republican resurgence.

The hashtag to follow this race on Twitter is #ny20 (or to a lesser degree #ny-20), and they are heavily dominated by supporters of the Republican candidate, James Tedisco. The Tedisco campaign's own Twitter account has used the #ny20 hashtag a dozen times today.

Other Twitterers' comments are littered with the hashtag #tcot, indicating their conservative leanings (mine doesn't count, I was just giving them a shout out for using the social media tool well, and reprimanding the #topprog crew for a missed opportunity). Scanning down the most recent tweets, nearly everyone is either neutral ("don't forget to vote!") or supporting Tedisco.

This particular Tweet started by @decidedlyright, has been re-tweeted (copied) several times.

I have to go back almost two hours to find a single tweet from a Democratic supporter.

But most damning of all is that the Democrat, Scott Murphy, seems to have completely turned his back on new media in his campaign. He has no Twitter account I can discover, and his Facebook page is an embarassment. The most recent status update is from January 26.

Murphy may win in the end, but his campaign seems to have learned nothing from Obama's revolutionary use of new media during the 2008 election. If he wants re-election in 2010, it would behoove him to join those of us living in that year.

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