Lamont’s Digital Constituency
DoubleSpeak commentator Ari Melber wrote a piece for The Nation called Ned Lamont’s Digital Constituency. It’s good. Have a read.
The Nation:
Joe Lieberman’s life as a Democrat ended on Tuesday with a fatal blow from Connecticut’s primary voters. The voters’ surging antipathy for Lieberman was stoked by many factors–the Iraq War, the President, the Senator, the surrogates, the pundits, the activists, the bloggers–but Ned Lamont’s victory was driven by two triggers: First, the war elicited a primary opponent; then Internet activists convinced voters that he was a viable alternative. Yet the recent obsession with bloggers, by traditional media and Lieberman boosters alike, only reveals one component of the Senator’s undoing online.
Bloggers actually constitute a small slice of progressive Internet activists, known as the netroots, which includes organizations like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America; informal networks like e-mail lists and MySpace groups; and Internet activists who use websites to raise money, broadcast videos and disseminate information. That is how Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas sees it. Just past midnight on election day, he emphasized that bloggers are “much smaller” than a third of the netroots, writing that it is “insulting” to focus on blogs instead of the real people who worked for Ned Lamont.
Read the rest here.
















