It’s Facebook day here on MoJoBlog! The two posts we’ve had about it today (here’s the first) may be two more than we’ve ever had.
Here’s the occasion for the second post: The candidate-based Facebook group that had the most members for many, many months — “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” — has finally been topped. And it’s been topped by Hillary Clinton, but not in a good way for the New York senator.
The group “Stop Hillary Clinton (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)” has more than 418,000 members, which beats Obama’s 355,000 members. And it crushes any pro-Clinton groups, the two biggest of which combine for just under 10,000 members.
So Hillary Fever isn’t catching on with the kids. Obama’s campaign is very aware of the advantage it has among this demographic, and has made it a crucial part of its Iowa strategy. From an internal Obama campaign memo that Marc Ambinder nabbed:
On a related point, polls consistently under-represent in Iowa, and elsewhere, the strength of Barack’s support among younger voters for at least three reasons. In more than one survey, Barack’s support among Iowa young voters exceeded the support of all the other candidates combined. First, young voters are dramatically less likely to have caucused or voted regularly in primaries in the past, so pollsters heavily under-represent them. Second, young voters are more mobile and are much less likely to be at home in the early evening and thus less likely to be interviewed in any survey. Third, young voters are much less likely to have a landline phone and much more likely to rely exclusively upon cell phones, which are automatically excluded from phone surveys. So all of these state and national surveys have and will continue to under-represent Barack’s core support – in effect, his hidden vote in each of these pivotal early states.
Update: It was Rudy Giuliani’s daughter’s membership in the Barack Obama Facebook group mentioned above that tipped the media to the fact that she disagrees with her dad’s politics.
