The Web on the Candidates

• Which candidate has the strongest stance on universal health care? Is it 53-year-old John Edwards? Or 59-year-old Hillary Clinton? How about 10-year-old Susie Flynn? Flynn is running for president on one platform, getting health insurance for the nine million uninsured children in America. While this might seem like a cutesy ploy, Susie (and her handlers) are actually quite serious -- in one video she argues that, for the amount we spend every three and half months in Iraq, every child in the U.S. could be insured. She even takes her campaign to Capitol Hill. When will another candidate adopt her platform?
• Jerome Armstrong has posted the results of recent preference polls on MyDD. Most of the polls, taken from the Daily Kos, MyDD, Moveon, MoveonHP (Moveon's Iraq forum poll), Democracy for America, and Democrats.com, show John Edwards in the lead, with Obama ahead in the Moveon and DFA polls. This is a survey of the readers of progressive blogs, not the general public, which partly explains Edwards' numbers, but he's still strong. Also, Bill Richardson "is beginning to happen, crawling out of the lower-tier pack and inching his way onto the radar of blog readers and MoveOn members," Armstrong writes. And Hillary Clinton, still not well-liked by the netroots, is mostly polling in the single digits. "The status quo scenario (the contrast continuing as is) leads to Clinton under-performing in the actual vote vs the polls; but it seems more likely that either Clinton is going start climbing among the netroots or she is going to start falling in the polls," says Armstrong. For Matthew Yglesias, this signals doom for Clinton, but the Hotline's Marc Ambinder is less sure. "Certainly, Clinton remains unpopular with the netroots, and that's become a large problem for her candidacy. But it's a leap to say that her entire presidential aspirations are doomed because she's lost favor with Markos and his readers," he writes.

The Candidates on the Web

• Non-profit blogger Tim Fullerton got an email from the Duncan Hunter campaign that was so bad it prompted him to write about "how to not email your supporters." In the email, which trumpeted Hunter's success in an Anderson County, South Carolina straw poll, "Fred Thompson’s (or is it Tommy Thompson?) name is spelled wrong and all are in lower case letters (plus there is an extra space in there)." Fullerton says that other Hunter emails actually commit the ultimate sin of including .pdf attachments: "Unless it’s really important, never do this. It most likely will look like spam to your supporters, take longer to send out, and no one really wants a .pdf from a campaign anyway." He offers some simple advice that should be obvious for campaign techies, but clearly isn't:
  

  *Do not send five emails in one day to your supporters
  *Make sure to spell check and check for other mistakes
  *Do not send general supporters attachments through email

In Case You Missed It...

What Obama and Clinton Fans View Online
By Tom Belford
Here's a peek at the blossoming art of online "behavioral targeting." In this case, the digital trails of visitors to the campaign websites of Obama and Clinton were tracked to see where else they browsed online. It seems that Clintonites are into real estate, while Obama visitors are into tech content.

Sorry Mitt, I'm Calling Your Bluff [UPDATE]
by Michael Turk
Patrick Sherrill wrote into our feedback line and pointed out an error in Turk's math regarding Mitt's traffic stats and the ratio of visitors to donors. He's updated that and adjusted the argument slightly.

Bill Richardson | email | Hillary Clinton | John Edwards | straw poll | Susie Flynn
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