The Web on the Candidates

• The New York Times produces an interactive video and debate analysis following every debate, and it’s really something. The feature lets you watch the whole video of the previous night’s debate (in this case, last night’s Republican debate) and read the transcript alongside it. Every time you skip to a new point in the video, the text updates. Likewise, every time you skip to a new point in the text, the video updates. It’s the best way I’ve seen for viewing a re-viewing a debate, or any event (imagine watching last night’s Red Sox/Indians game this way!).

• TechPresident contributor Patrick Ruffini is the most recent Republican blogger to try his hand at crowdsourcing (see Soren Dayton’s call to investigate Hillary Clinton’s earmarks). Inspired by TechCrunch’s discovery that you can use Google Reader to view the number of subscribers to blogs, which might more accurately point to a blog’s clout than Sitemeter numbers, Ruffini is asking his readers to report the number of subscribers to the blogs they regularly read. The end result could be new barometer of influence in the political blogosphere. It all depends on the help of readers like you.

• The winner of this weekend’s “Values Voters Straw Poll” held by the Family Research Council was Mitt Romney. Or was it? As the Politico’s Jonathan Martin explains, although Romney was announced as the winner, attendees to this weekend’s Values Voters Summit could vote in person, and people who’ve paid as little as $1 to join FRC Action, the “legislative action arm” of the FRC, were allowed to vote online. So Romney received the most total votes, getting about 28% of 5,775 votes, but among those actually in attendance, Mike Huckabee, who came in second overall, was the clear winner, garnering 51% of votes from the 952 attendees. Seeing is believing, and this was Huckabee’s crowd: MyDD’s Jerome Armstrong says that Huckabee is “becoming the theocon choice” now that Sam Brownback has dropped out.

The Candidates on the Web

• By last friday, Barack Obama was closing in on his goal of raising $2 million to “close the gap” between his and Hillary Clinton’s fundraising numbers. On techPresident, Patrick Ruffini argued that Obama’s email campaign paved the way; Jeff Commaroto saw it more as a result of offline campaigning. Either way, one thing’s for sure: Obama can raise a ton of money with the tip of the hat, I mean, the click of a mouse, er, the turn of a phrase…

In Case You Missed It…

During last night’s debate John McCain served up a witty one-liner about Hillary Clinton, Woodstock, and earmarks, and his campaign quickly capitalized on it, sending out an email to bloggers and another to supporters. David All thinks the reaction from the crowd and the smart follow-up by McCain’s modern media team give a glimmer of hope that John McCain may be making a true play at a comeback.

After the debate, Zephyr Teachout checked out the top five Republicans’ websites to see their responses.

Responding to Patrick Ruffini’s assertion that Barack Obama’s email campaign was responsible for raising enough money to “close the gap” between his and Hillary Clinton’s fundraising, Jeff Commaroto writes that it had more to do with offline organizing than sending out emails.

Micah Sifry noticed a bump in blog mentions of Chris Dodd on our Technorati chart, and he wonders if this might point to a rise in support for the Connecticut Senator.

Three days after its launch, 10Questions, our online presidential forum, had received a total more than 12,000 votes from just over 3,500 voters, reports Micah Sifry. More data from the day here.

A satire site from People from the American Way shows what the Republican candidates’ Facebook lives might look like if Democrats were scripting them.

Barack Obama | debates | Hillary Clinton | Mike Huckabee | Mitt Romney
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