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FOUND IT. Some readers were wondering why I asserted last week that blog readers were more likely to be based in California than in, say, swing congressional districts. And that since they can't easily engage in local GOTV opportunities in such races, I argued that their actual electoral impact was somewhat lower than what their media profile would suggest. I'd wanted to include the link to this report in that item, but couldn't find it at first. So here it is. According to the June comScore Media Metrix study, readers of Daily Kos, the biggest liberal blog and community, are a fairly cerulean bunch:
Regional skews correspond heavily to the coastal "blue state" regions. Visitors are 82 percent more likely than average to come from the Pacific region, 36 percent more likely to come from New England, and 19 percent more likely to hail from the Mid-Atlantic region.Kos readers also tended to be older and wealthier: 62 percent were over age 45, and 56 percent reported household incomes of more than $75,000 per year. Only 12 percent came from households earning less than $40,000 -- the national median household income in 2004 was $44,389 -- but I suspect that much of that income skew would, upon further study, be revealed as reflective of the readership's demographics (older, whiter, more Western than average, etc.). Obviously, Daily Kos isn't the only blog out there, but it's the biggest and best-researched one, and there's no reason to expect that the readers of, say, The Huffington Post, would be considerably more Southern or low-income.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
