2006 and local blogs

Linked from Political Wire, Kari Chisholm of Mandate Media has a post about the potential importance of political blogs in the '06 elections. Mandate Media runs the indispensible LeftyBlogs site, which sorts out the local blogs by state. (We've got a link to the MA lefty bloggers on our blogroll, and Kari was kind enough to leave birthday wishes to our site.)

The über-example of blogs' influence in a campaign was the  Daschle-Thune race in South Dakota in '04. But most of the time, it seems to me that blogs aren't going to have that kind of power, especially not in bigger states. But Chisholm puts her finger on it here:

Though readership is tiny for local political blogs, the Nevada Democrats' spokeswoman Kirsten Searer makes the critical point:

"The beauty of bloggers is they have an audience of the right people. If they break news, then insiders in politics and mainstream media are likely to pick it up."

It is nice to see that the Republicans at the NRCC completely miss the point about blogs.  Roll Call quotes spokesman Carl Forti:

"The people who go to these blogs, it’s the very partisan Republicans and very partisan Democrats, and those aren’t the people we are worried about."

As regular readers of P&T know, the whole purpose of a campaign website is to communicate with, motivate, and organize the grassroots supporters and fans of a candidate. 

If there's a blog out there - either of the news, commentary, or activist variety - that's talking to your people... well, that's a blog worth tracking and wooing.  Nevermind their roles in pushing stories to the forefront of the big media.

Yup. As we've wondered before, it may not be breadth, but depth of readership that can be influential. It'll be interesting to see if and how the MA blogcircle affects the '06 races.