The Twittering Class and the Primaries

Joshua Levy, Associate Editor, techPresident.com
While many political junkies are used to following election results on the TV, with news anchors reporting the news -- if there is any -- in a more or less orderly fashion, many online politics hounds need a quicker fix.

For some, that means using Twitter. Twitter is a "micro-blogging" site on which users post short messages (or "tweets") of no longer than 140 characters, usually about what they're doing. That's it. Once you have a Twitter account you "follow" other Twitterers, getting regular updates that can be a curious mixture of the profound and the mundane, the useful and the pointless ("No sticky note announcing package delivery. 52 inch television dream deferred a day," wrote one Twitter friend recently).

Why would anyone want that kind of distraction? Amazingly, hundreds of thousands of people are using the site every day, many of them for politics. And on a night like TUESDAY NIGHT, when much of America was pressed up against TV and computer screens awaiting the latest primary results from Pennsylvania, folks were using Twitter to get the news before anyone else.

While much of the country looked to Chris Matthews or Tim Russert for election updates, Twitterers received results and analysis from Campaign2008, a feed produced by Virtual Vantage Points; electionjournal, which was on the ground in Philadelphia looking for voting irregularities; votePA (created by NPR social media strategist Andy Carvin), which aggregated everyone else's PA-focused tweets; and perhaps the most valuable resource, our friends and colleagues, many of whom provided a constant stream of spin, dissection, and interpretation as the voting results poured in. For me, the choice was clear; I could bore myself to death watching network anchors commit empty chatter while waiting for the results, or I could dip into the Twitter stream and discover stats before they did, all the while engaging in a conversation with my peers about it all. Not much of a choice, really.

It's also simply a way to vent and to play. As my colleague, Micah Sifry, says, "It's a place where we shoot digital spitballs from the back of the electronic classroom."

Other webby ways to watch the election include using Google Maps to track local poll results; Election Journal's web site, which includes video and text updates about voting abuses direct from Philadelphia; and, of course, the many liberal blogs like DailyKos, MyDD.com, and Talking Points Memo, which were all devoted to parsing out polling results and adding some sanity to the cable news cacophony.

In the end, the results were the same. Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama by ten points, gaining about seven pledged delegates in the process. Professional prognosticators like NBC's Chuck Todd may not think Hillary has a chance despite her win, but the campaign is nonetheless moving on to Indiana and North Carolina on May 6. Twitter, till we meet again.