It's taken me a little longer than I had hoped to pull together the data on how the Republican presidential candidates are doing in terms of bottom-up support for their campaigns online, for which I apologize. Here's the headline: They're almost invisible on the web. Compared to the Democratic presidential field, which I posted on a few days ago, the Republican contenders* are playing bush league ball online. Not even Triple A.

To give you just one example, if you add up all the friends all the Republican candidates have on their MySpace pages, and compare it to all the friends the Ds have, the totals will amaze you: 4,007 to 51,471. If I take fringe candidates Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo out of that equation, the Republican total drops below 2,000.

Same with total incoming blog links, which for the Republican are woeful in part due to the fact that most of them don't have serious websites yet. Counting links to their primary unofficial sites along with official sites (and in some cases, like Newt Gingrich, George Pataki, Chuck Hagel and Mike Huckabee, none of whom are officially in the race, I'm counting links to their government sites or, in Newt's case, to his personal site, and in Hagel's case, to a draft site), we get a total of 3,069 incoming blog links. That compares to 8,488 to the eight sites of the Democratic candidates who are officially in the race. If I included some of the Democratic non-candidates who might still get into the race, like Al Gore, I'm sure the totals would be even more imbalanced.

Same is true for photos posted on Flickr. There are a total of 789 photos of members of the Republican field, even with those non-candidates counted. (In fairness, I started hunting for photos of Tommy Thompson, Jim Gilmore or Ron Paul the politicians, and when I discovered that there are plenty of regular folks with those names who have photos on Flickr, I gave up about three screens into my search.) By comparison, there are 3,977 of the official Democratic field.

I won't even bother with Facebook, since only Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo are active there. Yes, there are lots of little unofficial groups for various GOP candidates on Facebook, but those won't amount to anything meaningful if the campaigns fail to set up shop on the site and draw them in.

As of this week (these numbers are all drawn from online research done January 22-23), organic online support for the Republicans running is focused on four people: John McCain, Ron Paul (the libertarian maverick congressman from Texas), Tom Tancredo (the far-right anti-immigration congressman from Colorado) and Newt Gingrich, the former speaker. Sam Brownback, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are all trailing, though the numbers overall are so pitiful it's hardly like they have that much ground to regain.

Here's how it breaks down: In MySpace, Paul has 1,449 friends; McCain 1,052; Tancredo 728; and Brownback 452 friends on an unofficial page. None of the others topped 200.

In terms of incoming blog posts, Gingrich is the most popular with 1,172 (though I'm sure most of those are dated well before the 2008 race was a gleam in anyone's eye). Among the "serious" candidates, Romney leads with 556, followed by 284 to Brownback, 264 to McCain and 203 to Giuliani. One interesting clue as to the chances of dark-horse non-candidate Mike Huckabee: a blog devoted to drafting him as 1,059 incoming links (compare that to 156 links to a Draft Newt site).

Let be the first to say that what I'm reporting here is clearly incomplete. That's because, in order to do an apples-to-apples comparison that would track with the post I did on the Democratic presidentials online, I focused again solely on these four indications of organic grass-roots enthusiasm: the number of friends each candidate has on their MySpace page; the number of wall posts people have left on their Facebook page; the number of incoming blog links to their website as measured by Technorati; and the number of photos of them posted to Flickr.

And here's the problem with reading too much into these results: By and large, none of the Republican presidential candidates appear to be making a serious effort to garner support online through MySpace or Facebook; nor do they appear to have much outreach to blogs going; nor do any of them have a clue about Flickr. In fact, while several of the Democratic sites have front page links to many of those sites (and others), I don't think I saw one on any Republican site. Is entrepreneurial behavior dead in the Republican party?

That said, the tremendous skew in expressions of affiliation online toward the Democratic field can't just be explained by GOP cluelessness about e-organizing. Rightwing talk-radio host and new media maven Hugh Hewitt has some interesting theories, including the idea that the right side of the web is smaller because Republicans have been in power for so long:

...occupying the White House leaves certain political muscles undeveloped. The president gets all the attention he wants, even if it is unfavorable. It tends to make its inhabitants less hungry, or overconfident of their abilities to generate interest.

[Also], the Democrats have been using the tools of netroots advocacy to gain power for some time, while the GOP campaign elite --loyal to the president-- has been using them to preserve power, which are very, very different virtual skills sets.

He also argues that McCain has been "hostile" to new media and thus hasn't done much to stoke web enthusiasm for his campaign. All of these points may be true, but it still doesn't explain why netizens are seemingly tilting so strongly to the left. I don't think you can claim that people who go online every day are disproportionately Democrats; the socioeconomics of web usage, and in particular broadband subscription costs, still mean that the web tilts toward the upper income spectrum and thus is populated with at least as many Republicans as Democrats.

OK, maybe Facebook is still predominantly filled with college students, even after opening itself to anyone who wants to join, and we know young people are heavily Democratic at the moment. But camera users? And while the new Pew Internet study I reported on last week does indicate a partisan tilt toward the Ds among online political activists--the people who post and comment on blogs--I'm not sure that explains why incoming links from bloggers would go more than 2-1 Democratic.

No, the only conclusion I have is that right now, on top of relative cluelessness on the part of the Republican presidential campaigns about the value of engaging the big social network sites (c'mon guys, think of your MySpace and Facebook pages as booths at the state fair!), the Republican field just isn't generating as much enthusiasm online as the Democrats. A harbinger of 2008?

*Included in the Republican field: Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, Jim Gilmore, Tommy Thompson and Ron Paul--all of whom have at least announced the formation of an exploratory committee--plus Chuck Hagel, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and George Pataki.

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