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Republicans Attaining Parity on Social Networks?

A couple months ago I blogged a story by Business Week noting that Democrats far outnumbered Republicans on social networking sites. On FaceBook by as much as 2-1.

A story in The Hotline On Call today calls that into question, noting that - at least among the college crowd - Republicans may be achieving parity, or even surpassing, their democratic counterparts.

Take it with a grain of salt. The information is totally uncited, but its a trend to watch out for (and stop):

But a state-by-state analysis of College Democrats and Republicans on Facebook proved otherwise. There were almost an equal number of organized College Dems and Republicans groups. And of the 66 College groups listed for all 50 states and D.C. (Out of 102, 36 states didn't have a CR or CD), College Republican groups had 70 more people on average than College Democrats.

That difference was in no small part because of the Missouri College Republicans group, which is the largest of its kind in the U.S. with almost 3,000 members. New York College Democrats is the second largest group with 1,100 members.

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December 22nd, 2006 2:24pm
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organized political parties

Submitted by shai (not verified) on Fri, 2006-12-22 16:40.

as will rogers said and many college students probably will say again, "I'm not a member of an organized political party, I'm a Democrat". college students who identify as Democrats don't join the College Democrats, by and large. I can think of any number of reasons why, but it makes sense that whereas rare student conservatives feel the need to huddle together in the small number of conservative groups on campus - CR being the most prominent - abundant student liberals can choose any number of groups to belong to. frequently, college dems isn't even all that liberal, so i can sort of see why liberals don't join.

the abundance of CR's on social networking sites more or less reflects the fact that there are more CR clubs in the country then there are college dems. the disparity is sizable but not overwhelming - like 900 - 700 or something - but it makes sense that it would show up online as well.

Great interpretation

Submitted by Michael Connery on Tue, 2006-12-26 18:08.

Great reading of the situation, Shai. I should have thought of that - especially after having just recently blogged on the disparity between the # of CR and CD chapters.

And you're right, the dispersion of "liberal" students into single issue advocacy groups on campus could also be a significant reason for these results.

In light of that, the original assessment by Nielsen that liberals outnumber conservatives on social networks most likely still holds.