Performics' Survey Reveals the Increased Role of the Internet in the 2008 Presidential Election.

February 21, 2007

CHICAGO, Forty-two percent of Americans expect they will seek out more information from the Internet in 2008 than they did in the 2004 presidential election, according to survey results announced today by Performics, the performance-based marketing division of DoubleClick.

Performics’ survey reveals much about the public’s perception and use of the Internet as a channel for gathering information related to politics and the 2008 presidential election. While the survey confirmed that television news and talk shows, local and national newspapers, and news radio are the primary means for political information, campaigns and candidates, 42 percent of Americans say the Internet will play an important role in helping them decide who to vote for in the 2008 presidential election.

“As the 2008 presidential candidates hit the campaign trail, we were curious to find out how Americans plan to learn about their choices for our next president. We suspected that as the public continues to rely on the Internet as an important information source, people will seek political information via search engines in a manner similar to the way that they already search for information regarding consumer purchases, meaning that after they first hear about a candidate or issue, they will conduct broad searches to gather information and then narrow down the candidates and issues until they ultimately reach a decision,” said Stuart Frankel, president of Performics. “With 42 percent of Americans saying the Internet will play an important role in deciding who to vote for in the 2008 election, there is a large opportunity to leverage search engine marketing and optimization as a strategy for political campaigning.”

Performics’ survey found that the vast majority of Americans, 67 percent, ‘always’, ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ search for more information about a candidate or political issue at some point during the election process. Of those Americans who do so ‘always’, ‘often’ or ‘sometimes’, 68 percent read print editions of local or national newspapers, while the Internet (59 percent) is used slightly more often than television news and talk shows (58 percent), with radio news and talk shows (50 percent), and family and friends (48 percent) trailing.

Key survey findings also included:

Consumer Use of the Internet for Political Information

• Reliance on the Internet for political information is very strongly related to age, declining from 88 percent among 18-34 year olds to 25 percent among Americans 65 and older.

• Americans who search the Internet for additional political information typically visit television or news magazine websites (60 percent), search engines (42 percent), newspaper sites (36 percent) and other online news sites (45 percent) as their top choices.

Visiting Candidates’ Websites

• Overwhelmingly, those who visit a candidate’s website say they are primarily looking for the candidate’s stance on specific issues (72 percent). Far fewer visitors say they are mainly looking for the candidate’s voting record (16 percent), what others say about the candidate (6 percent) or which organizations have endorsed the candidate (4 percent).

• The largest proportion (38 percent) of those who have visited a candidate’s website say they are most likely to visit it throughout the election process, while 31 percent say they are most likely to visit only if they hear or read something about the candidate in the news.

Methodology 

These findings are from a telephone survey conducted February 8-11, 2007 among a random sample of 1,014 adults. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points among the total sample. Opinion Research Corporation of Princeton, NJ, conducted the fieldwork.