Is The GOP Playing Catch-Up Online or Are Our Voters Playing Catch-Up?

I saw this article from the Washington Post today called Online, GOP is Playing Catch-up and I couldn't help but think it paints a pretty bleak picture, but how bleak is it really?  Here are some pretty bleak points/quotes from the article:

• Quote from David All: "For the most part Republicans are stuck in Internet circa 2000," he said in an interview."
• Quotes from Mike Turk: "We're losing the Web right now." and "Sometimes I wonder if it will take losing the White House for the Republicans to take the Internet more seriously," Turk said.
• Quote from K. Daniel Glover, who edits National Journal's Technology Daily,"But look at the short history of online politics," Glover said. "For Republicans, the Internet is where bad things happen. Take [former U.S. senator] George Allen and his 'macaca' moment. . You can kind of understand why Republicans have this almost instinctive fear of the Internet, where the mob rules."
• (Nielsen/Net Ratings) it found that former senator John Edwards's site had about 690,000 unique visitors in March, when the Democrat's wife, Elizabeth, announced that she had a recurrence of cancer. That was more than the combined number of visitors to the sites of the three leading GOP contenders, Rudolph W. Giuliani (297,000), Sen. John McCain (258,000) and Mitt Romney (76,000).
• The top three Democrats, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama and Edwards, amassed more than $14 million over the Internet in the first three months of 2007; in contrast, the top three Republicans, Giuliani, McCain and Romney, collected less than half of that, $6 million.

Wow, that looks pretty bleak doesn't it?   Well, what bugged me most about this article is that I didn't see anything in there about demographic distributions of Democrats versus a Republicans.  Are Republicans behind on the internet because their core audience isn't online?  Are we behind on YouTube views, MySpace friends, and Facebook peeps because Republicans are either more likely to be older and not embracing Web 2.0 tools or some other dominant demographic for the party that isn't online as much.  Need some data for this discussion?  Let's check in with Pew, shall we?

• Latest trend shows a definite skew towards younger people for online use.
• According to a Pew presentation for PDF, more than twice as many broadband users under the age of 36 relied on the internet to get most of their political news in 2006 as did the 51+ age group
• And finally, looking at the results from the Connecticut Senate Race of 2006 when Joe Lieberman came back from losing the Democratic primary to defeat Netoots candidate Ned Lamont, you find that Senator Lieberman smoked him in the 45+ age brackets and Lamont won in the 18-29 age group.  (BTW - you get the joke that Sen. Lieberman got more votes from Republicans than the official Republican candidate, right?)

So if older people are less likely to be online and more likely to be Republican, why wouldn't we expect that the current online statistics favor Democrats?  Facebook skews wayyy younger, as does Youtube, and MySpace.  It seems to me that the stats quoted above are not not that fair to begin with; they may paint an accurate picture of what is happening today, but it is what you would expect if you peeled back the onion and looked at underlying demographic and usage behavior statistics.

I live in an true honest to goodness Republican stronghold of Long Valley (Washington Township), Morris County, NJ.  Democrats don't run for office in town because people won't vote for them.  You know what I've seen - these folks aren't on MySpace or Facebook and will use YouTube when someone sends them a link to a funny video.  They are not devouring Web 2.0 tools.  Do I wish more Republicans were online and used more internet tools - of course; it would make my job a lot easier.  However, that's not the case and until the rest of the Republican base catches up lets stop whining and remember who our audience really is.  BTW - Patrick Ruffini (online strategy adviser for Rudy Giuliani) has a rebuttal of the article.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric