The Web on the Candidates

• The New York Times’ Katherine Seelye has a sense that, even though there are more women than men online, more men than women are engaging with political websites. This presents a wrench in candidates’ web strategies. To get some answers about why women aren't more political online, Seelye solicited the opinions of her readers. In addition to the theory that men are happier spending time on the computer than helping with chores (for the record, I have no idea what she’s talking about…), many opinions point to the similarities between politics and sports, and that men “build up an echo chamber that reinforces their dominance.” These might be funny social observations, but they have a real political impact: if campaigns can't figure out how to engage women online, they're missing out on millions of potential eyeballs and, therefore, votes.

• Supporters of Ron Paul have produced a website called Ron Paul Friends USA (imaginative title!) with a GOTV message. Their goal is to get volunteers on the ground to promote Paul, and they have a fairly sophisticated plan to do so. I’m curious why this group — which doesn’t say anything about itself other than it’s privately funded — isn’t working with the Paul campaign, given it’s emphasis on field organizing.

The Candidates on the Web

• The entire Romney family (besides, er, Mitt) is now blogging. The five Romney sons blog at their Five Brothers blog, and now Mitt’s wife, Ann, has her own blog too. As Jose Antonio Vargas at the Washington Post notes, features include Ann’s Recipes, in which she shares the recipe for her mother’s Welsh Skillet Cakes (is that like a pancake?). I wonder if the blog, with it’s woman-centric focus, is a preemptive attempt to battle Hillary Clinton’s appeal to women…

• The third-quarter fundraising numbers are starting to come in: Ron Paul has raised more than $3 million, which, as the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Jacoby notes, is more than Democrats Chris Dodd ($1.5 million) and Joe Biden (just under $2 million).

• Barack Obama raised $20 million ($19 million for the primaries), and while this is less than the $32.5 million he raised last quarter, he has still raised four times as much as Howard Dean had at this point in 2003, and he has still received donations from an impressive 352,000 people, many of whom have donated small amounts over the Internet.

• MyDD’s Jerome Armstrong points out that, while Obama has broken Dean’s record for the number of individual donors in a primary campaign, his growth has been slowing compared to previous quarters:

  Obama’s new donors:

  1st Q— 104,000

  2nd Q— 154,000

  3rd Q— 93,000

  Total— 350,000

  “In terms of momentum, I doubt that Obama will focus as much on gaining additional donors in Q4, and he’s already peaked on that end during Q2. Still, that represents alot of money, and alot of donors to draw on again, more than enough to allow Obama to fully contest every primary and caucus,” Armstrong wrote.

• Although Hillary Clinton beat out Obama, raising $27 million ($22 million for the primaries), both candidates are about even when it comes to fundraising. “The bottom line remains that Clinton and Obama are in the same ballpark, with their rivals well behind,” writes the Politico’s Ben Smith.

• John Edwards raised $7 million, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are said to have raised $10 million each, and Fred Thompson raised $8 million.

In Case You Missed It…

In the battle to send out the most human, personal emails possible, Hillary Clinton has struck a blow: she sent out an actual handwritten note.