Politics by the Numbers

Industy Standard Gif Slate and the Industry Standard join forces to examine the effect of the Internet on Campaign 2000.

Politicians will tell you just about anything they think you want to hear. But this year's real story beams through in numbers. Here's our latest attempt to shape the numbers into a narrative. It says as much about those of us who surf the Net as it does about the politicians who are using the Net to get votes (especially when they try to get them in Spanish). (For earlier "by the numbers" reports, click here and here.)

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1. Ratio of searches in Lycos search engine for "George Bush" to those for "Buddhism," first week in April: 1 to 1

2. Ratio of Lycos searches for "Al Gore" to those for "Horses for Sale": 1 to 1

3. Percentage of Americans who'd be comfortable buying a used car from George W. Bush, according to AutoTrader.com: 39

4. Percentage of Americans comfortable buying a used car from Al Gore: 34

5. Mentions of "little" Elián González on the George W. Bush—En Español home page: 4

6. Mentions of "little" Elián on Viva, Al Gore's Spanish-language home page: 0

7. Date Hillary Clinton admitted that she had yet to go online: Feb. 20, 2000

8. Number of days later that Rudy Giuliani declared he knew how to surf the Web: 34

9. Number of unique visitors to John McCain's Web site in March, the month he dropped out of the presidential race: 228,000

10. Number of unique visitors to Al Gore's Web site in March, the month he secured the Democratic nomination: 164,000

11. The Bush campaign's "Internet expense" for February, according to a Federal Election Commission filing: $4,058

12. The McCain campaign's "Internet expense" for the same period: $290,393

13. Number of domain names registered to the Democratic National Committee: 1

14. Number of domain names registered to the Republican National Committee: 10

15. Percentage of RNC-registered sites labeled "currently under construction" or "unable to locate server": 50

Sources:

1-2 Lycos

3-4 AutoTrader.com

5. Georgewbush.com

6. Algore2000.com

7. New York Daily News, Feb. 29, 2000

8. New York Post, March 25, 2000

9-10 PC Data Online

11-12 FECInfo.com

13-15 Network Solutions

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Matthew Yeomans has covered everything from the dot-com bust to the global oil boom. Today, he is founder of Custom Communication, providing social media strategy and branded content for companies.

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