Political campaigns

12: Romney Debate Gains Show Staying Power. Mitt Romney continues to surge in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, and Friday may have featured his best set of polls all year.

The best way to track a change in the polls is to look for instances in which the same firm has surveyed the same state (or the national race) multiple times. The FiveThirtyEight forecast model relies on a procedure very much like this to calculate the overall trend in the race. Fifteen polls were released on Friday that provided a comparison with another survey conducted between the Democratic convention and last week’s debate in Denver. Mr. Romney gained an average of 4.6 percentage points in these surveys. That is actually a bit larger than we were showing earlier in the week, when the same exercise put Mr.

It is not clear whether Mr. But unlike earlier, Mr. Thus, just as the hypothesis of a fading Romney bounce was damaged on Friday, so was the idea (which we critiqued in an earlier post) that his gains would be more modest in the swing states. Mr. Mr. PBS Grows Increasingly Hostile Toward Mitt Romney. Democratic candidate slammed for playing World Of Warcraft. The practice of publicly attacking a political opponent in order to make yourself and your colleagues look superior by comparison is as old as politics themselves.

You need look no further than your own television to see Mitt Romney and Barack Obama trading barbs on topics like healthcare reform, education and the general state of our modern economy. However, Republicans in Maine have found a new vector of ad hominem assault in the world of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. Colleen Lachowicz is a Democrat currently running for a seat in Maine’s state senate. Twitter launches dedicated presidential debate page. Whether you're a political junkie or someone just starting to pay attention to next month's presidential election, tonight's first debate between President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov.

Mitt Romney is sure to provide tons of conversation fodder. And Twitter wants to be right in the middle of it. Already, Twitter has dispatched members of its @gov team to Denver, where they plan to monitor the debate from up close and keep track of how the massive Twitter user base responds to each and every barb, attack, evasion, and even the occasional thoughtful answer. And to help Twitter users corral all that information, plus the opinions and reactions of some of the world's most notable politicians and pundits, the company today launched its dedicated Debates page. How Social and Traditional Media Differ in Treatment of the Conventions and Beyond. As the candidates for president reintroduced themselves at their conventions and began the last phase of the campaign, they received markedly different treatment in social media than in the mainstream press, a new study finds.

The conversation on Twitter, blogs and Facebook about Mitt Romney and Barack Obama during this key period changed little with events-even during the two candidates’ own nominating conventions. The conversation in all of these platforms was also consistently negative, according to the study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the mainstream media, by contrast, both Romney and Obama received a version of the traditional convention bounce, with coverage about them becoming more positive during the week of their party’s nationally televised gathering. 5 sites that crunch data to help you predict the president — Cloud Computing News.

Google to Political Campaigns: Here's How You Win. Google's politics team has been working with presidential campaigns for years.

Now they're ready to share the lessons they've learned with candidates for everything from the local school board to the U.S. Senate. The "four screens to victory" initiative, which launched on Wednesday, aims to convince those running for office at every level of politics that they need a presence across television, computers, tablets and smartphones in order to run a successful campaign.

The site is half best practices, half sales pitch for Google products. "Google’s goal is to make the web work for all political campaigns. "We’re trying to build a base of expertise how to help campaigns win online," says Charles Scrase, who works with elections, campaigns and non-profits that use Google platforms. That sales pitch, though, is aimed at the masses. "We’re making what we do scalable," says Scrase. YouTube has a part to play in all this as well, says Google.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pagadesign. Republicans in Congress Use Twitter 'More Effectively' Than Democrats [STUDY] Many people believe that Democrats are the more tech-savvy party in the U.S., but Twitter-happy Republicans in Congress are turning that theory on its head.

Republicans in Congress use Twitter "more effectively" than Democrats, according to a recent study from Edelman. Tweeting members of the Grand Old Party not only saw more retweets, engagement and amplification than their Democratic brethren, but their tweets were also more substantive — Republicans were 3.5 times as likely to mention specific legislation and they included 52% more links and almost 60% more multimedia than Democrats in their tweets.

Three Big Myths About China. What Can Twitter Tell Us About the South Carolina Primary? What's the social sentiment on Twitter saying about Saturday's South Carolina Primary?

Mashable teamed up with social media analysis company Global Point Research to find out. In the latest results from Public Policy Polling (PPP), Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is strong heading into tonight's primary. He has a nine point lead over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum just barely edged out Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) for third place. Twitter to Play Crucial Role in South Carolina Republican Debate.