Survey Shows Importance of Internet to American Voters

Twice as many Americans used the Internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002. Some 15 percent of all American adults say the Internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7 percent in the mid-term election of 2002.

A post-election survey by the Pew Internet Project shows that the 2006 race also produced a notable class of online political activists. Some 23 percent of those who used the Internet for political purposes -- the people we call campaign Internet users -- actually created or forwarded online original political commentary or politically-related videos.

"The vanguard of YouTubers and bloggers has become influential in politics," said Pew Internet Project Director Lee Rainie, one of the authors of the Project's report on its national survey. "Those who wish to engage voters around a particular issue or candidate have many more tools at their disposal today than they did just four years ago."

Twenty percent of campaign Internet users say they got political news and information from blogs, while 24 percent say they visited issue-oriented Web sites.

The growing importance of the Internet in the nation's political life is tied at least in part to the spread of broadband connections in American homes. Some 17 percent of Americans had broadband connections at home at the time of the 2002 midterm campaign and it rose to 45 percent by November 2006. Younger broadband users -- those under age 36 -- were more likely to cite the Internet than newspapers as their main source of political news.

"Young broadband users seem to be replacing time spent with newspapers with time spent with online news outlets, while older broadband users go online for political information as a supplement to other media like newspapers and television news," said Pew Internet's John Horrigan, the Associate Director for Research and co-author of the report. "Younger users especially appreciate the extra information and the variety of perspectives they get online."

The 2006 election survey shows that convenience is the top reason people use the Internet to get political news information and that the majority of campaign Internet users go to the Web sites of mainstream news organizations. At the same time, though, a majority of Internet users go to non-traditional sites such as blogs, humor and satire sites like The Daily Show, international sites, alternative sites, candidate and government sites.

These findings come from a survey of 2,562 adults, aged 18 and older. The margin of error on the full sample is +/- 2 percent.