Fast Facts from the 2002 Political Web sphere

Did you know…?*

• More than 80 percent of candidates provided outlinks to other sites, however less than two percent linked to their opponent’s Web pages.
  
• Only two percent of Senate campaign Web sites provided information about contributors. This was more than either House or Governor candidates’ sites.
  
• Republicans had greater Web campaign site presence than Democrats in House and Senate races.
  
• One hundred percent of Democratic gubernatorial races, both challengers and incumbents, had Web campaign sites.
  
• There were a greater percentage of Republican Senate challengers (96 percent) with Web sites than Republican incumbents (87 percent).
  
• More than 80 percent of candidate Web sites provided information about a candidate’s position on at least one issue. However, less than 5 percent of all campaign Web sites explicitly compared opponent’s positions with the sponsoring candidate’s site.
  
• Less than half of third party candidates had campaign Web sites, compared to 75 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans.
  
• While 84 percent of campaign sites enabled public participation, only 21% enabled mobilization.
  
• Twenty-six percent of campaign sites provided information to enable citizens to begin the voter registration process.
  
• Almost half of Senate campaign Web sites posted privacy policies to explain how they treated individual information, compared to 21 percent of Gubernatorial and 11 percent of House sites.
  
• Fifteen percent of Senate campaign Web sites encouraged Letters to the Editor, compared to five percent of campaign Web sites for House and Governors.

* Findings are based on a sampling of the candidate Web sites produced in all 505 contests that took place during the 2002 House, Senate and Gubernatorial elections.