Caucusing 101

Check out this video that the John Edwards Campaign is spotlighting on their youth site:

It's a little long, but really good overall. It's fun, and it's a concise explanation of what to expect and how to participate in the caucus. This is part of a new project launched today by the Edwards Campaign - The Iowa Caucus Command Center. The site hooks up potential caucus-goers with the location of their caucus, ride boards, and basic caucus information.

Seeing this inspired me to go check out the three top candidate's youth websites to see what's new and how they are approaching the caucus. There's less than one month left until the caucus (and the final week of the year is always a wash), so this is really crunch time for the campaigns, and I wanted to see what a young, potential supporter might find if they came to a campaign site looking for information about the caucus.

First stop was Students for Barack Obama. The SFBO page took a more field-based approach to the caucus - presenting students with a Google Map Mashup listing all the college and high school SFBO chapters and directing new people to sign up with some forms running on ajaxy-goodness.

Some more digging around the Obama website actually turned up The Iowa Caucus Center, a section of the website that was even more in-depth than what the Edwards campaign provides. Like the Edward campaign, Obama's Caucus Center features their own retro-style video explaining the caucus, along with a slide show, downloadable information, ride boards, recruitment tools, and even help finding child care for the evening. Despite the recent stir-up in the Iowa press about the rights of students to caucus, there was no clear way to get to this wealth of information from the Iowa section of the SFBO pages.

Finally, I went on over to HillBlazers to see what was happening. Sadly, the site is very much in line with Hillary's recent comments about students at the caucuses. Hillblazers currently has no information about the caucus available, and going over to the main Hillary for President site yields only an online form for me to fill out if I want information about the Iowa Caucus.

On the social networks, Barack Obama was the only top three candidate to have any caucus-related information prominently linked in the official group or profile. His MySpace account links promiently to the Iowa Caucus Headquarters, which takes the viewer to a page that prominently features the Caucus Center. Such links to the Caucus Command Center was absent from the Edwards FaceBook and MySpace pages, and as we've seen, Hilllary has nothing she could even link eager young supporters to. So it appears that when it comes to reaching young folks (online), Obama and Edwards are starting to reach out, but the efforts are still a bit uncoordinated and not yet at full steam. Hillary, on the other hand, has nothing going.

What's happening on the ground I'm sure is another matter entirely.