{"id":312636,"date":"2010-02-12T12:53:58","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T17:53:58","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogs.courant.com,2010:\/capitol_watch\/\/9.71620"},"modified":"2010-02-13T11:39:25","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T16:39:25","slug":"if-facebook-fans-were-votes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/312636","title":{"rendered":"If Facebook fans were votes…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Peter Schiff <\/a>might win. The financial pundit, author and broker from Weston has a whopping 21,518 fans. (And that’s not even counting the 7,122 fans on his official “Peter Schiff for Senate<\/a>” page.)<\/p>\n

Democrat Richard Blumenthal has a respectable 9,582 Facebook fans and Republican Linda McMahon<\/a> has 7,676. Her arch enemy, fellow Republican Rob Simmons<\/a>, brings up the rear with 2,772 fans.<\/p>\n

On Twitter, Schiff<\/a> also leads the pack with 3,486 followers (even though his last tweet was on Jan. 17.) McMahon <\/a>has 3,326 Twitter followers (last tweet — about 1:10 this afternoon) and Simmons<\/a> has 1,850 (last tweet — yesterday.)<\/p>\n

Blumenthal<\/a>, by the way, has 192 followers on Twitter and has only one tweet, which came on Jan. 8, two days after he announced that he was entering the race.<\/p>\n

Many candidates like to tout their fluency in social media but does it translate into votes? <\/p>\n

Most of the posts and tweets are bland statements similar to the pronouncements found on the campaign websites. Blumenthal’s Facebook wall <\/a>is an exception: tucked among the numerous posts from fans lauding his work as attorney general — “You are a great man and have done so much for the weak, timid and underprivileged…” — are several personal pleas for help.<\/p>\n

And then there’s Merrick Alpert. Earlier this week, Ted Mann of The Day<\/a> took note of the slightly dreamy, stream-of-consciousness tweets<\/a> from the longshot Democrat.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Peter Schiff might win. The financial pundit, author and broker from Weston has a whopping 21,518 fans. (And that’s not even counting the 7,122 fans on his official “Peter Schiff for Senate” page.) Democrat Richard Blumenthal has a respectable 9,582 Facebook fans and Republican Linda McMahon has 7,676. Her arch enemy, fellow Republican Rob Simmons, brings up the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4000,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4000"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}