Tuesday 22 December 2009

#Kerryout Could Keep Kerry McCarthy In


Is this a sign of things to come from the blogosphere As we all take part in an election battle are we the bloggers about to become a bit nasty.

I’m no fan of Kerry McCarthy MP, I follower her on Twitter and I'm quite unimpressed with what I read from her Twitter account. I don't think she is cut out to be an MP myself, but that’s just an opinion. I am also aware that she has had the famous 2nd bed expense claim. However I think this campaign is nasty and demonstrates how nasty the election could get on the blogosphere.

There has already been plenty of blogs written stating that this campaign is nasty (for example here on the Conservative Blog and here on the Norfolk Blogger) so I won't go into one on this blog as it’s been covered. However I just wondered how influential bloggers believe they are when trying to win seats.

Kerry McCarthy majority is 8,621 at the moment the top bloggers stats for November 09 are 241,208 unique visitors for Iain dale and 305,624 for Guido Fawkes. As a rough calculation that's split by 646 MP's is 473 for Guido Fawkes readers per consistency (Guido I must add has not covered the #Kerryout campaign. I’m just using the higher stats.). Now assuming all the blog readers were persuaded, then their still be falling too short of the line (of course this is rough as there’s many missing stats. like the actual majority now after boundary changes and some people would have already change their votes and the number of pro Kerry out blog readers adding up.).

I understand that all votes count but this won’t impact much on the ground. Of course the funds raised will help (although there is a limit of £12k that a party can spend on an election campaign).

It is possible that if a local blog tired this campaign it could have a higher effect if they have more local readers.

I guess the idea would be for the press to report this campaign, maybe locally to gain more supporters for #Kerryout. But could this be where it could all go wrong. The British people actually could react badly to a campaign like this if they are not given really good reasons as to why Kerry should go. They may even defend Kerry as the sense of fair play could enter the voter’s thoughts and they may get defensive. So if I was one of the bloggers who are supporting this campaign (like Tory Bear here) I think I would now end it and slowly walk away. This could be used against the Tory candidate. If that happened it would be quite unfair to the Adeela Shafi, who never asked for this campaign to begin with, but Adeela may pay the price of negative campaigning herself.

We will wait and see.

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