ABSTRACT
The 2008 Democratic race between Barack Obama and Hillmy Clinton was the longest primary campaign in history and one of the most intensive in recent memory. Besides following the campaign through traditional media like newspapers, radio, and television, more Americans turned to the Internet actively searching for information about the candidates. In this article, the author analyzes search traffic data for Obama and Clinton over the course of the primary to revisit the classic "minimal effects" hypothesis about campaigns. Tlois hypothesis, first voiced in the 1940s and 1950s, argues that campaigns have only small marginal effects on citizens vote choices. TJoe author tests a weaker version of this hypothesis, asking whether campaigns positively affect a kind of political engagement that he terms active online engagement. Using a statistical model, he compares online search traffic in the month before an election against the month after. He finds support for the hypothesis that campaigns spark political engagement by an average of about 50 percent over the general level of political interest in a given state. He also finds evidence contrary to the popular wisdom of the 2008 campaign that Hillary Clinton ran a poor race. In fact, the author finds that her campaign had more influence in engaging people online, although the overall levels of search traffic remained below that of Obama. Put simply: Hillary Clinton ran a solid campaign against an unusually popular opponent.
