Political candidates have discovered that they can trawl for votes by getting student activists to stump for them on Facebook. They may soon learn that the social-networking site is also a handy, if less than scientific, polling service.
Facebook has added a new feature that lets students record their likely voting preferences, and the site is tallying the data on its Election Pulse page, intended to show where students’ sympathies lie in this year’s hotly contested elections.
As might be expected, most of the polls lean to the left: In Montana’s U.S. Senate race, for example, a Democratic candidate, Jon Tester, leads the Republican incumbent, Conrad Burns, by a whopping 67 percentage points. But Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat who is now governor of Michigan, can’t be too excited about her Facebook poll numbers: In her bid for re-election, she trails Dick DeVos, a Republican challenger, by six points. —Brock Read
