*Updated
Three LAUSD Board seats will be up for grabs on March 7th. It is really hard to tell who is in the lead in these races – primarily because they are such small potatoes when it comes to voters.
For example, in the last LAUSD election, one of the most hotly contested seats was District 5 between Ref Rodriguez and Bennett Kayser. Over $500,000 was spent on that election, and in the end 26,622 people showed up to vote….
For a board district that has over 80,000 students.
Of course, as we learned so very clearly in this last presidential election, one of the best ways to mobilize people nowadays is online. So I ask this question:
With only one month to go, how are the candidates online campaigns going?
Let me start with this caveat – just because someone has likes or followers, that does not mean they have those votes. What it means is that they have supporters, who might mobilize, through volunteering or through their wallet, to help them. And I think that is something interesting to look at….so here we go:
In District 2, the social media is dominated by Monica Garcia and Carl Petersen, while Lisa Alva has minimal web presence.
Carl Petersen () is a prolific tweeter, who has averaged 12.7 tweets a day since June. Almost all of them tweet at his opponent, Monica Garcia. In fact, he has mentioned Monica Garcia 229 times.
Monica Garcia () on the other hand has averaged 3.5 tweets a day during that time, has not mentioned Carl Petersen once.
In District 4, the twitter game is dominated by by Steve Zimmer, who has the benefit of having been active on twitter for some time. But while he dominates twitter, his opponents have stronger Facebook support.
Interestingly, while Zimmer () has more followers, he rarely tweets – only averaging about 0.1 tweets a day (compare that, for a moment, to the tweets going on in District 2). Melvoin, on the other hand, tweets an average of about once per day.
Melvoin () has attempted to use some hashtags to support his campaign – #picknick and #kidsfirst – but those kind of get drowned out because they are so generic. There are student body candidates from Ohio using #picknick and there are Oregonians opposing Betsy Devos using #kidsfirst. (Sorry Nick, you know I had to throw some shade).
Gregory Martayan has the most Facebook likes, but has no active twitter presence (as far as I can tell). His Facebook presence is also a recent thing – it has grown 20% in the last week.
Finally, in the Valley, we have District 6. Notice how much smaller the numbers are here. Nobody has over a thousand likes and twitter is essentially non-existent.
Imelda Padilla () seems to have her online presence most well defined.
Kelly Gonez () has a medium-strength web presence for this area, an she has been much more active on twitter recently.
I think what is most interesting to me about all this online stuff is that there are clearly different eco-systems in Los Angeles. What works at getting your word out in Board District 2 is clearly different from Board District 4 or Board District 6.
I am interested to see how this information compares to the election results. Do Twitter and Facebook reflect anything? Or is it just fluff that doesn’t matter? We’ll find out in a month.
*This post was updated to reflect that a more recent test of Imelda Padilla’s webpage on Safari and Chrome do not get stuck, and loaded in only 5 second.