• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, November 1, 2010

Tuesday will decide the outcome of a political season that was especially fraught, with feelings running high amid bitter controversies over healthcare, government spending, and immigration -- not to mention witches, make-believe Nazis, and the rent being too damn high. For all the drama, the outcome isn't really in doubt: The Republicans are almost certainly going to take back the House of Representatives, with the GOP gaining anywhere from 50-70 seats (maybe even more), and possibly the Senate, where most pollsters believe they are set to gain at least seven seats.

Obviously this is going to be a highly engaging election night, no matter how you look at it: Republicans partisans will probably be celebrating, while Democratic supporters will follow the exit polls with something approaching dread. On the media front, broadcast and cable news always scores high on election night, of course -- but it's also the kind of event where social media really comes into its own. After all, elections are up there with sporting events and wars as expressions of communal feeling and aggression: whether celebrating or commiserating over the election results, people are apt to seek camaraderie and comfort with their peers. Meanwhile the national scale of the event recommends social media as a way to check in with family, friends, and colleagues scattered across the country. Finally, social media make it easy to forge new connections amid the uproar -- the virtual equivalent of people going crazy and hugging everyone around them ("I don't know you but we won!").

The 2008 presidential election may have been the first real national social media event in the history of U.S. politics. This resulted in the heaviest Internet traffic in history up to that day (and probably since, until tomorrow at least): at 11 p.m. on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, the Internet logged on visitors at the rate of 8,572,042 per minute, according to Akamai, surpassing the previous peak of 7,283,584 achieved on June 22, 2006, when the U.S. lost the World Cup to Ghana. Roughly 7.5 million of the logins on election night occurred in North America.

Along with the predictable increases at news Web sites, Twitter saw overall traffic jump 43% on November 4, 2008 compared to the day before, according to Hitwise. Facebook got a big lift too, with overall activity increasing 20% over the same day the previous week, as measured by page-views. This included 5.44 million people clicking the "I voted" button to let their friends know they took part. Election-related wall posts surged from 200,000 per day in the week preceding the election to two million on the day of the election, including 1.1 million mentioning Obama and 280,000 mentioning McCain (suggesting Facebook's potential for forecasting political outcomes).

This time around, committed partisans will probably have several browser windows open in addition to Facebook and Twitter, with Republican supporters gravitating to sites like the National Review campaign blog and popular conservative blogs like HotAir, Instapundit, and Ace of Spades to revel in their victory. Given the sense of euphoria likely to prevail among visitors to these sites, I wonder if blog administrators are charging advertisers special premium election-night rates to reach their giddy audiences? Sports sites charge more during the Super Bowl or World Cup, so why shouldn't political blogs do the same thing?