• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, October 23, 2008

With Election Day fast approaching, liberal Democrats lead the way in political activism, with nine out of 10 giving a lot of thought to the election and 43% reading political blogs.

A new election-focused study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found the Internet overall is playing a major role in the presidential election as a source of information and means economy.

But the report highlighted stark differences in both offline and online political engagement between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. Besides embracing blogs at twice the rate of their Republican counterparts, they are also much more likely to have watched some type of campaign video online, by 60% to 33%.

Liberals were also more than twice as likely to have made a campaign donation and three times as likely to have attended a political event than conservatives.

Democrats overall outpaced Republicans in online political activity, although not as widely as liberals and conservatives. For example, 30% of all Democrats have read a blog compared to 23% of Republicans. The split is 43% to 35% when it comes to watching campaign-related video.

The level of online activity by independents was more likely to track that of Democrats than Republicans.

Political affiliations aside, nearly 60% of voters use the Web to find election-related content or discuss the campaign, according to a new study. The use of online video, in particular, has "exploded"-- with 39% watching campaign-related video, up from 24% in December 2007.

"However, the use of social networking sites--such as MySpace or Facebook--for campaign information has not grown much since early in the campaign season," stated the report. While more voters now visit social networks, only 8% say they have visited a social site for campaign information--up two points since last year.

Nearly one in four voters (23%) have visited a candidate's Web site, and 27% have read blogs about politics and the campaign.

The Pew survey was conducted from Oct. 16 to 19 among 2,599 registered voters interviewed on landline phones and cell phones.