Our political blogger David Postman brought up an interesting tidbit Friday about how MySpace will be holding a presidential primary Jan.1 and 2, before any of the official state primaries.
Users will be asked to vote for their favorite candidate (TechCrunch's Michael Arrington points out that MySpace has more members than Mexico has residents).
MySpace also launched an "Impact" section, which features bios on all the candidates and their stand on issues. It's pretty comprehensive and, in fact, it's hard to think of another user friendly site at this early in the game (traditional "voter pamphlets" are far from being out). The Impact site highlights a monthly category. Right now, the topic is "Environmentalism."
Postman does a good job pointing out that the site has some 65 million monthly U.S. visitors, 85 percent f whom are of voting age. Also, MySpace users 18 and up are three times more likely to interact online with a public official or candidate.
TechCrunch thinks the move would be even more interesting if made on Facebook (but aren't a higher proportion of those users more likely to be under 18?).