The last I heard, the right was feeling quite pleased with itself because there was some evidence to suggest the traffic for the top liberal blogs was trending down, while the traffic for the top conservative blogs was trending up. This item, relying on SiteMeter data from the end of December, argued, “It has long been understood that the largest liberal blogs have generally produced more web traffic than the largest conservative blogs.... After surveying the traffic stats of many major political blogs, I found that web traffic for several major liberal blogs either declined sharply or stayed the same while major conservative blogs saw a sharp increase in traffic.”
Now, apparently, the right is prepared to argue the opposite — liberal blogs are more popular — but with a rationalization to explain the phenomenon.
Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative megablog RedState, conceded that progressives currently enjoy an advantage over conservatives online — though he attributed it to an asymmetry in free time, since conservatives “have families because we don’t abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism.”
I’m not quite sure how best to respond to something like this — it’s unusually unhinged, even by the standards of the far-right blogosphere — though I think Matt Stoller is on the right track by relying on simple mockery: “Now, being a doctor who performs abortions is in fact a job, so one might find conflicting narratives in Erick’s quote. And if the way to use the internet well politically is to up the number of abortions, then the GOP is kind of fu**ed.”
