Blog-driven Polls

The folks at MyDD are putting together a poll which asks a series of questions that most media firms will not ask.

Kudos to them! Polling - especially polling on questions which are not frequently asked - is a great way to drive a story and "create" news.

However, polls are not enough. As Peter Daou pointed out in his "triangle" post last September, blogs will not be able to push a story into the traditional news media unless they have the support of Democratic officials and candidates.

Luckily, the MyDD poll dovetails with a lot of great yeoman's work being done by other parts of the blogosphere, on highlighting and supporting Iraq vets who are coming home to run for Congress. See, for example, Air America Radio, the ActBlue Fighting Dems fundraising page, and kos's weekly Fighting Dems series.

Before the poll gets underway, it's important to get the support of these Democratic candidates, as well as key elected Democrats, like John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi, and Russ Feingold. A commitment from even a handful of these to talk about the poll in the days following its release is as necessary to the poll's ultimate success as any fundraising or poll-drafting efforts.

Moreover, it wouldn't hurt to bring the progressive magazine circuit, including the Nation, Mother Jones, and The American Prospect, online in this effort.