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As soon as the polls start to close this evening the world will hear tha Obama has won the popular vote in the US presidential election and will take the electoral college with a landslide victory.  PR Media Blog is ‘calling’ the vote at 14.42 GMT well ahead of polls closing.

Since the 1990s the media have had the ability to accurately predict the popular vote which has meant that we don’t have to wait for the votes to be counted to know the outcome.  But in the last two presidential run offs, the vote has been close and in 2000 the votes were so close that it was days before the supreme court ruling resulted in the Bush victory over Al Gore.

This year the margin of victory will be significant and we can be fairly certain because the social web has provided ordinary people with the tools to predict the outcome.   Take the site Iftheworldcouldvote.  On the surface it is a bit of fun allowing anyone around the world to cast a vote and showing how different countries would cast their ballots.  One of the coutries is the USA and in effect this is a poll that shows Obama gaining almost 80% of the vote.  OK the poll is biased towards the web literate and in theory voters could post multiple ballots, but this is a sample size of over a quarter of a million and the margin is enormous.    

If we are to believe conventional media there are enough swing states and undecided voters to keep the race open but this is simply not the case.  Newspapers, radio and TV want to keep us guessing, because that is what will deliver circulation and audience but the social web is telling us the America has decided and Obama will be the 44th president of the United States.  

The United States presidential election has been the first major democratic process anywhere in the world where the use of social media has played a significant part in communications.

Of the eighteen candidates running in the primaries for the two main parties, nine had blogs, including both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.   Involvement in social networks was significant from the earliest days. Republican Mitt Romney was the first prospective candidate to launch a Facebook profile,  Democrat John Edwards set up a campaign headquarters in the cyber world of Second Life.  This resulted in a bizarre web 2.0 event when it was vandalised by the avatars of his political opponents.  Clinton used her web site to launch her campaign.

It was Barack Obama though who was the prime mover from the outset.  He engaged with most of the high profile social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter.  On the day that Barack Obama announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee in January 2007, student government co-ordinator Farouk Olu Aregbe created a group on Facebook called “One Million Strong for Barack”.  The social web was critical to the Obama campaign in another fundamental way.  It played an important part in the funding of his bid for office.  In a campaign video directed at his supporters he said “Instead of forcing us to rely on millions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs, you’ve fuelled this campaign with donations of $5, $10, $20, whatever you can afford, and because you did, we’ve built a grassroots movement of over 1.5 million Americans.”  Obama’s success raising money via these small donations was achieved in a way never before possible as part of a U.S. presidential election campaign.

The 1960 election of John F Kennedy was thought to be point at which television became central to the democratic process.  2008 may well be the year that sees the critical intervention of the social web

Coming out from under your boiler or out of a blocked drain, it’s plumbers’ turn to have their time in the sunshine: the US presidential race, no less.

 ”Joe the Plumber”, the ultimate American regular guy, who got face to face with Barack Obama over his tax plans was purloined by John McCain and his campaign team as the exemplar of those whose American dream would turn nasty if Obama ever makes it to the Oval office.

So powerful did McCain’s team consider the plumber, his name came up 25 times during the final presidential debate.

But while hanging his hat on Joe, I wonder if McCain knew that the plumbers’ union had already pledged its backing for Obama, way back in January this year?

Maybe he did, but the lure of using the plumbing “everyman” and unlikely media star to bash Obama was too much to resist. So, was it a clever tactic or desperation?

McCain wants to associate himself with and show that he’s batting for the regular Joe. It reminds me of former UK prime minister, John Major, who in the early 90s evoked a British image of “cricket grounds, warm beer and invincible suburbs” and “old maids cycling to holy communion through the morning mist” along with his moralistic “back-to-basics” campaign to tap into the mindset of Middle England.

A few Tory party scandals later and he was out on his ear.

What an interesting autumn of politics lies ahead. Here, the Labour party conference kicks off in a week while ministers re-run the Mutiny on the Bounty and, in the States, the final reckoning for Obama and McCain.

BBC4’s series about American politics last night featured the 1972 Robert Redford film, The Candidate, which looks incredibly prescient about the way politics has evolved in the UK. In it, a fundamentally good bloke with honest convictions gets absorbed into the business of winning elections, complete with the “style over content” manipulation of voters that Gordon Brown probably wishes he’d picked up from Tony Blair. Telling indeed is the final scene when, on realising he’s won, Redford’s character turns to his campaign manager, pleading: “What do we do now?” So much for the manifesto, then.

Meanwhile, in the US presidential race, a clear distinction has emerged between the candidates’ strategies. Michael Tomasky’s blog in The Guardian explains how McCain’s campaign is focused on winning the “news cycle”, in other words, attacking Obama through adverts and generating stories in the mainstream media. Obama, conversely, is concentrating on grass roots politics by having a greater number of local offices than his opponent in every state, registering voters and building support in advance of November 4.

These contrasting approaches seem to illustrate some of the tensions between old and new media tactics; whether it’s better to have the traditional media on your side or get through to people directly, as in the social media world.

Question is, will it work? As one of the campaign managers in The Candidate says to a bemused Redford: “We know this is all bullshit, but at least they’re believing it.”