In the past, I’ve criticized candidates for having little or no Internet presence.  By the last election cycle in 2006, the Internet had been in wide use for 10 years, and yet only a tiny handful of Trenton’s municipal candidates had web site and many didn’t know how to use e-mail.

In this cycle the situation has improved dramatically.

All eight of the mayoral candidates have web sites and 16 of the 27 city council candidates have sites.  Most of the candidates appear to also have a Facebook presence and I’m Facebook friends with many of them or have “Liked” their campaign pages.

In addition several of them are showing up on blogs in town (Keith Hamilton has a recent comment on Reinvent Trenton).

I’d like to think my chastising the group has had something to do with it but I suspect that’s not it.  Rather, the politicians are following the voters onto the web, have availed themselves of relatively inexpensive web solutions (Kevin Moriarity’s blog is an effective mechanism for communicating his views on campaign issues) and are following their Barrack Obama’s example of effective grassroots use of the Internet.

This is a good thing.

It’s inexpensive for the candidates and that’s good for them and for us as voters as they are less beholden to non-citizen funding interests.  It’s good for voters because we get to quickly read more about a candidate’s position than they’ll ever be able to communicate verbally or with their printed material.  Furthermore, many of the websites enable online donations.  I appreciate all of this.

Candidate Websites

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