Matt Continetti argues:

Inside Crashing the Gate, Armstrong and Moulitsas write that the top liberal blogs grow at a geometric rate, and that, "by late November 2005, the top seventy or so liberal blogs, led by Daily Kos, garnered about 60 million page-views every month." In Blog, his book on the phenomenon, the right-wing blogger Hugh Hewitt writes that "Kos gets 1.6 million--that's million--visitors a month."

For blogs, those are large numbers. For politics, however, they are small. Assuming there are 1 million regular readers of Daily Kos throughout America, that is still only 1/280th of the population--and only 1/59th of the number of people who voted for John Kerry in the last election. It is a tiny fraction of the American electorate.

The blogosphere is certainly encroaching on the mainstream, but is far from there yet. However, as Ezra points out, absolute numbers in this sense are meaningless. Reaching a wide audience may produce a certain degree of influence, but is worth zilch unless translated into action. The netroots have certainly proven to be a motivated base and have cultivated dramatic inroads into equalizing the monetary war-chest between parties, have brought critical issues to the fore, fact-checked the hell out of the MSM, and organized dedicated activists throughout the country.

However, Continetti’s argument is pertinent to the extent that all base-movements are lacking. Preaching to the choir and motivating an electoral base is certainly a vital function of progressive media. However, like any mainstream movement, the blogs are doing a less than adequate job in reaching out to the disinterested. We tend to forget that in every presidential election, no candidate has received a majority vote. In fact, by a 3-1 margin, We the People have chosen ‘none of the above’ for every election in my memory. Until we start making inroads with the 60% of the country who don’t feel their vote matters, we will continue to battle it out for votes among the existing politically engaged.

Bottom line is that there is a helluva large group out there just waiting to be drawn in on issues that matter to them. The first to do that will win in a landslide.