This year’s presidential campaign witnessed unprecedented levels of online engagement in the political process as millions of ordinary citizens used the internet to keep informed about politics, donate money, share their views, join communities built around shared interests or objectives and mobilize others in support of their candidate. In the final days of the campaign, our colleagues at the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that 59% of voters had taken part in some sort of campaign activity online: 44% had sent or received campaign-related emails, 39% had watched online political videos and 37% had visited politically-oriented websites or blogs.

In light of this level of online involvement during the election itself, more questions arise about the ability of the Obama team to translate its successful internet political operations into new levels of engagement and activism when Obama assumes the presidency: Will voters who were mobilized during the campaign through email, text messaging and social media such as Facebook remain politically engaged as the immediacy of the campaign turns to more mundane matters of governance? Do those who went online to support the Obama/Biden ticket and mobilize their friends during the election itself expect to remain engaged with the new administration during the transition process and beyond? Similarly, will Republican voters look to the internet as a key component of mobilizing conservative voters and electing GOP candidates in the future?

The Pew Internet Project examined those questions in a survey fielded from November 20 to December 4. Some 2,254 adults were surveyed and the margin of error in the overall sample is plus or minus two percentage points. There were 1,591 internet users in the sample and the margin of error for analysis relating to them is 3 percentage points.