Neilson Mobile: Mobile Use by Political Party

Neilson mobile offers new statistics on mobile media use in the US and specifically breaks down the users by Party affiliation. First it begins with ovarall national numbers on mobile media use in general:

• 43 million US mobile subscribers use mobile Internet
• 33 million recieve text alerts
• 32 million use instant messaging
• 4 million subscribe to and view mobile video 

Neilson then goes on to list out that in general Democrats are more active mobile media users than Republicans. This makes sense given that the demographics for mobile media users tend to skew younger, and more Hispanic and African American. But this is the first time I'd seen hard numbers broken down by party affiliation:

• Overall, 62% of Democrats are data users who use one or more data service on their mobile phone (compared to 55% of Republicans)
• Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use text messaging (53% compared to 46%)
• Democrats are more likely to use picture messaging and MMS (27% compared to 21%)
• Democrats are more likely to use mobile Internet, as well (17% compared to 13%)

As political progressives seek to continue to evolve the use of this new media as tools for influencing both elections and public policy, it is good to get new numbers that confirm that these are tools that Democrats do resonate with.