AP-AOL Poll: Candidates, parties target growing Web audience

(AP) Increasing numbers of people looking for political news are going online _ with more than a third now saying they check the Internet for such information.

That group is more likely to be younger, better educated and male than the population in general, an Associated Press-AOL News poll found.

While 35 percent say they go to the Internet for political updates about campaigns and candidates, that number grows to 43 percent of likely voters _ and they tend to be more liberal than conservative.

With midterm elections less than two weeks away, the online audience is getting deluged with e-mail and election updates from the news, campaign and political Web sites.

Those who use the Web point to the convenience, the wide variety of information and the range of intense emotion available.

The poll found that four in 10 men search the Web for political news compared to three in 10 women. About four in 10 of those under age 50 search the Web for political news, compared with fewer than two in 10 of those 65 and over. And more than half of those with college degrees look to the Web for politics, compared with a third of those who have some college and fewer than one in six with a high school education or less.

The most popular destinations are the news sites, with nine of 10 in the online political audience saying they go to news sites. Just over a third go to candidate's sites and almost half check out political sites.

The number who go online has grown from about a fourth in this country six years ago, according to the Pew Research Center. Fewer than half of those who go online are regular users of the Web for political news.

While the online browsers go to a wide variety of sites, they overwhelmingly trust what they see on the news sites,

Seven in 10 said news sites are the most trustworthy, according to the poll of 2,000 adults taken Oct. 20-25. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, larger for subgroups.