Whoa.
On Thursday morning, I posted a 4-minute long online ad paid for by the campaign to elect Bridget Mary McCormack to the state Supreme Court. In fact, Eclectablog was one of the first to get it and have it available. Since then, the West Wing reunion spot has gone crazy viral.
The post on this site has gotten nearly 20,000 views. The video itself has had over 450,000 views on YouTube and was the #5 trending video that day. On the day it was released, the phrases “Bridget Mary McCormack”, “West Wing Reunion”, and “West Wing” trended on Twitter at one point or another. The non-candidate PSA version of the video that doesn’t mention McCormack has been viewed over 7,000 times. Here’s that video:
In addition to countless blog entries, the video generated articles at upwards of 150 different online and print publications including:
- The New Yorker
- The Detroit News
- The Detroit Free Press
- Time magazine
- Gawker
- Politico
- MLive
The Atlantic Wire- The Wall Street Journal
- The Lansing State Journal
- BuzzFeed
- The Raw Story
- Fark.com
- Mashable
- The Hill
- Daily Kos
- TowlerRoad
- UPI
- The Daily Beast
- Slate
- Huffington Post
- Entertainment Weekly
- USA Today
- The Washington Post
- Boing Boing
- Michigan Public Radio
Professor McCormack appeared on The War Room with Jennifer Granholm on Current TV as well as The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC. Extra did a feature on the making of the video that aired twice.
McCormack’s website crashed due to heavy traffic and they received hundreds of donations, mostly small $5 and $10 contributions.
This is a stunning achievement that is sure to boost both McCormack’s candidacy and, more importantly, awareness of the nonpartisan section of the ballot that so many people ignore.
I have scheduled interviews with the other two Michigan Supreme Court candidates, Justices Shelia Johnson & Connie Marie Kelley. I’ll have those up over the next couple of weeks. I will also be publishing a voters guide for the nonpartisan races and the ballot initiatives so stay tuned.
