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No one’s claiming that a solid presence on Facebook or MySpace is, by itself, enough to win an election.  But it certainly doesn’t hurt, as Australian politician Kevin Rudd has discovered.

Rudd hit the 5,000-friend cap on Facebook some time ago, and currently has almost 22,000 mates on MySpace.  By contrast: John Howard is Rudd’s opponent, and Rob Taylor notes, “Howard’s Liberal Party page lists just nine friends, while his unpopular deputy, Peter Costello, musters just 227.”

Granted, I’m sure there are some very well-liked people who have never heard of Facebook and MySpace, much less joined the social networks and gotten thousands of cyber pals.  Yet when Taylor turned to the real world, he discovered that “[a] Newspoll in the Australian newspaper on Thursday said Rudd had built a one million vote lead over Howard with younger voters, opening a gap of 775,000 over Howard among those aged 18-34 and holding a 373,000-strong lead among those aged 35-49.”

Which seems to reflect the ages of people who are most often associated with Facebook and MySpace.  So it’ll be interesting to see not only who wins the election on November 24, but if that person has any words (kind or otherwise) to say about social networks.