It's happening tonight (I heard about the Democratic Presidential Debates and how it's being done on YouTube as well as CNN via YouTube Goes To Washington from Adotas).

"..Tonight is a historic evening as the very first of two Presidential debates sponsored by CNN and YouTube are scheduled to air. The questions that will be asked are all from user submissions on YouTube.com.

The debate tonight is for the Democrats and will air for two hours starting at 7 p.m. EST. The next one will air on September 17th for the Republicans. Anderson Cooper has been slated to moderate and is reported to offer between 20 and 30 questions.

In an elaborate campaign that equally advertises CNN, YouTube, and parent company Google, the debate will feature geographical locations of questioners on Google Earth maps; and over-sized projector screens streaming questions by visitors to the site."

Should be interesting to watch – it's not at an ideal time for me but it really doesn't matter since the whole event can be time-shifted anyway.

Right now, Youtube is really co-branding well (associated with) the Presidential Debates, judging from the chart above; but the numbers of actual posts are low yet (between 50-100).

I like The Search Engine Election: 2008 Presidential Campaign Scorecard Jonathan Mendez put together as it gives me ideas of how you measure effective of a paid campaign for a political candidate:

2008 Presidential Election SEM Performance Scorecard

While it's clear, according to the scorecard above, that Mitt Romney wins, most of the steps would be very easy for any candidate to immediately put into action with slight modifications to their paid campaigns.

But the other point is more troubling and though provoking:

"…If candidates are not even doing the SEM basics yet how can we expect they will leverage the more targeted opportunities to connect with voters through interest, behavioral and content targeting and testing technology. Only Romney had targeted landing pages and most every site I looked at was woefully poor in conversion optimization. Others agree. With online contributions 15-30% of total fundraising what candidate wouldn’t want even a 10% bump in donations through some site targeting and testing?"

It's funny how putting information in a scorecard format focuses interest and questions (and the scorecard suggests, by it's format, solutions).  I would expect that some of the candidates will put more focus in the targeting and testing technology soon enough. 

My guess is most are "testing the waters" and, honestly, most candidates probably don't have people setting up the targeting and testing, yet, that he mentions in his post….but it sounds like they all should.