In the space of a few short years, Comedy Central has managed to win the hearts and minds of a generation of young voters with a pair of topical comedy shows that speak truth to power in an age when the mainstream media too often abdicates that role. I am, of course, referring to The Daily Show and the The Colbert Report. The latter of these is a spinoff of The Daily Show, where host Steven Colbert satirizes the right wing polemic style of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and others. Since the 2006 midterm elections, Colbert has often made reference to the "Colbert Bump," whereby a politician gets a popularity surge following an appearance on The Colbert Report. As it turns out, there is an actual, verifiable Colbert Bump—but with a twist.

The finding is the result of work by University of California-San Diego political science professor James Fowler. Dr. Fowler has authored an article in Political Science and Politics that analyzes the performance of politicians pre- and post-Colbert and compares them to matched controls who did not appear on the show. Previous attempts to quantify the Colbert Bump have been attempted, but Dr. Fowler dismisses them as unscientific, since they did not attempt to control for variables, which any scientist will tell you is a sine qua non for research.

Fowler obtained the FEC's data on individual contributions to candidates from January 2005 to October 2007 and identified the politicians who appeared on the Colbert Report's "Better Know a District" segment. These are compared to control politicians of the same party in similar districts who did not appear on the show. Interestingly, Democrats raised significantly more money for up to 42 days after appearing on the show compared to those Democrats who didn't, and they raised on average 40 percent more.

The picture is not nearly as rosy for Republicans. Far fewer have appeared on the "Better Know a District" segment, making analysis more difficult, but none of the ones that did showed any improvement in fundraising post-Colbert. In fact, the Republicans that did appear had previously been doing quite well, only to slump following their appearance. Dr Fowler suggests three possible reasons for this effect: that the Colbert Report selects the Republicans because they've been doing well; that the only Republicans who accept the invitation are ones that have been doing well; or that a peculiar rift in the space-time continuum means that Republicans see their Colbert Bump in the weeks preceding their show.

Dr. Fowler points out that these results might not be welcome to the "legions" of Ron Paul supporters, and it seems to refute Mike Huckabee's claim of having received a Colbert Bump, but then he did lose the Republican primary to Sen. McCain. Dr. Fowler also cautions the reader not to put too much stock in his findings, since the audience for The Colbert Report is rather narrowly focused on a particular demographic. But then as we know from the venerable Colbert himself, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Political Science and Politics, 2008. DOI: 10.1017/S1049096508080712