OKAY, MAYBE I WAS WRONG: I’ve said before that I thought Democratic candidates were doing a much better job on the Web than the Bush Campaign. I guess it depends on your metric: this poll suggests that Bush is doing better than I’ve given him credit for:

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean’s extensive use of the Internet to raise tons of money and drum up early support for the Dem presidential nomination led to his reputation as the favorite son among techies.

But his special appeal to higher-tech voters may be fading, according to the latest WASHPOSTABCNEWS poll.

Dean does no better against President Bush among Americans who say they get their political news from the Internet than those who don’t, trailing Bush by 20 percentage points among both groups.

That doesn’t mean the the Internet hasn’t been a useful tool for organizing Dean supporters — it obviously has — but I guess it means that it hasn’t been a dramatically effective tool for winning new converts.