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Amy Schatz reports on the presidential race.

It’s not clear how many of them were awake when it finally arrived around 3 a.m. EDT, but about 2.9 million people received Team Obama’s text message that Delaware Sen. Joe Biden had been chosen as his vice presidential running mate.

Nielsen Mobile calculated the 2.9 million figure by reviewing the billing activity of 40,000 households who take part in one of its volunteer panels. Thus far, Barack Obama‘s campaign hasn’t disclosed how many people actually received the text message. That info isn’t likely to be known until after the election, if the Obama Internet team’s history of being a bit tight-lipped about details for fear of helping the opposition holds true.

The value of the text message went beyond the 26 words the campaign sent, according to Nic Covey, director of insights at Nielsen Mobile. Obama “branded himself as cutting edge, inflated the already enormous press attention paid to his VP pick and further established a list of supporters’ most coveted form of contact: their cell phone numbers,” he said in a statement.

The text was just the latest in a long line of experiments with text messaging that the presidential campaigns have used this season to help build their voter lists. Not everyone agrees that the Obama text message was all that revolutionary, with one Republican Internet consultant on Saturday called it a “disappointing” because it was too impersonal.



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