Social networks the new government?

In Digital Media and Society today I was suprised to see the statistics for Obama's online campaign. One of them being that an exit poll stated that Obama had the vote of 70% of the under 25 year olds in the United States. Was this solely due to Obama's clever participation of facebook,twitter,flickr,linked In etc? What do you guys think, would Obama have won without the help of the internet? Personally I think it was a huge benefit to him as he spent a tremendous amount of time maintaining and updating all his OSNs which can not be said for McCain.