Google the Vote

From Ajswiki

Barack Obama and John McCain are running for President of the United States. Who will win? Who can know, but I've been trying to read the tea leaves of Google searches by counting up the number of search results for various key phrases related to each candidate.

Based on my experiences with this page, I wrote an entry on my blog entitled, "Using the Web to predict elections" I hope that my lessons learned help others to figure out where to go next.

Contents 1 Straight up 2 Trust 3 Responsibility 4 Feel the love 5 Other sources 5.1 Goolge Trends 5.2 Intrade 5.3 FiveThirtyEight.com 6 Footnotes

Straight up

This is the really obvious search to do. Who comes out on top as President. The first search is for the primary candidate, and the second is for the ticket. Notice that while Obama has a handy lead as the Presidential candidate, McCain/Palin leads the tickets. I think this is because Palin has been such a media phenomenon that she has helped to boost the McCain/Palin ticket to the status of major brand.

I've placed McCain/Romney in the mix just because it was being widely discussed as a fallback position at one point in the campaign.

Trust

Truth and lies are always favorite topics for campaign ads, so this section is really a test of how successful the campaigns have been at getting these messages across, or combating them.

Most interestingly, the two metrics have opposite histories. In the first case, trust has gone from heavily in favor of Obama to a relative tie between the two. Lies on the other hand started off relatively even and now reference John McCain far more often than Barack Obama.

Responsibility

Responsibility could be measured in any number of ways, but we've chosen two examples that I think are typical: leadership and fiscal responsibility. Interestingly, on the fiscal responsibility side (balancing the budget) neither candidate does very well, but Obama simply falls off the radar. Leadership seems to be a quality that is much more associated with McCain than with Obama.

Feel the love

Love is never easy to measure, but it's certainly easy enough to do the search. Obama is the clear winner, here. His supporters seem to have a far more emotional connection to their candidate. This might actually explain his success later in the campaign season as ads turned negative. When someone attacks a politician, there's no real emotional investment being interfered with. If, however, people have strong emotional ties to Obama, then negative ads would have the same impact as insulting a family member. Much of the traditional wisdom about the value of negative campaigning might well be based on the assumption that the majority of voters have no emotional investment in their candidates....

Other sources

Goolge Trends

Google Trends offers the ability to chart comparisons of key words or phrases like the above over a long period of time. Why is this page interesting?

Well, Trends doesn't actually give the same information. Why, I have no idea, but the numbers are radically different for the "web pages" results, and of course the "searches" results are orthoganal to these numbers for the most part (someone searching for a term doesn't always mean the same thing as someone writing that term of a Web page.

However, for comparison, here are some Google Trends pages for the items listed, above:

• ... for President, President
• Love

Intrade

Intrade's political markets are an interesting way to track upcoming events such as this. What they do is allow people to buy "futures" just like you do for pork bellies or oil barrels, but for events like a hurricane hitting New Orleans or a particular Presidential candidate winning. It turns out that for specific races they have a pretty good track record of being correct. Mathematically, there are lots of reasons that this isn't surprising, but it's very informative to see in action.

FiveThirtyEight.com

FiveThirtyEight.com isn't really doing the same sort of thing. They're gathering polling numbers and measuring which electoral votes will likely go to which candidates. It's a much more in-the-field sort of analysis, and doesn't really rely on the Web at all. None the less, it's a very well put-together site and has some excellent statistics.

Footnotes

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Fluctuation seems high for this result, and I suspect it's a problem with Google's database propagation, rather than such a large change in the candidate's results.
2. ↑ I've added a second way of looking at the ticket, which shows different results. Why "... for President" and the ticket name have different results is an open question. I've also added in the McCain/Romney ticket as this is now being discussed frequently enough in the media to be notable.
3. ↑ As of late October, McCain/Romney seems to be dropping rapidly, and I think it's safe to say that's a dead idea at this point.
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1} Trust-related metrics for Barack Obama began to fall in early September. This might be a result of a new ad campaign from McCain which focuses on Obama's statements with respect to supporting the war in Iraq.
5. ↑ Now it's quite stark: Obama's trust numbers have sunk tremendously.
6. ↑ ^{6.0 6.1} Quite an amazing turnaround... will be interesting to see if this is a trend.
7. ↑ Nearly a factor of 10. Clearly, something is going on here.
8. ↑ This jump in Obama's leadership numbers might be artificial, resulting from the debate over his an Palin's respective leadership experience.
9. ↑ Where this large jump in the "love" search came from is unclear, but Obama's started with a very large lead anyway, so this only serves to confirm the gap.
10. ↑ Interesting that McCain has exactly 1/10th the score of Obama in this result.