Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton March 4 Primary Early Call
4 March 2008
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I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb and call Barack Obama the winner of the Texas and Ohio “Super Tuesday II” primaries today.
Why?
Google. Specifically, Google trends search volume for Obama vs. Clinton in those two states. Take a look:
Results for Ohio – last 30 days
Results for Texas – last 30 days
On top of that all, take a look at Google’s AdWords Keyword tool. For February, bidding competition (meaning higher prices) was much higher for Hillary Clinton, but Barack Obama led search volume. Clinton is spending for traffic Obama is getting for free or lower cost.
AdWords Keyword Research Tool
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What I think is cool about your theory, Chris, is that you are using freely accessible information to make your case. As tools become more sophisticated, will we really need CNN to “make the call” in situations like this?
A few years ago here in Canada, we had some issues with our federal election in that people in the Maritimes were posting their election results when their polls closed, when it was still 2 1/2 hours till the West Coast’s polls closed. This was despite a ban from Elections Canada forbidding anyone to post this information. Of course people found ways around it. How can this kind of information be controlled, really. Not easy.
I think your research is very interesting, and it will be interesting to see how it plays into the overall results…good work!
The honest truth is that if Google predicted winners through it’s trend tracking then Ron Paul would basically have already won the election. Using these trends and relating them with actual poll results does not work.
Chip and Dennis – honestly, this is all back of the envelope stuff. My thinking on the topic is that Obama is leading search volume and Clinton is paying, paying, paying via AdWords’ estimator. By no means is any of this scientific at all. That said, if people are searching for Obama and not Clinton, that means either they know nothing about Obama and are doing research, or they already have their minds made up about Clinton, or both, or neither.
If I had more free time, I’d do an analysis of Super Tuesday I to see what search volume correlated with what wins. In this case, we’re not claiming causation, just correlation.
Thanks. I think you are right on!
Further, I should add that by tracking search volume you are actually looking at who wants to know more about a candidate. There are plenty of subjects I may be curious about, yet that doesn’t mean I support them.
What did you say was the relationship between search volume and voting patterns?
The problem with your analysis is that Hillary was up in the polls at the start of the trend charts, but these charts don’t reflect that, nor do they reflect a significant change in the spread over time.
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