Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch poses the question as to whether Google Trend result will be a good predictor of the 2008 presidential election. He points to past statistics that show a relative symmetry between searches for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the results for the Democratic primary.
Blue = Barack Obama Red = John McCain
I think you can take all this with a grain of salt. Sure, there will be some relevance, but there are too many other factors involved that could skew the results. There are also a bunch of unrelated factors that can’t be prescribed to online search.
The electoral college is the deciding factor in elections and while you can break down searched by state, each state will have its own factors relating to voters and internet usage. And voters will vary as to how they get their political information. Evangelical voters will differ from young urban single people who will differ from Latinos who will differ from suburban housewives.
How thiis wold be helpful is to also measure terms such as health care, immigration, tax policy, and Iraq…and match them with each candidate. Better yet, match them by candidate and state. You’ll start to see what issues are important where.
Candidates then should create issue focused minisites that can directly address a candidates interests.
Hopefully, campaign advisors will look to do this as opposed to primarily run on slogans and attack ads that teach us very little.
1 Comment » Posted on June 8th, 2008 by Jonathan Trenn
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