16
2007
Obama versus Clinton – Barack Advantage in Key States
In light of today’s news that Barack Obama is filing campaign papers today for the 2008 Presidential election, I’ve assembled a quick chart comparing the popularity of Obama compared to Clinton based on search queries for the two potential candidates.
A quick look at the demographic composition of their two respective senate sites (obama.senate.gov and clinton.senate.gov) reveals an interesting breakdown in age between visitors to the two sites. Barack seems to be resonating with the 25-44 year olds, while Clinton is showing a swing toward younger and older voters.
I also pulled the state by state breakdown to compare which states are swinging the highest for each candidate. While they both are clearly swinging in their represented state (Illinois and New York), the remaining top states are telling:
Barack Obama
Illinois
California
Ohio
Florida
Michigan
Hillary Clinton
New York
Kansas
New Jersey
Hawaii
Missouri
It’s interesting that Barack got more searches on a particular day, but, could this not just be down to the fact that people are more familiar with Hillary?
A rising star is surely bound to get more searches than a fully established one?
Daniel,
Thats a very good point, but it presupposes that internet users search when they are unfamiliar with a candidate. While anecdotal, I’m very familiar with both Obama and Clinton, yet didn’t know where to find their official sites, so I searched on both.
At the end of the day I don’t think a search = a vote but it does give some insight into consumer mindset.
To the extent they have them (I’m not sure that they do yet), I wonder whether the results would be different if you examined traffic to their campaign websites (as opposed to their official Senate websites).
As a professional SEO, I’m surrounded by these types of stories and I truly do enjoy stats like these ro the ones on Google Trends.
However, I’m wondering what exactly we can extrapolate from this type of data. All we know is that more people are searching for Obama, but what advantage, as used in the title of this post, can we ascertain from this?
More people may be searching for Obama because they’re looking for something to *dis*like, or it could be a flood of oposition research (I’m sure Obama’s competitor’s on both sides are searching for him, too.
Anyway, I just wanted to make that point if it hasn’t already been addressed. If it has, i apologize. If not, I’m curious how people here interpret the motives behind the searcher when the only data we have is a word.
Thanks for the stats!