During the primaries we took a look at the visitation to the websites of presidential candidate hopefuls to predict the winners by state. Now that the nominations have been decided and the DNC is underway with the RNC not far behind, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this analysis. Below is an electoral map from NYTimes.com which summarizes how each of the states have voted in the past 5 elections for quick visualization.

For both of the presidential candidate websites, I categorized the states by the same breakdown above. Each state includes the share of traffic from that particular state and the representational index (a method of comparing two groups or audience, and expressing the different between the two as an index, in this case, is the candidate’s website and the overall online population) which summarizes the likelihood (over 100 means more likely, below 100 means less likely) of online users in that state to visit the website. Below are the top 10 sites ranked by traffic share for each candidate.

The top 10 states to BarackObama.com represent 60% of the total traffic to the website over the past 4 weeks ending August 23, 2008. Among the top 10 are 4 states that are categorized as ‘Strong Obama’, which represent 31% of total traffic. The top 5 states that index highest for visits to BarackObama.com are Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, and DC. Colorado is likely to appear due to this week’s DNC in Denver, but Obama’s website has been a key component for communicating with voters, so visitation from the tossup states of Colorado and New Mexico gives a chance to communicate key messages.
For McCain’s website, 55% of the traffic came from the top 10 states, but only 8% of the traffic is from a historically Republican and ‘Solid McCain’ state – Texas. The abundance of visitors from historically Democratic states implies that many voters are gathering information (and may have been Hillary Clinton supporters). When the states are ranked by representational index, 4 out of 5 are in the western part of the US – Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado, with Louisiana rounding out the top 5. But more importantly for McCain, only Wyoming is considered a ‘Solid McCain’ state, so the others may provide an opportunity to sway undecided voters.
As we have said many times, a visit does not equal a vote, but insight into who is visiting the websites of the candidates helps to identify the best mediums to reach potential voters. The flip side of this analysis is all of the stares that are not visiting either website, highlighting the need to reach them somewhere else online or away from the computer entirely.
One final note and wildcard to consider – what is the predictability based upon past elections? There are new voters that have registered in the last year which might make that map look much different in November – or not at all.