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There’s no need to watch today’s Super Tuesday presidential election coverage, we already know who’s going to win: Barack Obama and John McCain.
How do we know this?
Marketing Pilgrim and Collective Intellect have joined forces to release “Election 2008: Using Social Media Measurement as a tool for predicting poll results” a study that looked at sentiment across social media and the search engines. Based upon our findings, we’re confidently predicting a win for Democrat Obama and Republican McCain.
You can download the free report via the Collective Intellect blog. In it, you’ll find full details of how we used blogs and search engine results to make our predictions.
For those of you interested, here’s a quick summary.
Sentiment across social media:
Republicans: Until a precipitous drop-off in the last week of his campaign, Giuliani’s sentiment
stayed at about the same level as Romney and McCain. Huckabee’s sentiment has been wildly erratic – tall peaks and deep valleys matching his varying election results.
Democrats: Over the past few months, not only has Edwards had less blog activity, but his
sentiment has also been consistently lower reflecting not only polling data, but traditional news coverage. Obama and Clinton have traded off on the highest sentiment, but Obama has maintained the lead more often.
Sentiment across search:
Republicans: Of the remaining Republican candidates, the search results appear to mimic the
recent surge in popularity of Senator John McCain. Since June 2007, Senator McCain has increased his overall search engine “approval” rating from 27.5% to 37.5%. At the same time, the number of negative search results for McCain reduced from 10% to 5%.
Democrats: Senator Hillary Clinton gave up 2.5% (50% compared to 52.5%) in positive search results, while Barack Obama gained 2.5% (50% compared to 47.5%). Clinton and Obama are now neck-and-neck in the race for search engine sentiment–both with 50% positive search results.
Raw data for search engine sentiment analysis:
(External link to spreadsheet)
See how the search engine sentiment results compare to our presidential election study back in June 2007.
