Democratic Party vs. Republican Party vs. Green Party vs. Libertarian Party vs. Constitution Party (Part 3)

This is the last part of a three-part series of posts (part 1, part 2). We explained the method used for this experiment, i.e., analyzing "toss-up" states in the US presidential election by comparing Google Insights for Search and Pollster.com graphs in part 1. We continue with Ohio:





For the first couple of months of this year, the Democratic Party (DP) was ahead in Google-popularity in this state while McCain was ahead in the regression trend line of the polls. For the rest of the year, the DP and Republican Party (RP) lines related to one another in the same way as the Obama and McCain trend lines: first the DP/Obama in the lead, then the RP/McCain. However, in September, Obama again gained the upper hand. The RP stayed in the lead though. I wonder if there isn't some kind of delayed effect in these case, or maybe the high-sensitivity trend lines for the candidates overreacted to recent polls? Now we turn our attention to Pennsylvania.





This state too was kind of puzzling: the parties' graph showed a DP advantage for most of the year except in September when the RP overtook them, only to end in a tie. On the candidates' graph, McCain was ahead till Obama overtook him in April; the latter then put a lot of distance between him and his opponent after some tightening in the beginning of September. This seems related to the Republican-convention a.k.a. Palin-announcement bounce for McCain and the current financial-crisis bounce for Obama (see also, for instance, Ohio above). Next is Virginia:





Similarly to Pennsylvania, the DP had the edge till the RP bested them in September. McCain however was ahead but lost more and more till the race turned into a dead heat in June. In September, the same Palin bounce and the financial-crisis bounces gave the advantage to Obama. Finally, I looked into Missouri, a state that has gone in and out of the "toss-up" category quite a few times. It was in McCain's camp when I started this series of posts but is again in contention.





The DP dominated till the RP took over in September. McCain was in the lead the whole year but it's now a tie. One more thing: Nader, Barr and McKinney are an afterthought in the polls. This is partially due to them often not being included in polls in the first place and, when they are, they don't appear in enough of them to survive Pollster.com's high-sensitivity smoothing filter. To be fair, let me give you briefly what their poll standings were today when using normal smoothing, as well as their parties' Google-popularity for 2008 so far (shorter period didn't yield good data):



I quickly tested the correlation between the two measures by producing scatter graphs with a linear regression trend line added (without the Constitution Party as I had no poll data for their candidate).





Quick conclusion: it looked like there was no correlation, in other words the Google-popularity of third parties couldn't be used to try to predict the third-party candidates Pollster.com scores or vice versa. Which probably means that we didn't miss out by not having them on all but one state poll graph after all.

Democratic Party vs. Republican Party vs. Green Party vs. Libertarian Party vs. Constitution Party (Part 1)

A grand face-off of the five major political parties of the US! Since 2004, their Google-popularity has evolved as follows:



Generally speaking, the Democratic Party (DP) narrowly bested the Republican Party (RP) though at pivotal moments the latter succeeded in rising above the former, e.g., the 2004 presidential elections (peak in October) and at the very end as we are again approaching presidential elections. Note the surge at the occasion of the 2006 elections for Congress. The Green Party was the leader among the so-called "third parties." When we look at the electoral results, these trend lines do seem to run in parallel: George Bush narrowly won re-election in 2004 and the DP became the majority party in Congress in 2006. I wonder whether the recent uptick in interest in the RP will turn out to be as consequential come election day (November 4). Of course, 2004 showed us that October is the pivotal month...

How about we perform an experiment and look at the interest in political parties in the states that right now are judged to be competitive, a.k.a. "toss-ups," starting in January? Then, we could compare the graphs with Pollster.com's presidential polls' state regression-trend-line graphs. On Pollster.com, I used the more sensitive smoothing setting and besides Obama and McCain added the third-party candidates when poll data were available: Ralph Nader (ex-Green Party, now independent), Cynthia McKinney (ex-DP, now Green Party) and Bob Barr (ex-RP, now Libertarian Party) . I realize I have to a certain extent compared apples and oranges here: parties (Google Insights) vs. candidates (Pollster.com). However, when I attempted to rectify this by adding the candidates to the Google Insights terms, this did not work: Obama and McCain's overwhelming media presence just distorted everything. In a way, I propose that searches for the parties might be a better indicator of the real, underlying political support for the candidates. It is of course also possible that the interest in the parties reflects rather on the congressional races. Anyway, let's see what the graphs told us, starting with Colorado:





The DP/Obama was ahead of the RP/McCain in general. September did see a tightening on Pollster.com but an actual overtaking of the DP by the RP in Google Insights for Search. Next is Florida:





The RP overtook the dominant DP in August (Google Insights) while Pollster.com showed McCain on top with only a tightening of the race in August. When we got to the present though, Pollster.com does point at a tie. So we had conflicting evidence here. The next "toss-up" state I tested was Indiana:





The DP was the most Google-popular through June but by September the RP had taken the lead. The opinion poll trend line however showed McCain ahead the whole time with some temporary tightening only in September. This state too offers a contrast between the two graphs.

Note that so far the "third parties" have not shown up yet in the Pollster.com graphs because they didn't cross the threshold to allow for a regression analysis. Tomorrow, I will continue this experiment with other "toss-up" states.