Obama vs. McCain vs. Palin vs. Biden in the Last Month: Details

A post on the FiveThirtyEight.com blog (Google Traffic Suggests McCain Not Grabbing Voters' Attention) today looked up the Google-popularity of McCain and Obama, using Google Trends. The author wondered about the context of the Obama searches: maybe they were people looking for dirt, i.e., "proof" for the many slanderous allegations? Well, there's a way to a least get an idea of that and more: use Google Insights for Search
—my standard analysis tool.



I also included Palin and Biden to complete the presidential election picture. This graph showed again that Obama has been in the lead for the past month. Palin at times peaked higher than Obama and was most of the time more Google-popular than McCain. Except for his vice presidential debate, Biden led a quiet life out of the big spotlight ;-) Now, let's have a look at the details underlying this graph. First, the geographical differences for the candidates; then the context of the candidates' searches.
I started with Obama's regional search patterns:



The following states were the most interested in him: New Mexico, Colorado and North Carolina. The remainder of the top 10 were also seen as battleground states at one time or another, except of course the District of Columbia and Illinois. How was McCain's list?



Ohio, New Mexico and Pennsylvania led the top 10. Further down though, the battleground states didn't dominate with McCain: only three more. Furthermore, his home state Arizona wasn't in the top 10. Interesting... Next: Palin.



Her top three was made up of Alaska, Vermont and Oregon: all non-battleground states. In the remaining seven there was similarly only one state that could be called a battleground (Colorado). This seemed to point at her appeal being more as a celebrity than in the strict context of the campaign. Finally, where was Biden the most searched?



Delaware, Vermont and Alaska led his list. Maybe a lot of people in Alaska were trying to find out what their governor was up against? The only battleground state the Democratic VP candidate was Google-popular: Pennsylvania. he has been campaigning a lot there if I'm not mistaken.

In conclusion, Obama was the one who evoked he highest interest in the battleground states. That being said, in what light was he being searched: positive or negative? Here's the list of most common search terms for Obama:



The top 10 was basically positive with searches focusing on the race, polls and debates. The second list on the right shows the "rising" searches, i.e., searches that saw the fastest growth spurt but were not in the top 10. Nos. 4-8 were rather negative: (false) accusations of him not being qualified in a legal sense to run, the ACORN voter registration fraud allegations, the tenuous connection with a '60s terrorist. All in all, the rising searches displayed a half positive (Powell, ...), half negative interest. Republican mud-slinging had only a limited impact. On to his opponent, McCain:



His top 10 was similar to Obama: positive. The "risers" were also all basically positive. Next, Palin.



Five of her top 10 searches related to Tina Fey's parody of her on Saturday Night Live. I don't think that can be classified unequivocally as positive. The other five were the typical contexts of the campaign, debate, etc. When it came to rising searches, about half of them to had a connection with SNL. Last but not least ;-) , Senator Biden...



A basic, positive top 10 was accompanied by as much as four rising searches about the SNL sketch parodying the VP debate.

Clearly, the searches were mostly about the campaign except for some following up on accusations against Obama and regarding the Palin SNL saga.

Three-day average interest in Obama and McCain by state and top cities

Yesterday, I was conducting an experiment that took a while to complete. That's why I skipped a day. I was looking into Google searches for Obama and McCain over the last three days available (10-16 through 10-18) on Google Insights for Search, and well split up by US state plus the District of Columbia. I experimented with different analyses and this is what I came up with:



The states are displayed alphabetically. Let's give them ranked according to Obama share too:



The interest in Obama was the highest in Missouri, then came Nevada, Wyoming, and so on. The lowest Google-popularity for Obama or highest one for McCain in this three-day time span was in Delaware, then North Dakota and Massachusetts. So did this mean that Obama was ahead in Missouri but behind in Delaware, opinion-poll-wise? Of course not. I think these graphs show a snapshot of the attention being paid to the two main presidential candidates, e.g., on October 18, Obama held a 100,000-people rally in St. Louis, MO. What is measured is more something like the "buzz," how much the candidates are being talked about. You might say that it reflected the cumulative effect of campaigning: TV, radio, robocalls, appearances, mail, etc.

The analysis also yielded the top cities where people were looking for information on the candidates during the sam time span:





This confirmed my theory that the huge St. Louis Obama rally spiked Missouri: St. Louis was no. 1 for Obama. Second came Houston and then Tampa. McCain had the highest score in Boston, then San Francisco and Seattle. It seemed to me that these had more to do with Obama being so far ahead that people weren't thinking about the candidates much anymore.