Elections data for junkies

Posted December 17th, 2007 at 5:30 am by Alan Warms, Yahoo! News

 One Comment / Filed in: Trends & News

Did you know that when Oprah Winfrey joined Barack Obama on the campaign trail last week, his Yahoo! Buzz rating (based on the volume of people who searched for variations of his name) shot up by more than 40 percent? Or that a much wider margin of voters are literally putting their money on Giuliani as the Republican candidate than are supporting him in the polls?

That’s the kind of insight we thought Yahoo! users would find interesting when evaluating this year’s election. It’s why we launched the “political dashboard,” a site that offers some interesting trends of the moment, as well as a state-by-state and candidate-by-candidate data analysis to give even the most hardcore political junkies their campaign fix.

It’s a part of our Election 2008 news site, and gives you a comparative snapshot of the most important campaign data, ranging from aggregate poll data, fundraising information, and even “prediction market” statistics from Intrade (an Irish-based website that uses a stock market-like approach to let users predict the election’s outcome). The dashboard gives a national overview, as well as a state-by-state analysis of both who’s winning and who’s voting. And it’s all updated daily. This type of analysis allows you to track for yourself who’s rising (or falling) as the polls, and ultimately the votes, come in. For now, it’s focused on the presidential candidates, but we also plan to add in local election data as those races heat up in the states.

Of course, we’ve also included the Yahoo! Buzz metrics, which may be the most interesting data point in our minds. This is the first time search data has been presented alongside traditional campaign metrics — something no other major news site can offer.

Check it out for yourself, and let us know what you think.

Alan Warms
General Manager, Yahoo! News

Tagged: election 2008, yahoo! news

Post a Comment Bookmark This Digg This

One Comment Add your own

Thane Eichenauer | January 6th, 2008 at 3:38 pm

I like this page and the information it presents.

On the initial view I don’t have much complaint about your using RCP Poll Averages as a primary sort value but instead of using Leaders/Other Candidates howabout you just allow us to sort all the candidates by highest RCP Poll Averages or highest Yahoo buzz instead?

I find using Yahoo buzz as a sort value more interesting both on the Republican and Democratic side.

Here is my bias. Of those candidates you include on the dashboard, I find Ron Paul the most appealing, Bill Richardson 2nd most appealing and Dennis Kucinich 3rd most appealing (as you don’t include Libertarian candidates).