Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - US
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September 14, 2007
Ron Paul for President 2.0
This week's Science of Search column at TIME focused on the popularity of Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) online. We've known from past experience that you can't predict elections based on search data (due mostly to the multiple intents behind political searches). Yet I've been puzzled over the last several weeks about the gaps between searches for candidates and their popularity in pre-elections polls.
Here's the latest chart on top Republican candidates (note Thompson's surge this last week coinciding with his announcement to run).
As I discussed in the column, perhaps the difference in polls versus searches could be based on demographics. Visitors to candidate's websites that rank highest in search volume also skew younger which happens to be a demographic difficult to capture through phone polls.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 06:03 PM
Posted to Politics
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Comments
The "2.0" stands for his popularity. Every single non-spammable poll shows he has the support of 1-2% of Republican voters.
Posted by: Lou Minatti at September 15, 2007 08:16 PM
Ron Paul recently won the Fox News text message poll with the 33% of the vote. It was impossible to spam. The system only allowed one vote. He has won almost all of the straw polls that use paper ballots.
Posted by: Ken Langston at September 16, 2007 06:15 PM
