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McCain Website Appeals to Independents
February 06, 2008
John McCain is the de facto Republican candidate but the race is still going strong between Clinton and Obama. I created some charts to illustrate the profile of visitors to the websites for these three contenders for the presidency. We all know that the primaries are about appealing to the party base but in the battle for the presidency the winning candidate will most likely need to appeal to a cross section of American voters. Which of these candidates attracts that broad cross-section?
One way to analyze this is to look at the lifestyle profile of visitors to the candidate websites. I have created a Lifestyle Quadrant Analysis for McCain versus Clinton in the first diagram below and McCain versus Obama in the second. In these charts I am plotting the index representation versus the online population of visitors to the candidate websites. Visitors are organized into Mosaic Groups created by Experian based on thousands of offline data points covering everything from demographic data to purchasing behavior, media habits and political affiliation.
A simple way to think about these charts is - any Mosaic Group above the horizontal line are strengths for Clinton in the first chart and Obama in the second. What I mean by strengths is that these are Mosaic Groups that are over-indexing on the website compared with the online population. Groups to the right of the vertical line are strengths for McCain. So the Groups in the top left hand box are exclusive strengths for Clinton/Obama and those in the bottom right hand-box are exclusive strengths for McCain.
While the visitor profile for Clinton's and McCain's website do show some unique strengths, they don't have the kind of extreme we see with Barack Obama. The Groups Urban Essence and Aspiring Contemporaries are unique strengths for Obama relative to McCain. The Group Urban Essence is described by Experian as "Young, single and single-parent minorities living in older apartments working at entry-level jobs in service industries" The Group Aspiring Contemporaries is described as "Young, mostly single, ethnically diverse, online active households living in new homes or apartments with discretionary income to spend on themselves."
These groups are 84% and 78% more likely than average for the Internet population to be on Obama's website. These Groups are among the most likely to be "very liberal" in their political views and are among the most likely to be registered Democrats, based on offline data collected by Experian. These Groups are also strengths for HillaryClinton.com but not to the same extreme as for BarackObama.com.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the groups that are exclusive strengths for McCain are most likely to be registered Republicans.
I cross-compared this data with the groups whose households are among the most likely to be registered Independents -- as a potential group of swing voters. The following chart shows McCain versus Clinton again, but this time with the size of the dot reflecting the propensity of people in that group to be registered Independents. (I adjusted the scale to spread things out a bit).
As you can see, the groups with the largest bubbles - (i..e those most likely to be registered Independents) are strengths for McCain (Affluent Suburbia, Upscale America and Small Town Contentment).
So the data indicates that Clinton and McCain's websites are appealing to a broader sprectrum of voters than Obama and that McCain is appealing most to those more likely to include Independents. I welcome other comments and analysis on the charts. I am really just scratching the surface here.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 08:51 AM
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