When it comes to the 2008 presidential election, you can listen to the smartest political pundits, or, if you like, flip a coin – the election’s just too far away to be sure of anything. But we can form best guesses, and Matt Pace has done precisely that with an article titled “If Clicks Equaled Votes in November – Democratic Candidates.”
Pace’s findings contradict what a recent analysis of Google Trends revealed. They should, however, stack up well against David Utter’s article on the Republican field (since both used Compete statistics).
According to Compete, then, the campaign website with the most traffic belongs to Barack Obama; Obama’s site received 318,179 unique visitors in November. Hillary Clinton’s website was the closest runner-up, but it got just 289,615 visitors.
Things looked even more dismal for John Edwards, whose site received only 136,002 unique visitors. Pace got into the geographic distribution of visits, though, and wrote, “Edwards’ focus on Iowa, where polling shows him very competitive, is evident as he appears to be drawing a considerable following in Iowa to rival Obama and Clinton.”
Kucinich, Biden, Richardson, Dodd, and Gravel all trailed the top three candidates, and did so in that order. Still, with the better part of a year left to go before the election, there’s plenty of time for any person to shake (or muck) things up.
