Google Predicts Obama for President

I noticed that even if you search on their first and last names, you get nearly identical results: http://tinyurl.com/yu9kcj

I’ve found intrade.com to be a far better predictor of political races. It’s a mock stock market where users buy and trade ownership in candidates instead of businesses.

It has been frighteningly accurate because of the amount of people who do their own research on polls, news, etc… before buying stock as part of this online game. While most of the big news stations were guessing about tight polls in the Florida race between Romney and McCain, Romney’s stock price dropped two days before the election and sure enough, he lost.

I check the polls, but InTrade.com has been so on the mark so many times (even in the neck and neck races) that it’s hard not to give it more cred.

Predicting the winner of a presidential election in February is about like predicting the winner of the Superbowl in November. A lot of things can happen along the way. Granted, Obama has a winning personality and great oratory. But what if the economy tanks? Obama has already proposed hundreds of billions in new programs that would drive Federal spending up and taxes along with it.

Obama has also done a good job to date of avoiding any real substance. You can only talk about change and hope for so long before someone insists that you actually explain how you are going to accomplish them.

Finally, Obama is a complete unknown on security issues. If there is another terrorist attack in the US or western Europe, a lot of people will be moving quickly into the McCain camp. If only None O. Theabove would run.

I’m sure someone will be mad at me for pointing this out, but Ron Paul is FAR ahead of any of those candidates in google searches. Does this mean he will be the new president?

Really? Try adding Paul. Here’s the results:

http://google.com/trends/viz?q=obama,+clinton,+mccain,+huckabee,+paul&date=mtd&geo=all&graph=weekly_img&ctab=0&sa=N

@hack124×768 - first off, Ron Paul is a fluke because he’s been hugely popular online but fizzled in the polls. Besides that, if you look at Google Trends, Ron Paul is NOT ahead of the others.

@Intelitary, the last name search thing won’t work for Ron Paul because his last name is also a very popular first name. Check out where Ron Paul is at with full name searches: http://tinyurl.com/yovwy2

Obama and Clinton are still in the lead, although as of today, Ron Paul does have a slight lead over McCain.

Yahoo’s buzz market index is also quite interesting to look at.

Democratic Candidates:
http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/market/market.html?_mid=77072

Republican Candidates:
http://buzz.research.yahoo.com/bk/market/market.html?_mid=77328

Ouch, still mchuck is fighting for relevance.

I think the markets and google both have the same flaw: confirmation bias - google from supporters and markets from media.

Google doesn’t have a built in question, while the markets have who will win as the question.

Google is agnostic about the why and therefore allows for richer detail.

But elections are a numbers game so we shall see.

The other bias that has not been considered is generational bias. The likelihood of people voting is somewhat inversely proportional to the likelihood that they are online. A million 19 year olds may look up Obama, but whether they will actually show up to vote is another question. Likewise, there are a lot of older people who have never googled anything who have voted in every election since before Al Gore invented the Internet.

This is all true. There are a lot of factors that were not taken into consideration in this prediction that will be taken into consideration in the general elections. However, what this data is suggesting is that regardless of those factors, the front-runners of the race have corresponded with the amount of searches on their last names. It’s simply phenomenal that even with those flaws in the research, it has still proven to be accurate.

I think also because Barack Obama is a virtual unknown people are googling him to find out more about him. That doesnt mean that they would vote for him. I may well mean that they are afraid of voting for him….

Interesting what can be supported, maybe not concluded, from data we didn’t have a decade ago.

Does anyone else think the 2nd Bush election was rigged? Especially in FL? Things like that don’t give me much hope for any election in the future…

Interesting application of Google trends…the points raised against the figures reflecting in the polls are very relevant, however it does indicate that the majority of political searches are about Obama, which does indicate a keen public interest in his campaign. Let’s face it folks, there is either the 1st woman president, or the 1st black man as president coming. History is in the making here.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. Part of the searches could be attributed to the fact that no one really knows anything about Obama. The revelations last week that Obama has spent 20 years as a member of a church whose minister goes on anti-white/anti-American tirades may play well to the far left of the democratic party, but it will not play well with blue collar democrats or independents.

The American voters are independent minded and there is plenty of time for something to come up that pushes a few percentage points in either direction. According to all of the polls, that is all it would take to swing the election.