Predicting the Presidential Election

I wrote about The Obama, Hillary, McCain Election and the Two Realities yesterday on Webmetricsguru.com and I want to pick that up here, because what happens up through November will depend on which of the Two Realities dominates – and right now, I’m looking for “markers” that would be tractable in Social Media Monitoring, that might indicate which way the election is going.

Assuming nothing is totally set now, and the election can go either way (even though it seems like a likely Obama win), there should be some way of tracking each reality to see how they’re evolving over the next 5 months.

A recent Google Trend query suggests that they way you search has a lot to do with how the results play out. But all of that assumes that more of the voting public is using Search Engines to access the internet and research candidates running for office.

And what’s the pattern for that? How about the 2004 Election, that’s the most recent one and most likely what we can look back at for patterns.

At, more or less, the same point we are today in the 2008 Election, Kerry was twice as searched on as Bush but events that happened during the summer of 2004 sunk his campaign (maybe it was the Swift Boat thing, maybe it was a combination of factors – and maybe, at some level, John Kerry wasn’t as appealing a figure as Barack Obama is – and John McCain, for all his gravitas, doesn’t really have the Bush Cabal behind him – remember, to the Cabal, largely organized by his father, George H.W. Bush – Bush was sorta a religious figure – sorta a “messianic worship – the cabal worked to no end to get George W. Bush elected and Re-elected).

McCain doesn’t appear to have the loyalty of the Bush Cabal behind him – but he is a war hero and that may play out as the summer and fall approaches.

My guess – “Obama” is way ahead of “McCain” now, but so was “Kerry” ahead of “Bush” at the same point in 2004 – then the summer came and a lot of stuff went down.

One marker of which reality will dominate, if 2008 turns out like 2004 is a sabotaging of Barack Obama’s image over the summer or early fall – similar to what happened to John Kerry.

While McCain doesn’t really have Bush’s Cabal behind him, as I mentioned (they have no personal loyalty to McCain) there are a lot of people who will now take a position, over the summer.

What I’m thinking about is terms, or patterns to look for to assign to each “reality” which will predict the pattern of what will follow.

My guess is the Internet has changed a lot since 2004, and so I’d look for some other dynamic to play out – but I suspect, the methods of political sabotage will be used, again, perhaps by both sides, but more likely by the Republicans, because they have a lot more to lose.

That’s my guess as of today – expect it to be a very interesting summer with a lot of “revelations” on both sides – mostly garbage stuff but there might be some relevant information on both sides that comes out.

At that point, when the political operatives plant and set of “mines” – the response to the those stories, will probably be the “markers” I’m looking for.