Enough with the polls, let’s go to the hits!
Over the next few weeks, more political polls will be coming out, and supporters of aggrieved candidates will contort to show that the poll's methodology is wrong. So enough with 'em.
Let's see...we've looked at lawn sides, and polls. What's left? Hits on Web sites!
Occasionally, I like to look at the traffic stats on the news domain (where, for the record, Polinaut just jumped over Midmorning as the most viewed page) around election time and see where people are going.
For the primary, a lot of people were going to the attorney general section of the Campaign 2006 Web site.
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But that's small potatoes. A company called Hitwise is out with a release today:
Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, today announced that search term data for September 2006 (12 weeks ending 9/16/06) reveals how political issue have shifted compared to the same time period in September 2005 and September 2004. The search term ‘abortion’ was the most searched for political issue sending visits to the Hitwise Lifestyle – Politics category in the 12 weeks ending September 16, 2006. ‘Abortion’ received the largest volume of searches among political issue search terms for the same time period in 2005 and 2004.
The top political issue-related terms following ‘abortion’ for the 12 weeks ending September 12, 2006 were ‘military deaths in iraq’, ‘antiwar’ and ‘hezbollah’. This contrasts with ‘biodiesel’, ‘death penalty’ and ‘american flag’ for the 12 weeks ending September 17, 2005. For the 12 weeks ending September 18, 2004, the top political issue terms following ‘abortion’ were ‘american flag’, ‘homeland security’ and ‘gay marriage’.
The top search term overall for the Lifestyle - Politics category was 'huffington post' for the 12 weeks ending September 16. 2006. For the same period in 2005 the top term was ‘michael moore’ and in 2004 it was ‘john kerry’.
(H/T: Jon Gordon - Future Tense)