Obama is Popular

by: tremayne

Wed Jun 25, 2008 at 00:56

Here's a rather telling political ad for Gordon Smith, a Republican senator (although you wouldn't know it from this ad) representing Oregon:

I didn't hear the word "Republican" in the ad. There was a tiny R next to his name in copy that appeared on that computer screen shot but that's it. He's proud of his work with Barack Obama. Probably a shrewd ad for a Republican who represents a state Obama will probably win.

Smith isn't the only Republican who likes to talk about Obama. Using Google, I searched conservative political blogs over the last 30 days and found this:

BLOG            OBAMA    McCAIN

Redstate         590       459

PajamasMedia 339       211

MichelleMalkin  289       203

Powerlineblog  150        68

Instapundit       6           4

Of course, I didn't say they were complimentary references, but they are posting about Obama about 50% more often than McCain. Obsessed perhaps.

What about liberal blogs or traditional media?  Follow along for that.

Since the conservative blogs are relatively obsessed with Obama you might think liberal blogs would be writing about McCain predominantly. Not really:

BLOG              OBAMA     McCAIN

Dailykos            829         853

MyDD                690         705

OpenLeft           237         265

Hullabaloo          52           49

It's a relatively even split. The same appears to be the case for some of the major traditional media sites (over the last 30 days anyway) such as CNN (722 Obama, 691 McCain) and NY Times (262 Obama, 277 McCain).

Which candidate are readers interested in? Here's a clue in the volume of Google searches for Obama and McCain:

There's that spike when Obama clinched the nomination and had 6 or 7 times the volume of McCain. Otherwise, the Obama searches are running at about 4 times the volume of the McCain searches.

Some of this you could attribute to Obama being the lesser known candidate compared to McCain who's been around... a while.  But it's not like Obama hasn't been in the news pretty constantly over the last 18 months so I expect this does represent genuine interest and even enthusiasm.

When even Republicans such as Gordon Smith want to align with Obama over McCain or Bush, that's a telling sign of things to come. 

UPDATE: Considering how many more searches there are for Obama, maybe we should be working to optimize positive search results for him in addition to negative search results for McCain.