by WonkoKevin

If one of John McCain’s objectives in picking Sarah Palin as VP was to stop the Obama news cycle, Wonkosphere can report: mission accomplished.  Obama’s buzz share in both liberal and conservative realms had been in the 60% range, peaking around 75% earlier in the week.  Over the last 24 hours, McCain now leads Obama in buzz share 60-40, effectively turning the tables on Obama’s convention bump.  We assume with the events of next week McCain will maintain or even increase this lead, knocking attention away from Obama for a good ten days.  The Republicans hope that all the upcoming attention is positive.

by WonkoSteve

The more observant among you will notice that we’ve made a change to the Wonkosphere home page and have added a new Mud Meter tab.  This is a reprise of a similar service we ran during the 2004 election, to keep track of who is saying more negative things about their opponent from day to day.

The calculations are based on press releases and speech transcripts from the candidates’ official web sites.  The Mud Meter shows, on a 1 to 10 scale, how negative the language is in sentences mentioning the opponent.  The value is an average over the previous week.

The Mud Meter tab shows these values for each candidate over the last 30 days, as well as the number of mentions.  It also gives influential words each candidate is associating with the other over the last week.

The story so far is that Obama is just not mentioning McCain very much, compared to McCain’s mentions of Obama. OTOH it appears that he got the message from disgruntled dems about not hitting back hard enough, considering the large jump in his mud meter value over the last week or so.

We have also noticed that Obama’s campaign doesn’t seem to be nearly as conscientious about updating their web site as McCain’s.  How strange, given that Obama is supposed to be the hipster and has a more sophisticated web operation in other ways.

Because there are only two candidates people are seriously talking about anymore, we also replaced the bar chart showing buzz share with a pie chart showing McCain, Obama, and all other candidates.

Enjoy!  And watch this space for more analysis of the Mud Meter and comparisons to the 2004 campaign.

by WonkoKevin

According to Wonksophere buzz share data, Barack Obama has gotten about a 20% increase in buzz share since the Democratic convention began.  Obama is pulling down 75% of the total buzz about the presidential candidates, John McCain is at 24%, and Ron Barr at 1%.  Sentiment about Obama and McCain has remained constant, but the volume of bloggers has exploded.  Whereas the total number of blog posts tracked by Wonkosphere is normally in the 1500 range (about one post per blog per day),  this week the daily average has been in the 2500 range, a 66% increase in volume. 

by WonkoKevin

Hello all, I know it’s been forever and a day since we’ve been around.  Time to get back into the numbers.John McCain is pulling close to Barack Obama in projected electoral votes, according to a relatively new political web site called FiveThirtyEight.com (538=number of electoral votes).  The site in run by Nate Silver, who is a sabermatician–concerned more typically about baseball statistics than election polling.  According to Silver, his method differs from others in several ways:

Firstly, we assign each poll a weighting based on that pollster’s historical track record, the poll’s sample size, and the recentness of the poll. More reliable polls are weighted more heavily in our averages.Secondly, we include a regression estimate based on the demographics in each state among our ‘polls’, which helps to account for outlier polls and to keep the polling in its proper context.Thirdly, we use an inferential process to compute a rolling trendline that allows us to adjust results in states that have not been polled recently and make them ‘current’.Fourthly, we simulate the election 10,000 times for each site update in order to provide a probabilistic assessment of electoral outcomes based on a historical analysis of polling data since 1952. The simulation further accounts for the fact that similar states are likely to move together, e.g. future polling movement in states like Michigan and Ohio, or North and South Carolina, is likely to be in the same direction.

His method has Obama at 272.3 and McCain at 265.7, and Ohio is the swing state. His scenario simulations give Obama only a 17.9% chance of winning if he loses Ohio, whereas McCain is given a 0.42% chance–less than 1 out of 200–of winning the election if he loses Ohio. Pollster.com currently has Obama up 45.6% to 43.9% in Ohio.