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Campaign Geekery

By Jim Bonfield

A major daily newspaper recently reported that “A number of bills likely to emerge from the Democrat-controlled Legislature in the weeks ahead could test the governor’s centrist strategy at a critical point in his re-election bid.”
    Hmmmm ... what bills? Where can I find that information? What research is online and how visible online are the two gubernatorial candidate’s positions on these issues?
It is important to the gubernatorial candidates’ chances to speak to voters at the precise moment they are seeking information on important issues, and the internet is playing an increasingly important role in the information-gathering process.
    How many California voters may burn the midnight oil researching the candidates’ positions on emotional issues and perhaps make last-minute decisions critical to the election?
    The latest Public Policy Institute of California Poll shows 19 percent of voters still undecided. A recent Field Poll shows Schwarzenegger with only an 8 precent lead. If voters turn to the internet search engines to better understand the issues surrounding the campaign, which candidate’s message will they find? Will what they find be compelling enough to influence their votes?
    I drew a sample of search terms based on some of the key concepts mentioned as likely voter concerns for the upcoming gubernatorial election. The following sites cumulatively represent more than 96 percent of all internet search activity: google.com; google.com sponsored links (the paid ads are tracked separately); msn.com; overture.com; yahoo.com; and yahoo.com directory results.
    If a search-engine user requests information on any of these popular search sites for any of the search terms at left, neither of Schwarzenegger’s election sites comes up on Page 1 for any of these terms. (For some reason, he has www.joinarnold.com and, like a third nipple with no obvious purpose, www.joinarnold2006.com. Weird.)
    Angelides’ site does only slightly better; producing a single Page 1 result for the term “California governor race.”
    If search results are an indicator that the gubernatorial race is close, the advantage offered through search optimization and marketing is obvious and critical.
    As Prosper goes to print, there still may be time for a bright marketer on either camp’s side to improve their online outreach, perhaps in time to alter the outcome of the election.

Other Geeky-Fun Factoids:
Page Rank: Google measures “the importance” of a website by measuring the quality and quantity of inbound links a site has from other websites (page rank). Joinarnold.com and its appendage site, joinarnold2006.com have 58,678 other web pages that link to these sites, and www.angelides.com has 55,249.
Alexa: The Alexa web search platform ranks sites by traffic volume: the lower the score, the closer to the top of all website traffic a site is (Yahoo.com is ranked No. 1). Again, both candidate sites are comparable, with Angelides’ site pulling slightly more traffic than the governor’s.

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