Joshua Levy of TechPresident.com has dug up an interesting potential predictor for success in state primaries: Yahoo search results. As he wrote last week:
Amidst all of the head-scratching - or self-flagellating, as I like to call it - following pollsters' erroneous predictions in New Hampshire is a sign that the web may have had it right all along.
Yahoo! has released some Buzz data that shows that Hillary Clinton's "Buzz Score" - "the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read" - went up and up in the runup to the New Hampshire primary. At the same time, Barack Obama's score spiked downward.
In addition, the fine folks at Yahoo! report that on the day of the New Hampshire primary Clinton's Buzz Score among New Hampshire women spiked on primary day. (It's scary that they know this information so precisely).
Levy reports today that in the runup to the Michigan primary, Mitt Romney's buzz score was much higher than John McCain's among Michiganders. He also provides buzz score charts for Nevada and Michigan.
If you're interested, you can check out each candidate's score at Yahoo's nifty Political Dashboard. As of right now, it shows that among South Carolina residents searching for information about the candidates, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and Ron Paul have climbed significantly over the last 24 hours. McCain has been falling over the same period, while Huckabee is dropping like a stone.
Are we headed for a surprising vote -- with McCain and Huckabee underperforming while the other three candidates outperform their poll position? If so, Buzz Score will be getting a lot more attention in the future.
