Tuesday, June 09, 2009

A Strange Election Predictor Indeed!

I am somewhat reluctant to assign too much significance to this, but I checked my Sitemeter statistics and made a startling discovery. That is, besides the fact that I am getting the highest number of visitors I've ever had, mostly due to interest in the primary. Usually, my readers come from links from other blogs, people who just wander by, and occasionally from readers researching a specific topic on Google, Yahoo, or one of the other search engines.

Today, almost all of my visitors - I would say easily 4 or 5 to 1 - are coming from Google. And they appear to be people researching Creigh Deeds. They are looking for information on Deeds and guns, Deeds and choice, Deeds and religion, etc. I am not seeing as much interest in the other candidates from readers - none of them have been Googling McAuliffe or Moran. At least, not the ones being captured by Sitemeter on my Referral page. There have been a few for Signer and for the Lt Governor's race. But the overwhelming majority that I am getting are look ups for Creigh Deeds.

I suspect that these are undecideds and last minute voters who are breaking his way. They are the ones who haven't been focused on the races before, whose attention has been caught by his momentum over the last few days. Now, they are suddenly tuning in and want to know more before heading off to the polls today.

I have not broken down the geography of where they are all coming from, except that my number of Virginia hits is unusually high too. It's usually the majority of the readers I get, anyway, but not in these numbers.

I am not sure if this actually predicts anything for Creigh Deeds, but it's the first time since I've been doing this (I started after the 2005 election, so I've been blogging actual elections since 2006) that I've ever seen this type of pattern with my visitor statistics.

No comments: