Playing to your base may be standard operating procedure in politics, but the left-leaning Huffington Post appears to have attracted a more diverse audience than one might expect. Last February, Golf Lovers and Technology Enthusiasts joined Environmentalists, Gay-Rights Activists and other “progressives” to comprise a portion of the over 1.9 million unique visitors to the Post that month. In fact, while 34% of the Post’s visitors also visit other liberal blogs like dailykos.com and crooksandliars.com, 27% of them frequent conservative blogs like townhall.com and redstate.com.

Using Compete’s BehaviorMatch™ product, we can dig even further into the composition mix of visitors to top political sites, including blogs and leading candidates’ websites. The table below compares these sites and measures the propensity of consumers of various behavioral segments to be found on the site. For example, Green Conscious consumers are 4.9 times more likely to be found on huffingtonpost.com than the average website.

Observations

• On average huffingtonpost.com attracted the highest segment indices, indicating its appeal to seemingly disparate groups like ID Protection, Family and Technology Interested Behavioral Segments
• Few segments over-indexed higher on candidates’ sites than on the blogs, but for those who did—such as NASCAR, Retirement and African-American Segments—huffingtonpost.com appeared to be their blog of choice
• While Golf, Business and Family Interested Behavioral Segments indexed highest at huffingtonpost.com, they still indexed higher on McCain’s site than on either of the two Democrat candidates’ sites
• The Tech Savvy Segment is most skewed toward the huffingtonpost.com, where they are 5 times more likely to be found than on the average website, while the Religion Interested Segment is most skewed toward townhall.com where they are over 3 times more likely to be found than on the average website
• Country Music and NASCAR Fan Segments appear most conflicted over the choice between Clinton and McCain as each group over-indexes on these two candidates’ sites, but not so much on Obama’s site

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