As Americans head to the polls today, a look back at the closing weeks of the race reveals that Barack Obama increasingly distanced himself from John McCain in the online race as the election neared.

Weekly unique visitors to Obama’s website (graphed below) quickly rose from 540,000 at the start of August to an interim peak of 2.5 million during the week of the Democratic National Convention. The race narrowed online the following week as attention shifted to the Republicans (Sarah Palin in particular.) After the dust from the conventions settled, Obama’s traffic continued to soar, fueling his record $150 million in campaign contributions in September. Obama’s traffic later eclipsed his convention-fueled spike three weeks before Election Day.

McCain’s traffic also rose in the lead up to November 4th, but his growth was relatively modest compared to Obama’s. One reason for this was that McCain, unlike Obama, kept his promise to accept public campaign financing. As a result, McCain received a one-time cash infusion from the Federal Government but was then prevented, in the general election from soliciting contributions from voters. McCain’s traffic peaked after Palin was added to the ticket in late August, but never again reached that level throughout the remainder of the race.

The above graph also plots the weekly ratio of Obama visitors to McCain visitors. During the final eight weeks of the race, Obama’s site traffic averaged 2.2 times greater than that of his GOP rival.

As the presidential race enters its long-last homestretch this weekend, Barack Obama continues to leverage his online advantage to feed his campaign’s insatiable appetite for campaign contributions to fuel his massive advertising blitz (Exhibit A: last night’s nationwide infomercial). Compete’s most recent data on traffic to the candidates’ websites shows that BarackObama.com attracted over 3 million unique visitors last week, compared to the 1.3 million that visited JohnMcain.com.

Absent an October surprise in the final weekend of the race, John McCain faces stiff odds of turning the latest polls around at this late date and his VP choice appears to have been an ill-timed and poorly placed bet. The table below compares the candidates across several web stats in September, including Compete’s FaceTime metric which measures the candidates’ share of voice with voters online.

By most measures, Obama leads McCain handiy online. And while McCain’s Wikipedia article was more widely read than Obama’s last month, this was due largely to spill-over from readers seeking information on Sarah Palin. For the second straight month, Palin’s Wikipedia article was the most popular on the site with nearly 1.4 million readers, 11% of whom also read McCain’s article. Joe Biden, despite his knack for saying things he and the Obama campaign later regret, has largely been a non-factor in this race as voters have focused elsewhere. Interestingly, Cindy McCain received more attention last month on Wikipedia than the Democratic VP candidate.

McCain gambled when selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, hoping she could help him pick off disenfranchised Clinton supporters while somehow, at the same time, help him curry favor with long skeptical social conservatives. That bet seemed a long shot at the time and appears to have not worked out as intended. Certainly Palin’s addition to the ticket has added much-needed youth and vitality to the campaign, but her poor showings in limited press interviews combined with suggestions of impropriety in her governing of Alaska over the past few weeks have dimmed her Halo effect on the race and with it McCain’s chances. When the economic crises struck last month, McCain and Palin’s combined limited economic experience handicapped the campaign’s ability to present a compelling case to voters that they could lead the nation out of this mess if elected.

As Americans became more familiar with Palin last month, interest in her as a candidate was replaced in many ways with interest in Tina Fey’s characterization of her on Saturday Night Live. The chart below compares Sarah Palin article readership on Wikipedia with searches for her on YouTube and show that interest in Sarah Palin on Wikipedia subsided soon after the Republican National Convention as the popular press recovered from their flat footedness. For the week of September 14th, following the season premiere of SNL, searches for “Sarah Palin” made up for 2.5% of all searches on YouTube as viewers rushed to find video clips of the SNL sketch. YouTube interest in Sarah Palin repeatedly spiked after subsequent episodes of SNL and for the month of September, “Sarah Palin” was the most widely searched for term on the video sharing website. Undoubtedly these sketches made an impact on the race.

It has been a very long race and I have enjoyed following it for Compete and adding my commentary and analysis of our data to the nationwide political conversation. Win or lose on Tuesday, Obama’s mastery of the web is sure to be studied and mimicked by political hopefuls in future elections.

As Senators Barack Obama and John McCain crisscross the country in search of votes, clog the airwaves with advertisements, and tighten their seemingly iron grip in the popular media and blogosphere, it’s no surprise that Americans are paying increasing attention to the race. Compete’s latest data on traffic trends to the candidate’s websites shows Obama maintaining his 2 to 1 advantage online.

Of course for all that’s made of national election data and polls, in the end, the race will be decided in the trenches at the state level. In reality, only a dozen or so “battleground” states hold the keys to the White House next month.

A state-by-state look at the online activities of Americans across the country suggests that voters in certain pockets of the country are following the race more closely that people elsewhere, which could portend lower voter turnout in some key contests. The map and table below compare interest in the election as gauged by the percentage of each state’s residents who visited a candidate’s website or top political blog in September. For comparison, look at a similar post we did last year.

Observations:

• More than residents of any other state, Coloradoans are following the election the closest, at least online. 1 in 8 Coloradoans, who were online in September, visited a candidate’s website or top political blog. This battleground state that has voted Republican in the past 3 elections, is considered by many to be “in-play” for Obama this year.
• Easterners certainly love their politics…if not their politicians. Interest in the race, generally speaking, is highest in the Northeast and greater D.C. area.
• Residents online in other parts of the country, particularly the Deep South are paying considerably less attention to the race. The bottom ten states, in terms of online interest, all hail from traditionally Republican states across the Deep South. The general ambivalence towards this race suggests that despite the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket, McCain has failed to connect with social conservatives in the Republican Party.

Now this race is really getting interesting.

The announcements in August of Senator Joe Biden and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as their party’s Vice Presidential candidates have defined the race over the last few weeks. After long trailing in national and battleground polls, fundraising and the all important buzz factor, McCain’s surprising choice served as both a shot in the arm for the GOP base and a punch to the gut for Democrats. An updated Tale of the Tape table now shows a narrowing race on all fronts.

As shown in the chart below, both campaigns got a bump in site traffic after their VP announcements; however, the McCain campaign’s smart tactic of announcing Palin’s name the day after Obama’s speech in Denver helped grab the national media attention away from the Democratic nominee. The ensuing Palin frenzy helped McCain do what was once unthinkable: rival Obama’s online reach for an entire week (albeit the week of the Republican National Convention).

Palin, a political unknown only a few short weeks ago, has had an undeniable impact on the race as she fast becomes a household name across the country. Web searches for Palin totaled 2.8 million on the day of McCain’s announcement, and remained above 1 million through the Republican convention the following week. With the national media unprepared for the pick, Americans turned to Wikipedia in droves to find information on Palin. Nearly 1.2 million people read Palin’s Wikipedia article within the first 36 hours following the announcement, making hers the most popular article on the site in August, and leaving Michael Phelps just a silver medal to go with his eight golds from Beijing.

Not only is Palin driving more people to McCain’s campaign, but importantly, Palin is bringing out more women. The gender split among JohnMcCain.com visitors has shifted from 48% female prior to Palin’s announcement, to 52% over the past two weeks. Regardless of whether these are GOP faithful just now warming to McCain’s candidacy, or disaffected Clinton supporters testing the Palin waters, even a modest female break toward McCain could spell trouble for Obama.

Coming at the end of August, Palin’s entry in the race had only a modest impact on McCain’s FaceTime share last month; however, McCain was still able to make up ground on Obama thanks in large part to his growing website traffic, as well as continued sharp attack advertisements found on YouTube (as well as other video sharing websites.) The FaceTime metric measures total time spent with candidates online and the chart below illustrates the degree to which McCain and Obama are attracting the attention of voters across leading social networks and video sharing websites as well as on each candidate’s official sites. In just four months, McCain’s FaceTime share has risen five-fold from 7% to 38%.

In addition to popular attack ads launched in July, which continued to get significant play last month, the McCain camp found viral success last month with a video staring Joe Biden himself. The ad, “Joe Biden on Barack Obama” which features a clip of Biden questioning Obama’s readiness to be president, has registered nearly a million views to date. Obama also found YouTube success in August with his “Seven” ad, which paints McCain as out of touch on the economy and criticizes his ownership of multiple homes. While Obama has long been the political king of YouTube, this latest video was his first in over six months to register close to a million views, whereas McCain has posted three videos in the past two months that have attracted a million or more views.

Historically, the selection of a VP candidate has had little impact on the results come Election Day. In this race of multiple “firsts,” however, and with less than 50 days remaining before American’s cast their votes, history could be trumped once again.

Just when it seemed the ailing economy, soaring oil prices and a historically unpopular president would doom John McCain’s electoral aspirations, a funny thing happened while Barack Obama and his media entourage were taking last month’s overseas mid-summer victory lap: America seems to have tired a bit of Obama’s celebrity status, dulling, at least slightly, his glow of invulnerability. Now, with the recent Georgia/Russia conflict causing voters to rethink Obama’s preparedness for the world stage, national polls narrowing, falling site traffic, not to mention 2012 aspirant Hillary Clinton’s posturing for another run, Obama’s success in the fall is less assured than it appeared only a few short weeks ago.

John McCain, given up for dead last summer, has had a surprisingly successful past couple of months. After almost of year of convincing most that his campaign lacked anything in the way of a cohesive online strategy, McCain’s camp has seized on the Internet of late to distribute satirical attack ads to define Obama for the American public. Like Mike Huckabee last winter, the relatively underfunded McCain camp has leveraged YouTube to generate free publicity for his campaign. The ads “Celeb” and “The One,” McCain’s most virally successful so far, along with the related well-publicized fight McCain picked with debutant Paris Hilton, helped the presumptive Republican nominee finally get voters to stop and consider that Obama still has to win in November before he can occupy the White House.

The FaceTime chart below illustrates the degree to which McCain, Obama and Ralph Nader are attracting the attention of voters and highlights the degree to which recent developments have helped McCain become much more competitive online. The FaceTime metric looks across candidates’ official websites as well as their related sites on places such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Meetup.com, to measure the total time voters spend with candidates. After months of trailing Obama by a nearly 9 to 1 margin, these well-timed videos helped McCain’s FaceTime share jump to 26% in July…not bad for a candidate mocked for his lack of web savvy.

McCain tactics seem to have worked, so one can only expect more of the same in the weeks leading up to Election Day. Next week’s Democratic Convention will broadcast Obama into tens of millions of American homes. It will be interesting to see whether or not, under the scrutiny of the national stage and the pressure of a resurgent opponent, voters will see in Obama a man ready to lead the nation come January.

Fueled by a 65% rebound in visitors to his website, Barack Obama recently reported raising a near record $52 million during the month of June. This haul represented a significant boost from the $22 million he raised in May when he was still in a heated battle with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. While the total is indeed staggering, less reported was a recent Washington Post analysis that found that only $1.8 million (or 3.5%) of this sum was given by former Hillary Clinton donors.

Perhaps they are waiting for an olive branch vice presidential invitation. Or maybe, they are biding their time hoping Obama stumbles come November, paving the way for a Clinton resurrection in 2012. Whatever the underlying reason, it seems that Clinton’s most active supporters have yet to rally behind Obama.

The FaceTime chart below illustrates the degree to which the Democratic candidates have attracted the attention of voters throughout the race. The FaceTime metric quantifies the total amount of time voters spent online each month with candidates across their official website as well as their related sites on places such as MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Meetup.com. Even though Clinton ended her campaign on June 7th, for the month she still managed to grab 15% of Democratic FaceTime, while the remaining share went almost entirely to Obama.

Further, the chart below illustrates the degree to which Obama’s official website is attracting once active Hillary supporters (defined as those who made three or more website visits to HillaryClinton.com during the final two months of her candidacy). Through July 19th, Obama’s site had only managed to attract the attention of 11% of Clinton’s formerly active supporters.

In response, the Obama’s have recently ratcheted up their outreach to women, hoping to bring this large group of Clinton supporters into the fold. Of course Obama has proven himself to be a masterful organizer and fundraiser, able to raise millions at the drop of an email. With all Obama has going for him at this point in the race, and in lieu of all the baggage the GOP standard bearer (John McCain) carries, whether or not Clinton hold-outs fall in line may end up not really mattering come November.