For the past year I’ve offered analysis on this and other questions relating to the ongoing presidential election. I recently had the opportunity to speak on the topic at Compete’s Client Forum. I was privileged to have been joined on the stage by Evan Tracey, COO of TNS Media/CMAG. Those that follow the election have likely seen Evan on the major news networks providing insight into how the campaigns are spending their advertising dollars.

I started things off by presenting data to highlight how the Internet landscape has been transformed in the four years that have elapsed since we were discussing Swift Boat Veterans and President Bush’s National Guard service. At this time four years ago, the words facebook, twitter, youtube and flickr had yet to enter our lexicon. These sites, as well as their rivals and imitators, have seen incredible growth in a short amount of time.

As voters have gravitated to these sites, the candidates have rushed to embrace the platforms as tools to more effectively engage and organize their supporters as well as solicit campaign contributions. All of the major candidates made at least a cursory attempt to have a presence on these social networking and video sites this election; however, the Democrats have far exceeded their cross-aisle rivals (Ron Paul’s efforts being a noted exception) in leveraging the power of these tools to their advantage.

Compete’s FaceTime metric looks across candidates’ official websites, social networking and video sites to assess the degree to which the candidates have used these new channels to earn time with voters. The data suggests that Barack Obama’s online advantage was evident a year before the first votes were ever cast, giving him the financial muscle and breadth of support to compete against Hillary Clinton’s presumed inevitability.

In contrast, the race among Republicans was much more fluid, with John McCain wining despite an apparent lack of a cohesive online strategy. McCain’s nomination seems in large part due to social conservative infighting, and specifically the right’s failure to coalesce around a single candidate.

All this online time with voters indeed matters, not only at the polls, but particularly at the coffer: Roughly 80% of the $131 million Barack Obama raised during the first quarter was raised online, compared to less than a quarter of McCain’s modest $38 million in total contributions.

While huge amounts of money are being raised online, Even Tracey detailed the fact the very little is being funneled back to the web in the form of advertising. In the world of political advertising, TV still reigns supreme.

Since the start of the current race for the White House in February 2007, $238 million of television advertisements related to the presidential race have aired. Well-funded Democratic candidates and Democratic-leading special interest groups have outspent their GOP rivals by a more than 2 to 1 margin. During this time, only $4 million has been spent online, mostly by the candidates to solicit campaign contributions and drive grass-roots efforts.

For all the attention the web has received over the past decade, campaigns continue to view TV as a more efficient means of informing and influencing voters, particularly those that are undecided about who to support. CMAG forecasts $3 billion will be spent on campaign advertising this election year across the various presidential, state and federal races both by candidates themselves, their respective parties, as well as well-funded special interest groups.

Evan also noted an interesting relationship between the timing of political advertising and the number of undecided voters these ads reach. As the majority of advertising occurs 60 days before an election, the marginal cost of influencing voters climbs dramatically as these ads chase a dwindling number of undecided voters.

While the power of the web from an organizational and fundraising perspective has been made abundantly clear this election, judging by where the candidates are placing their advertising bets, campaigns remain skeptical of the web as a medium for finding, let alone influencing prized undecided voters.

To political junkies and novices alike, I’ll pose these questions, and welcome your responses:

• How can the GOP compete with the Democrat’s online muscle?
• Are online political advertisements effective?
• Will facebook and MySpace supporters turn out to vote in November?

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

Note to political junkies and anyone else curious about the race to determine the next occupant of the White House:

Our friends over at techPresident.com have begun prominently featuring Compete’s presidential data (weekly unique visitors to the candidates’ websites) on their site.

TechPresident is a great resource for those interested in the race and in particular the role of the web in influencing voters. We are grateful to them for the added exposure.

Compete’s commentary and analysis on the presidential election has garnered significant media attention over the past year, leading to coverage on CNN, CBS News, Time, Politico, Wired and TechCrunch just to name a few. Check out our 2008 Election Center to access past posts and coverage.

In the wake of a largely unpopular war and President, a stuttering economy, record high gas prices, and a depressed housing market, forget the “Year of the Rat,” 2008 was supposed to be (and may yet prove to be) the “Year of the Democrats” back in the White House. Instead, though still early, the increasingly bitter battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is giving John McCain the cover to do what many once believed unthinkable: draw even or even out poll Obama and Clinton in national results.

While Obama and Clinton escalate their war of words, McCain is now caught in a major battle of his own: namely to raise enough campaign contributions to compete with his eventual Democratic rival all the way to November.

In the past few weeks, in large part due to his heavy television advertising in the state, Obama has erased much of what was recently an over 20 point deficit in the Pennsylvanian polls. Regardless of whether Obama wins or loses the Keystone State primary next week, he has proven one thing: if you massively outspend your rival, you can indeed move polling numbers.

Obama has so far raised nearly $130 million (yes million) more than McCain. And while only a fraction of both candidates’ hauls remain unspent, Obama’s appeal to supporters and innovative use of the web to raise both money and support immediately put him at a significant advantage in the general election.

The chart above compares each GOP candidate’s share of monthly FaceTime since the start of last year. FaceTime is Compete’s measure of web-wide candidate engagement based on the total amount of time voters spend with candidates across the leading social networks and video sharing websites. McCain secured the nomination over a month ago, but managed to earn only 34% of all GOP FaceTime in March (compare that to Clinton and Obama who combined for 99% of Democratic FaceTime last month).

The FaceTime trends suggest that McCain’s victory in the primaries was facilitated in large part by the failure of social conservatives to rally behind a single candidate. As a result, they split their vote and diluted their own power to nominate one of their own.

McCain’s troubles run deep and are directly related to who he is as well as who he isn’t. His struggle to raise campaign funds is due in large part to distrust and general malaise among social conservatives still smarting over the loss of would-be standard bearers Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee. McCain now hopes to convince these same voters to rally behind him instead.

Further complicating McCain’s fundraising efforts is the continued popularity of Ron Paul. Paul’s legion of largely net-fueled libertarian supporters have proven themselves to be highly organized and adept at raising money. Online interest in McCain’s candidacy has been tepid at best, so an olive branch extended to this group (despite the ideological differences) could pay handsome dividends for McCain and help him counter Obama’s online advantage.

McCain is going to need all the help he can get as he goes to battle with either Democratic candidate. Choosing a strong running mate will help if he or she is able to curry favor with still hesitant Republicans and convince them to open their wallets in support of McCain.

With the majority of primary votes cast over a month ago, March was likely met with a fair amount of disappointment by anyone hoping the hoopla surrounding the presidential race would quiet down, if only for a moment. A lot happened on the way to the Democratic Party nomination last month and as Pennsylvania gears up for its primary next week, it’s worth looking back at events that shaped the race in March and look forward to what is likely to happen next.

Clinton and Obama sparred on almost every issue last month, much to the delight of John McCain. Clinton claimed she’d be most prepared to defend the country but later had to defend and then recant her Bosnian war-time experience claims. Obama faced blistering criticism over inflammatory remarks made by his pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forcing the candidate to make what many called the most important speech of his life.

Reviewing the tale of the tape, the extent of Obama’s dominance is clear. Obama doubled up Clinton in each of the six metrics shown above. Time spent on the candidates’ YouTube channels was particularly disproportionate in Obama’s favor thanks specifically to the popularity of the speech he gave last month at the height of the Rev. Wright controversy. At last check, the speech had been viewed over 4 million times on YouTube. In contrast, Clinton’s most watched video in March was the much publicized, and highly parodied, spot about a phone ringing in the middle of the night, which to date has been seen just under a million times.

The chart below compares each candidate’s share of monthly FaceTime during the past year. FaceTime is Compete’s holistic measure of web-wide candidate engagement based on the total amount of time voters spend with candidates across the leading social networks and video sharing websites. While this has effectively been a two person race for much of the past year (no offense to John Edwards), what’s surprising is that Obama continues to add upon his commanding lead over Clinton in terms of online time with voters. In March, Obama earned four times more FaceTime than Clinton.

From a web perspective, Barack Obama’s heavy advertising spending in Pennsylvania appears to be having its intended impact on voters. The chart below tracks the candidates’ share of traffic to their websites among Pennsylvanians. While recent state-wide polling shows him narrowing the gap with Clinton, online at least, Pennsylvanians have been moving to Obama for weeks. With the exception of late March spike in Clinton’s state web traffic share, which coincided with national interest in her inaccurate claims of landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996, Obama has outdrawn Clinton handily online for the better part of the past month.

Given the trends noted above, Obama’s increasing momentum, and his dominance across almost every measurable statistic, he could pull out a victory next week in Pennsylvania. This of course would be a disaster for Clinton who has pinned all hope on getting a late boost from the final primaries in order to persuade the party’s Super Delegates to hand her the nomination.

Don’t believe the media hype, this race really isn’t really that close.

While the dust has yet to settle entirely in the primary contests, an aura of inevitability is increasingly surrounding Barack Obama. This glow extends beyond the nomination battle with Hillary Clinton, against whom Obama has won 10 straight contests, and could prove extremely difficult for the GOP’s presumptive nominee, John McCain, to overcome.

Across several web metrics, summarized below, Obama leads McCain by no less than a 3 to 1 margin. In terms of online FaceTime with voters, the margin was 6 to 1 in favor of Obama last month. Beyond his fundraising prowess, speaking skills, and likeability, Obama’s online dominance is truly what separates him from both Clinton and McCain and may well be a deciding factor in an Obama walk-off this November.

The barrage of early primary contests in January leading up to Super Tuesday accompanied by near dawn to dusk media attention and heavy ad spending by the candidates led to huge increases in the candidates’ FaceTime with voters in January. During the month, voters spent a total of 77% more time online with the candidates than in December, with certain candidates benefiting more than others.

The table below shows each candidate’s FaceTime in January and their share of their party’s FaceTime. Following the table are charts comparing monthly FaceTime share by candidate during the past year.

January Highlights:

• With reality helping to winnow the field, Obama scored the most FaceTime with voters, grabbing a commanding 60% of all his party’s FaceTime in January, or nearly triple Clinton’s attention. Obama’s Iowa victory speech was the most watched candidate video on YouTube in January and to date has been viewed over 1 million times.
• Across the aisle, McCain’s FaceTime grew the most of any GOP candidate; however, he continued to trail rivals Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney in earning time with voters. While his nomination is all but certain, McCain’s continued struggle to win over, let alone rally conservative Republicans signals trouble on the horizon for his campaign and prospects in the general election. McCain is likely to enter the race with only tepid enthusiasm among the GOP base while holding the party banner of an unpopular president; squaring off against a candidate whose youth, rhetorical gifts, financial backing and online support alone could prove insurmountable, let alone the fact that Democrats appear determined to retake the White House and in Obama appear to have found a candidate they can rally behind.