Presidential elections are tough. It's a long process fraught with uncertainty, pitfalls and heartbreak; just ask Ross Perot. In this last push towards the Democratic convention, and with a race that many are saying is too close to call, we figured it was perfect time to put some crowdsourcing to work and see how accurate it might be.
So, what do the Interwebs tell us about Tuesday's primary to end all primaries? Frankly, a lot. The first place we decided to hit on our prognostication panoply pursuit was prediction purveyor Intrade.
Intrade is like the stock market, only instead of trading shares of companies, participants trade shares of the future. (cue ominous music here) Intrade shares trade between 0 and 100 points, with 100 representing perceived certainty and 0 representing "totally not gonna happen, no way, no how." The idea is to have people put money where their mouth is, buying and selling a chunk of the future. The difference between the outcome (100 or 0) and your purchase point is the spread, the amount of money you walk away with if you're right -- or lose if you're wrong.
The pundits will tell you that in order for Hillary to stay alive, she must win two crucial states, Texas and Ohio. According to Intrade, she's got a pretty fair shot of winning Ohio. Texas on the other hand isn't looking so hot. With Intrade reporting a 71% chance of Obama taking the Texas primary, "the market" seems to have spoken in respect to how Tuesday will shake out.
Overall, Intrade users seem pretty confident that Barack will take home the nomination. Shares in Hillary's chance have tanked in recent trading, with a resulting spike in Obama contracts. Currently Intrade gives an 86 percent chance of an Obama win.
How accurate is this Intrade thing? -- you're probably asking yourself. It's certainly not 100% but, as far as political predictions go, it's pretty solid. In the lead up to Super Tuesday when all the major news organizations were back and forth over Romney vs. McCain in Florida, Romney shares tanked two days before the polls opened. When the smoke cleared, McCain won, Romney lost and the iron haired Reagan-a-like took his lumps and dropped out of the race.
Memes on teh intarwebs
Elekshun cat sez the memes pointz toes Obamuh. Memes and the internet go hand in hand, and election season is ample fuel for the fire. We've noticed a distinct trend of our own over the last several weeks. Every Obama meme we've seen is positive, while the Hillary memes are mostly negative. Take these, for example.
Overall, Intrade users seem pretty confident that Barack will take home the nomination. Shares in Hillary's chance have tanked in recent trading, with a resulting spike in Obama contracts. Currently Intrade gives an 86 percent chance of an Obama win.
How accurate is this Intrade thing? -- you're probably asking yourself. It's certainly not 100% but, as far as political predictions go, it's pretty solid. In the lead up to Super Tuesday when all the major news organizations were back and forth over Romney vs. McCain in Florida, Romney shares tanked two days before the polls opened. When the smoke cleared, McCain won, Romney lost and the iron haired Reagan-a-like took his lumps and dropped out of the race.
Memes on teh intarwebs
Elekshun cat sez the memes pointz toes Obamuh. Memes and the internet go hand in hand, and election season is ample fuel for the fire. We've noticed a distinct trend of our own over the last several weeks. Every Obama meme we've seen is positive, while the Hillary memes are mostly negative. Take these, for example.
We'd prefer not to get into whether this Flickr image is offensive -- a random sampling among members of my house hold got mixed reviews, some hated it while others really hated it. We'll let the image stand on it's own merit, or lack thereof. There's plenty more meme-a-licious election stuff to go around.
Hillary is Mom Jeans
A few of these have cropped up over recent weeks. There's Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, Hillary Clintion is Mom Jeans, along with "new bicycle" versions for McCain and Hillary. You can deduct points for the "new bicycle" group, as they don't allow public contributions.
Hillary Clinton is Mom Jeans does allow you to add phrases, and again the collective will of the Internet generation just doesn't find Hillary very cool. She didn't listen to your mixtape, she wants you to make a quick change to that PDF, and she even loves that James Blunt song.
Need more? Of course you do. These are highly subjective -- and entertaining. While Obama has great YouTube fan videos like Will.I.Am's "Yes We Can", and has even been edited into an East Indian dancing rockstar in "Barack Obollywood". On the other hand, searching YouTube for positive Hillary videos is like looking for a decent meal in Nicole Ritche's kitchen, at best you come away with scraps. Go ahead, try it. The closest thing we could come up with was this little homage to Jack Nicholson's ego.
Enough with the funny business
Any roundup of Internet future-gazing couldn't be complete without Google Trends. We're afraid the trends aren't looking so good for the Hillary supporters either. After taking a beating in the future market, and being passed over for all manner of entertaining memes, she's also losing the search wars.
When we take a look at search statistics for Ohio and Texas and compare the two candidates, Obama is showing consistent strength among Google searchers.
Ohio
Texas
The Round-up. What does this all mean?
While looking at all these things is interesting, all bets are off once the polls open on Tuesday. No one can predict the future. The one thing we can predict? If you live in one of these hotly contested states, you're needed at the polls. The one thing that can change the future is you, using your vote and your voice to participate in the process.
While looking at all these things is interesting, all bets are off once the polls open on Tuesday. No one can predict the future. The one thing we can predict? If you live in one of these hotly contested states, you're needed at the polls. The one thing that can change the future is you, using your vote and your voice to participate in the process.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-03-2008 @ 9:48AM
Amber Rhea said...
Wow Grant! You really did your research.
I love this post, and I'm especially loving the tennis balls photo at the top.
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3-03-2008 @ 10:02AM
Rocketboy said...
Wow, just like the sex posts, where's the Download part of Download squad? Shouldn't this be on some sort of politics blog?
This is a plea to Weblogs to stop it with the shenanigans.
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3-03-2008 @ 10:41AM
Dolores Parker said...
Wow Grant. This is just brilliant. Bill Schneider needs to incorporate some of this into his magic tea leaves too.
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3-03-2008 @ 12:13PM
kingkool68 said...
@Rocketboy
As the state of computing has moved from the desktop to the Internet, more applications have been developed as web applications or "web apps" for short. With a greater focus by the industry as a whole on web apps, Download Squad is forced by simple market pressures to cover what is out there and a lack of desktop application development has resulted in a lack of desktop application coverage. Make sense?
As for this article I find it highly relevant due to the use of social sites being used here. These are very interesting times we are living in. The Internet is changing the way we do things including predicting future elections by tapping into the groupthink of the world wide web.
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3-03-2008 @ 12:19PM
Grant Robertson said...
kingkool : Bang on. Thanks for coming to our defense.
rocketboy: Download Squad is and has always been in part about the online lifestyle. Sure, we cover great apps, utilities and downloads but, we also cover the ways those things fit into your life, make life easier, offer you new possibilities, or take away your privacy. It's a big beat to cover, but we feel we do it well. We're constantly looking for new desktop apps to cover, and we talk about that point all the time in our backchannel conversations. Unfortunately, kingkool is right.. the desktop is nearly dead. After several years covering all these things, we've kinda touched on just about every piece of software we use both individually and as a team. Believe me, we're ecstatic when we find new downloadables but, if that's all we posted, we'd be bored to death.
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3-03-2008 @ 12:53PM
Rocketboy said...
"the desktop is nearly dead"
Wow, I've been hearing that since, oh, what was that, sometime before the y2k scare?
My beef with this particular article is that you're basically saying that you can determine what is popular on the internet, and that may (or may not) be a reflection of a contest that (in many ways) is determined by popularity.
Or the prev. article that decrys the concept of being a "Professional", and how dare anyone make a judgment on anyone based on anything, it's something that I would expect from Wired. Not something called "Download Squad".
Far be it for me to decide how Weblogs runs their sites. I'm not trying to say that they should never publish anything like the two posts that I mentioned. I would just like it if they had a 'Internet Life' spin off. That way, people can separate out the two issues, Internet Life and Applications (desktop/social/or web based).
I'm just looking at it from a branding issue. If all else fails, I can find a new apps blog. No harm, no foul. It's not like I'm going to stop reading all Weblogs pages, and even if I did, I'm just one guy. I'm just looking at the branding issue. For example AutoBlog vs AutoBlog Green. Joystiq vs {insert name here}Fanboy.
I would also not wish to lose the application information that you do post up here. Many have been useful by themselves, or through the comments that others have posted.
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3-03-2008 @ 1:01PM
Grant Robertson said...
rocketboy : I think you're too hung up on branding. Our name is our name, but like many blogs, what our editorial definition was pre-launch and what our editorial definition is after a few years of operation are different things. That's not something we should have to apologize for. We do a bang up job of covering the things we cover, and I'm super proud of the team we have.
You can do all sorts of interesting views with our RSS feeds, for example:
http://downloadsquad.com/category/windows/rss.xml would give you nothing but posts which end up in the "windows" category. So, mostly downloadable things for Windows, or Windows related news. You can custom make feeds from just about everything on our site in that way (tags or categories, add rss.xml to the end)
And, for the record.. "it's something that I would expect from Wired"
Thanks, you made my day.
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3-03-2008 @ 3:00PM
Drew said...
When Popular Science introduced their PPX (PopSci Predictions Exchange) last year, they wrote an article in the magazine basically decribing this same phenomenon. While Intrade and the PPX tade in different futures, the underlying logic is the same: if you want a pretty solid predictor of the future, just ask the market. I forget the figures they gave, but I think the accuracy was somewhere in the 80-90% range. When people go to vote, the government is asking the market who should get the nomination. It's the same kinda thing, these sites are just doing it beforehand. Save this article and come back to it Wednesday morning, I bet a lot of these predictions work out.
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3-03-2008 @ 8:24PM
Rocketboy said...
Grant.. Again, it was not intended to be a slight, so feel free to take any compliments that you find(but the Wired comment was for the other article, not this one, sorry).
To say that branding isn't important, dismisses quite of few of the Weblogs sites. XXFanboy, the different Engadgets, and two flavors of Autoblog seem to disagree with your dismissal of branding. Heck, the Lifestyle blogs seem to be nothing ABOUT brands and branding (for the most part).
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3-04-2008 @ 12:42PM
Basil said...
I found this post through Digg and think it’s a great post – not sure about the scope debate that’s going on here…
As a keen gambler on political events I find the internet an invaluable research tool (as in so many areas). In the ‘memes’ section I’d add tools like Blogpulse that, like Google Hottrends, can be used to get snapshots of public opinion about candidates, issues, etc: http://www.blogpulse.com/
The ‘wisdom of crowds’ approach to predicting the outcome of events is widely used here in the UK, where journalists will quote the odds bookies offer on an event as a shorthand way of illustrating public opinion. Example: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/politics/littleandlarge/feb07/bookies.htm.
And with the information networks big bookies have, their press releases alone can be valuable sources of ‘inside information’. This one from William Hill speaks volumes about Clinton’s chances if things don’t go her way today: http://www.2008-us-presidential-election.com/the-sharpe-angle/hillary-71-to-quit-us-election-this-week_20080303.htm.
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3-04-2008 @ 5:56PM
kyle said...
bros before hoes is a tshirt hell product, not just a flickr image.
and they are an equal opportunity abuser, there is plenty of obama-bashing stuff there too.
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