Presidential Campaign Events and Web Traffic

With the U.S. presidential election season now in high gear, I've been interested in events that are a part of the process and how they drive web traffic. Which events on the campaign trail drive which surfers to which sites? Sometimes, an official campaign site of Senator Obama or Senator McCain will get the traffic; other times, it's political blog/forum websites that get the bump.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, the official site of Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, is generally more popular than that of his Republican rival Senator John McCain. The graph to the right is an un-smoothed version of the last month to show specific dates when there was a spike in traffic to either site.

Right about August 22, when Obama announced Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, there was a huge spike of traffic to his campaign's official website. Because there were reports that some who were hoping to receive a text message of the candidate's Vice Presidential pick, but had not, some of this might be due to their hoping to find the answer there instead of on their cell phones. While I was interested in his pick, I did not opt for the cell phone option, and can probably be counted among those who spiked traffic to his site around that time, hoping to learn his choice. The second spike in traffic, in the following week, is likely related to various excitement generated by that week having been the Democratic National Convention.

I note that the only spike of note to McCain's official site happened about the same time as that second one to Obama's site. Were his followers hoping he'd steal some convention thunder and reveal his Vice Presidential pick at that time? Were they looking for some red meat rebuttal to the charges leveled against the Republicans during the course of the Convention?

Another interesting thing to observe is when McCain did announce his running mate, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska, on August 29th, a Friday. While there was a big of increased activity to McCain's official site, the most interesting bump was when those who had not bothered since Friday to visit the Alaska Governor's site managed to do so on Monday, September the first. You can see this in the second graph, as well as the reasonably anticipated bump during that same week to McCain's official site during the Republican National Convention.


The graph I find most interesting is one comparing what I believe to be fairly equivalent sites on the right and left: Townhall.com and Dailykos.com. In this un-smoothed graph of a full three months of traffic, all of which has included the campaign season, primaries, etc., there's one spike that stands out. Around September 1st, after the news had settled in, all the righties and the lefties were talking about Palin.

Sometimes, a campaign's official announcements can drive traffic to its website. Other times, a significant (even historic) political development gets tongues (or keyboards) wagging all over the blogs created for political junkies. Do you see any significant spikes that correspond to a date of import in the recent months of these campaigns? Am I missing a place where others might go to discuss surprising developments like McCain's selection of Governor Palin? Let us know in the comments.