Calling it early: The Four Person Race to the White House

With the 2008 Presidential Election less than a year away, it's easy to see who the clear forerunners are when you ignore the mainstream media spin machine (and yes, today a good number of voting age Americans actually do). The race has come down to four candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Ron Paul. Why am I ignoring the other Republican candidates? Because the Republicans don't have a snowballs chance in hell in 2008 if they don't field Ron Paul. He's their only chance to get Democrats to vote Republican, and if they can't see that they will lose. For example, today in Virginia Paul's campaign turned in 20,000 signatures to get him on the state's GOP primary ballot. The 20,000 signatures are 5,000 more than Mitt Romney turned in, and double the 10,000 signatures required for a place on the ballot. Paul clearly has grassroots support that the other candidates (even Democrats) are having trouble obtaining.

Let's examine the "If Clicks Were Votes" series released by Compete for November 2007.

By the Numbers
Ron Paul: 496,906 unique website visitors
Barack Obama: 318,179 unique website visitors
Hillary Clinton: 289,615 unique website visitors
John Edwards: 136,002 unique website visitors

State-by-State








Yes, this is a new concept to rank candidates based on their online popularity. But you must remember that online popularity does translate back into real-world popularity, and that translates into votes in America's idea of a democracy. If each one of those unique visitors to a candidate website mentions the candidate to even 5 of his or her real-world friends, you can see the "reach" numbers jumping into the millions. It will be interesting to see how close the primary results maps look to these website visitor maps.