Google Insights Iowa Caucus Projections: Update Through January 2

Through my new Italian correspondent, I have learned that Google has updated its Insights search index data through yesterday, January 2 for Iowa. So, it's now possible to update the forecast for tonight's Caucus a bit. I will use the same assumptions that "other candidates in the Iowa race will get about 10% of the Caucus vote between them [which I now realize is probably too low] and that Google Insights scores are directly comparable to levels of electoral support, these data indicate the following vote percentages." I have, however, fiddled a little bit with the search terms used for this forecast compred to the ones I have rolled out earlier. Having now observed that some candidates last names alone, Santorum and Gingrich, return both unambiguous search results (e.g. not Katy Perry mixed in with Rick Perry when searching for "Perry") and higher Google Insights scores than the combination of all candidates first and last names (which I had been using in my previous posts).

The Google Insights scores from January 2 and the resulting forecasts are:

Ron Paul---100 (32.5%)
Rick Santorum---75 (24.4%)
Mitt Romney---49 (15.9%)
Newt Gingrich--- 31 (10.7%)
Rick Perry---22 (7.1%)

Subjectively, I think these data are over-reporting Ron Paul's standing a bit, since his supporters tend to be younger who are (probably) more likely to use the internet and under-reporting Santorum's standing since his supporters tend to be older social conservatives who are (probably) less likely to be online. Also, I am pretty sure I have over-stated the support for all of the included candidates since I have low-balled the estimate for "all others" at 10% total, but I can't include them individually since the public Google Insights tool limits users to seeking out five search terms at a time. Still, the data are consistent with my own baseless sense of how the candidates will line up when the votes are tallied: Paul, Santorum, and Romney taking the top three spots, in that order.

Web Searches and the Iowa Caucus: Update

Daily Google Insights index scores from Iowa are now available for January 1. They show that Rick Santorum has moved into 2nd place in the web search primary. Google Insights scores for the five leading Republican presidential candidates are:

Ron Paul---70
Rick Santorum---32
Mitt Romney---22
Rick Perry---15
Newt Gingrich---13

Once again, assuming that the other candidates in the Iowa race will get about 10% of the Caucus vote between them and that Google Insights scores are directly comparable to levels of electoral support, these data indicate the following vote percentages (with projections based on last week's Google Insights index scores in parentheses).

Ron Paul---41% (45%)
Rick Santorum---21% (10%)
Mitt Romney---14% (14%)
Rick Perry---9% (10%)
Newt Gingrich---8% (10%)

The figures capture both the strong surge in support for Rick Santorum which has been evident in the polls and the continued collapse of Newt Gingrich.

In contrast, polls show a much closer contest between Romney and Paul for the Iowa win, with Romney holding a slight advantage. ARG's latest poll, which concluded on January 1, indicates:

Mitt Romney leads the Iowa Republican Presidential Caucus with 22%. Following closely, Ron Paul is in second place at 17%, Rick Santorum is in third place at 16%, and Newt Gingrich is in fourth place at 15%.

Likewise, Intrade's current market for election futures indicates that Romney is the most likely winner of the Iowa Caucus. Current prices for the Iowa Caucus future indicates that Romney's probability of winning the Caucus is 51.6% with Ron Paul (27.0%) and Rick Santorum (20.4%) assigned nontrivial prospects of winning. The Intrade market has little faith in either Gingrich (0.5% chance of winning) or Perry (0.2% chance of winning) pulling off a comeback.

Update: I just found this bit from a report on Iowa State University's Poll, released December 22:

A new Iowa State University/Gazette/KCRG poll of 333 likely Iowa Republican caucus goers finds Ron Paul in the top spot among GOP presidential candidates with 27.5 percent, followed closely by Newt Gingrich with 25.3 percent. Paul's lead over Gingrich is within the poll's margin of error at plus or minus 5 percentage points.


Mitt Romney is in third place at 17.5 percent, while Rick Perry is the only other candidate to poll in double digits at 11.2.

While Paul's lead is just over 2 percentage points and easily within the poll's margin of error, it may actually be more solid than it appears.

"What our poll says is that 51 percent of Paul's supporters say they're definitely backing him," said James McCormick, professor and chair of political science at Iowa State and coordinator of the poll. "The percentage for the next two candidates is much weaker, at 16.1 for Mitt Romney and 15.2 for Newt Gingrich. Moreover, the percentage of respondents 'leaning to' or 'still undecided' in their support for these latter two candidates remains high, at 58 percent for Gingrich and 38 percent for Romney. In other words, I'm going to make the case that these numbers are still very soft for those two candidates."

"I think Paul probably under-polls," said Dave Peterson, interim director of the Harkin Institute of Public Policy at Iowa State and associate professor of political science who assisted with the poll. "His supporters are younger and more likely to reply on a cell phone, so he's probably going to perform better than his polling suggests. His supporters also are dedicated and will likely turn out on caucus night and not change their minds."

The Dave Peterson quoted is none other than Aggie PoliSci Legend David A. M. Peterson, by the way.

Political Analysis with Google Search Data: A Roundup

My friend and coauthor Sylvia Manzano pointed out this story from yesterday's Morning Edition on NPR. NPR's science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, interviewed UNC sociologist Phil Cohen, who discussed how political web searches correlate with cultural and aesthetic web searches. Here's part of the transcript of the conversation between Morning Edition host Linda Werthheimer and Vedantam:

VEDANTAM: There's a sociologist that I spoke with at the University of North Carolina. His name is Phil Cohen. And what he did is he said can we apply this tool [Google Correlate] to politics. And so he said let me search for prominent, liberal and conservative commentators - people like Rachel Maddow and Stephen Colbert, or Rush Limbaugh.

And what he found, unsurprisingly actually, was that the places where people were doing a lot of searches for the liberal commentators tended to be liberal places. They were places that tended to vote for President Obama in the 2008 election.

WERTHEIMER: California.

VEDANTAM: Exactly. But he also found that the places which searched for the liberal commentators also tended to search for very particular kinds of foods.

WERTHEIMER: Now, that is very strange.

VEDANTAM: So let me play you a little bit of what Phil Cohen told me in terms of what the liberals who are searching for Rachel Maddow are also searching for, in terms of their food.

PHIL COHEN: On the liberal list are arugula pasta, beets nutrition, beets urine, fake meat, fennel salad, firm tofu, a variety of vegetarian cooking, vegetarian recipes. Something like a Republican stereotype of what a liberal food diet might be.

And, from my reader comments, I learned about this Italian blog, Studi e Proiezioni Elettorali (Surveys and Election Forecasts), that's been playing around with using Google Trends and Google Insights data to forecast European elections and trying different ways of weighting the these web search data to correct for some kinds of selection bias inherent in drawing inferences about the electorate from the population of internet searchers.

Some of my own musings about the value of web search data for political analysis here and here.

Santorum's Mo

Rick Santorum seems to be the latest GOP candidate to gather spontaneous momentum ahead of the Iowa Caucus. He's running a close third in the latest round of Iowa polling, just behind Ron Paul and Mitt Romney. Considering Santorum's run last May, I wrote:

[Santorum's] thinking is philosophically indistinguishable from that of President Obama and most of the rest of the Democratic Party. It boils down to a belief that people should not be free to choose, that we are too stupid or immoral to decide what's best for ourselves, and that we need government to step in to save us. Democrats and Santorumites may have different priorities about how to use government and what particular choices they want the government to make on our behalf, but there is no principled difference between government commanding us to buy health insurance in order to promote universal health care and government proscribing contraception, abortion, or consensual homosexual sex. Either you are for a limited government exercising a finite set of enumerated powers or not, and it is clear to me on which side Santorum falls.

I've neither seen nor heard anything since to change my mind.

Web Search Volumes and the Iowa Caucus

For the last couple of years, I have been musing about the meaning of web searches as an indicator of affective attachment to individual politicians and causes. My first cut at the problem was the belief that web searches are indicative of support. (In fact, Sylvia Manzano and I have an article forthcoming in Political Communication that argues as much.)

Taking that at face value for the moment, this figure shows the weekly Google Insights index scores, based on web searches originating in Iowa during 2011, for the five front-running candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.
In these data, Ron Raul has developed a commanding lead. For the last week of 2011, the candidates' Insights scores are:

Ron Paul---100
Mitt Romney---30
Rick Perry---23
Rick Santorum---22
Newt Gingrich---21

Since the Insights scores are proportional, we can translate them into fractions of overall "support." Assuming that the other candidates in the Iowa race will get about 10% of the Caucus vote between them and that Google Insights scores are directly comparable to levels of electoral support (which seems like a crazy assumption to make, but I am rolling with it for now), these data indicate vote percentages of:

Ron Paul---45%
Mitt Romney---14%
Rick Perry---11%
Rick Santorum---10%
Newt Gingrich---10%

Transforming the Google Insights scores' transformation into percentages of support draws some sharp contrasts with conventional polling of "likely" Caucus goers. Public Policy Polling of North Carolina, which seems to have the freshest poll heading into tomorrow night's Iowa Caucus, reports:

The Republican caucus in Iowa is headed for a photo finish, with the three leading contenders all within two points of each other. Ron Paul is at 20%, Mitt Romney at 19%, and Rick Santorum at 18%. Rounding out the field are Newt Gingrich at 14%, Rick Perry at 10%, Michele Bachmann at 8%, Jon Huntsman at 4%, and Buddy Roemer at 2%.

Both the poll and the web search volumes (treated as support) put Paul and Romney in the first two slots, but the poll shows the two much closer together and shows them running evenly with Rick Santorum and with Gingrich and Perry trailing a bit more.

Looking at the poll numbers and the Google Insights scores side-by-side leads me to think that, at least in the context of elections, web searches may be more usefully thought of as indicators of "stimulation" (in the Rabinowitz and MacDonald sense) than of support. Stimulation, of course, may result in support when candidates and potential voters are on the same side of the status quo policy (so long as a candidate preserves some adequate acceptability), but it can also yield opposition when candidates and potential voters are on opposite sides of the status quo.

This directional voting interpretation makes some sense in the case of Ron Paul. His strong, libertarian-ish stands have won him intense support in some quarters of the Republican Party while engendering intense opposition from other parts of the Party. Likewise, many regard him as an unserious candidate, beyond a region of acceptability, and therefore shy away from supporting him despite a policy-based inclination to do so.

In any event, moving ahead, if Ron Paul outperforms the polls and wins Iowa by any sizeable margin, we will have one more bit of evidence indicating that web searches can be a useful leading indicator of political support for cases in which traditional polling is difficult or unavailable. If not, we will have an additional reason to rethink what web search volume means, perhaps along the lines suggested above.