As you’ve no doubt realized by now, we like maps, and of course we like people who also like cutting-edge, slightly puzzling internet maps. So who better than Chadwick Matlin and E. J. Kalafarski, founders of MapTheCandidates.com and hosts of a recent panel on “Political Cartography 2.0” at the 2008 Politics Online Conference to have a little chat about internet mapping:

- First of all, could you tell us a bit about Mapthecandidates.com: how did it come about? Are you planning to add new features for the general election?

MTC came about last summer from the realization that there was going to be massive amounts of data about presidential candidates available in the coming election, but no intuitive way of searching it. We wanted to provide a tool that could be useful in different ways to different demos: the “average joe” voter who might be wondering where their candidate is today, media analysts looking for trends in statistics, and political operatives trying to get a feel
for the campaign map.

A lot of usability testing went into finding the most intuitive ways of viewing and manipulating the map. We thought of the sidebars as the “axes” of a graph, starting with lists of the candidates and locations as widgets that users should immediately recognize. With the explosion of the amount of data, ways of filtering and restricting the data obviously became more crucial, such as the inclusion of the timeline, a suggestion from a colleague. Tying in articles and videos
came from our obvious love of new media, and we hope its been useful for people who can’t follow around their favorite candidate in person.

For the general election, we’re pursuing options for making MTC available for more than just the Presidential race. We’re envisioning a network of smaller MTC applications, maintained by regional Web sites and publications, creating a hierarchical database of data on local, state, and national races. The types of analysis that could come from such a detailed database could really be fascinating.

- You recently hosted a conference panel on “political cartography 2.0″. This is a brand new trend in digital politics, thanks in large part to mash-ups and new applications. Where do you see this trend going? Do you foresee broader implications for political and social communications, beyond campaign season?

We absolutely see this field expanding even after this election cycle is long over. One interesting statistic I learned recently is that Google estimates that 80% of data can be mapped in some way; there are huge amounts of data already collected that can be looked at in new ways we haven’t even tried yet. Maps are a tremendous tool because of their ubiquity; most users can recognize a map of their country, and thus immediately have a starting point for analysis of
the data mapped on it; it’s a generous learning curve you don’t get with other interfaces.

Moving forward, I think the toughest problem is going to be standardization of the data. Data comes in so many different formats (and sometimes, such as in emailed correspondence from campaigns, completely unformatted) that formatting it logically will become the bottleneck very quickly as the mapping technologies themselves jump forward.

- Last but not least, could you recommend to our readers a few sites (beside yours) showing interesting demos of political cartography?

The Electoral Map is a fantastic blog/round-up of the most interesting maps on the Internet that we read frequently, and its author, Patrick Ottenhoff, was a participant on our panel at POLC. The tools generated by the development team at NYTimes.com, really a powerhouse of map creation, are very interesting also.

Before republican and democrat voters from 24 States reach the voting booths on this Super Tuesday, we offer a brief state of the political webosphere round-up.

The progressive community online

In the final run-up before Super Tuesday, it seems the US progressive webosphere is trying to deal with all the polls, debates, campaign news and trails in the 20 or so States that will have a say today. As a result large media outlets such as USA Today or the Washington Post receive a lot of attention and interest from bloggers. One might suppose that where these media outlets have the expertise, money and manpower to cover all the issues at stake in an insightful and documented manner, bloggers don’t have a similar claim to exhaustiveness.
Tu put it in a nutshell, bloggers from the progressive community seem to react, comment and debate upon materials drawn from the ultimate common opinion ground: the Mass Media.

Obviously, websites (Dailykos, TPM, Huffington Post, etc.) within the progressive community that are more akin to participative media outlets than to individual blogs offer perspective and substance, in line with what mass media offer - and maybe with even more insight, see here for an interesting Op-Ed.

There are some interesting conversations about the whole primary process: the undecisive character of the democratic primaries caused by the proporitional rule and the part played by the superdelegates - of whom Hillary Clinton seems to have won more to her candidacy than Barack Obama has, although some say the winds might be changing.

The debate is not so much on who’s the best candidate of Clinton or Obama, it’s rather focused on who’s doing the best campaign. It seems the lack of fundamental policy differences between the two and their focus on style (hope, change, experience) over substance has led many in the webosphere, but not all (see here and there as well for examples of opinionated posts), to comment the campaign rather than plainly endorse a candidate.

The buzz is clearly mounting on Barack Obama’s campaign. Although opinion polls show the candidates neck in neck, many pundits say he could take over Hillary Clinton in some key States. As far as the Hispanic vote is concerned, a good number of media and social media sites believe the obstacle that stands in senator Obama’s way is not so much that his candidacy does not engage Hispanic voters but that he has yet to gain the widespread visibility that senator Clinton enjoys among this community - the Washington Post has offered a series of articles with respect thereof.

Hence, after having raised an impressive 32 million dollars in January, senator Obama’s campaign move to spend over 10 million dollars in advertisements seems like a smart move to raise awareness on his candidacy - see Obama’s SuperBowl ad on YouTube.

The webosphere is abuzz (here and there as well for instance) with the number of high-profile endorsements the Illinois senator is getting, both from superdelegates (the Kennedys) and from progressive movements or media (LA Times, MoveOn, LA Opinion). It should be noted that the political webosphere has put into emphasis those endorsements that may bridge the gap between Obama and the Hispanic community, notably in California.

Overall, Barack Obama’s candidacy seems to be gaining momentum and could thus emerge in a leading position after all the Super Tuesday States have had their say - not necessarily in terms of number of delegates, but with respect to his chances in the race with favorably-looking primaries upcoming in February. With respect to large States such as California, New York and Illinois, Barack Obama’s share of voice is often double that of Hillary Clinton in the US progressive webosphere. Once more, these figures should not be construed as opinion polls. However, they both reveal and exagerate trends that have always been both hard to factor in traditional opinion polls and very important in deciding the outcome of an election.

The following chart from Pollster.com clearly shows the pendulum shifting from Clinton to Obama in opinion polls (with black dots representing the latest polls).

The conservative community online

To an external observer, a substantial part of the conservative online community forms a hunting party going after mild republicans, after those whose credentials are not conservative enough. You already see where this is going. Unlike the progressive webosphere, there’s a clear divide between those who support Mitt Romney and those who are behind John McCain - with the former clearly holding the most visible online ground.

There’s a lot of media coverage for the acrimonious battle going on between the two democrat candidates, yet it’s nothing compared to what is going on between McCain and conservative pundits. Influential websites in this community have unleashed hell against the not-so-conservative-to-them senator from Arizona (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.)

Conversely, those supporting McCain (occupying a smaller portion of the territory than their opponents) have gone negative on Romney (see here for instance). There are some who wonder what the witch hunt is all about, seeing McCain as a bona fide conservative - but they stand in the middle of the progressive community.

What does the debate tell us about Super Today? Well, the “true conservative” label has been denied to John McCain by authoritative websites such as Michelle Malkin. As a result, Mitt Romney’s edge on the battleground seems to be in default, or to say it in the words often used by bloggers and media alike, it rests upon his electable character.

Notwithstanding the anti-McCain wave in the webosphere, he seems to remain way ahead in the polls.  Does it mean that the most active online voices are not representative of the larger conservative base? Or does it mean that pollsters haven’t factored in the aversion towards McCain’s candidacy. We’ll soon have an answer to these questions.

Now to the New Hampshire primaries. As for Iowa, we offer a brief analysis of each candidate’s voice share in the US political webosphere with respect to their standing in New Hampshire.

We have finetuned our metrics in order to exclude from Hillary Clinton’s voice share that of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, whose voice share remains substantial in the debate. Our previous analysis of the Iowa caucuses showed the voice shares of the Republican candidates pretty much matched the actual results. The discrepancy between the leading voice share (H. Clinton) and the ballot winner (B. Obama) for the Democrats can be explained by the aforementioned methodological glitch.

Now, the online buzz matches the polls. On the liberal side, Obama is way ahead of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. On the conservative side, the online trends are not as conspicuous as the polls. John McCain is leading by a narrow margin, with Romney and Huckabee closely following.

The political webosphere gives the following orders on each side:

Republicans:

1. McCain
2. Romney
3. Huckabee
   

Democrats:

1. Obama
2. Clinton
3. Edwards

For the french version of this post, see here.

With every poll showing the top-tier candidates neck and neck in Iowa, it is also interesting to glimpse into the web’s crystal ball. Following the predictions of Hitwise, let us consider what the US political web is saying about the Iowa caucus, with one research objective in mind: to analyze, and perhaps confirm –as we did during the last French presidential election- the correlation between each candidate’s “share of voice” on the web, opinion polls, and ballot results.

Prior to unveiling the numbers, let us first go over the methodology. We have measured the number of quotes and mentions of each candidate with respect to mentions of the Iowa Caucus against our dataset of the 2000 main sites and blogs of the US political web. To be fair, those quotes and references are not qualified, in terms of positive or negative language; this is essentially a quantitative measure of the level of buzz on a select sample of the most politically active and influential sites and blogs on the US web.

Generally speaking, the web is highly reactive to news coverage and events, and thus acts as an amplifier, often yielding previous insights. When focusing exclusively on the chatter over the past 10 days, Hillary Clinton seems to dominate the Democratic side of our dataset of sites, with 31% of share of voice, closely followed by Barack Obama (29%) and John Edwards at 26%.

When looking at Edwards’ share of voice stats over the past 2 months, one can only notice his impressive online surge, apparently confirmed by recent investments in additional servers by the campaign (http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/12/a_real_edwards_surge.php), albeit not sufficient to leap ahead of the top two Democratic contenders. Conversely, Hillary Clinton seems to have lost some virtual ground since November, considering she once culminated at 42% of share of voice between November 10 and November 19.

On the Republican side of things, the matter isn’t straightforward either. In the last 10 days, the Republican political webosphere (all the Republican sites in our 2,000 sites dataset) has confirmed the “Huckaboom” by putting him at the top of the charts with a 26% share of voice. Mitt Romney follows with a solid 24% while John McCain and Fred Thompson are lagging behind, respectively with a 16% and a 13% share – the latters’ voice shares being slightly better than their standings in the Iowa polls. Again, if we take a look at the trends over the last 3 months, we’ll notice that Huckabee rose over his competitors at the beginning of December, both online and in the polls. Giulani’s steady decline in the polls in the last months compares with his diminishing share of voice among the Republican online community.

To sum it up, here is the share of voice for each one of the leading candidates:

Republicans

Mike Huckabee 26%
Mitt Romney 24%

John McCain 16%
Fred Thompson 13%

Democrats

Hillary Clinton 31%
Barack Obama 29%
John Edwards 26%

Now, let us wait for the first actual results.