The forthcoming US Elections have dominated the news for the last few months and that trend looks set to continue throughout 2008.

With the mainstream media beginning to recognise the importance of social media to the candidates involved, we decided to analyse the front-page stories from the 2008 U.S Elections category to find out what the results would be if the US elections were held on Digg.

We excluded some stories from the results, however, all the original data we collected is available to download in a spreadsheet here. So, if you disagree with our interpretation of the data then please feel free to download the spreadsheet and conduct your own analysis.

About the results

• We were primarily interested in the results for the individual candidates, so stories in the 2008 U.S Elections category that weren’t about a particular candidate were excluded from the results.
• Only stories that reached the front-page of the 2008 US Elections category were included. We finished collecting the results on January 11th and it took around a week to collect the data, so we may have missed some of the stories with lower numbers of votes. You can use the spreadsheet to check the figures are still correct or update them yourself.
• While some of the headlines of the article were about a particular candidate, often the article itself was not only about that candidate (voting outcomes etc.), so, we went by the content of the article rather than the headline on Digg.
• Some of the articles were about a candidate who is not running in the election so those results were excluded (George W. Bush, Stephen Colbert etc..)
• Articles about a candidate’s exclusion from a debate by the media were not included in the results as we considered them to be more about the media than the candidate (Mike Gravel, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich). Also, stories about Ron Paul supporters were not included as we felt these articles were about the supporters rather than the candidate.
• The topic of the article and whether we felt the article was positive, neutral or negative towards a particular candidate was based on us reading the article, and is obviously subjective.You might feel that our analysis of each article is incorrect, so please feel free to change the data to reflect your own opinions. We encourage you to check the articles for yourself using the data in the spreadsheet.

• Some pages were unavailable to view when we looked at the articles, so these results were not included in the final analysis. More information on what articles were unavailable are included in the spreadsheet.

If you do decide to use the data we’ve collected then it would be great if you could leave a comment with a link back to your article. This way we can keep track of what different sites each made of the data. We’ll update this article and provide a link to your own analysis.

This was all manually done, so there may very well be some mistakes or things that we missed, but no attempt was made to deliberately mislead or manipulate the data for a particular candidate or party in anyway.

Here are the results (click picture to enlarge):

Average No. of Diggs Per Candidate

Total No, of Comments Per Candidate

Total No. of Positive/Neutral/Negative Articles Per Candidate

Total No. of Diggs Per Party

Total No. of Positive/ Neutral/ Negative Stories Per Party

Total Number of Comments Per Party