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Yahoo already has a 2008 election site with deep content on the candidates and issues. But digging through all that content to find relevant stats comparing the candidates can take awhile.This afternoon the Elections team launched a new part of the site, called which contains basic polling and funding stats for each candidate in one easy to read screen.Each candidate is listed, Democrats on the left and Republicans on the right. Next to each candidate’s picture are four basic stats:

1. recent polling results, based on aggregated poll averages from Real Clear Politics
2. “buzz” which shows the relative popularity based solely on Yahoo search queries
3. prediction market, which shows the likelihood of a candidate to win based on real world, real money bets placed at Intrade, an Irish company
4. total money raised for each candidate

Comparing the basic stats is fascinating. Ron Paul, for example, is only polling 4% versus other Republican candidates, but he has a whopping 37% relative to other candidates in searches. The prediction markets, though, are probably the most accurate data when it comes to predicting the actual winner of each primary. Hillary Clinton shows a current 61.3% likelihood of winning, even though she is only polling at 43%. When it comes to predictions, I’ll be watching the people betting real money vs. poll results.

Users can also click and see the data on a state-by-state basis, and see other demographic data. Click on any candidate and a pop up window appears with more detailed information (see screen shot below).

Tags: dashboard, yahoo

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.