Barack Obama looks at this point in time to be heading for the White House as the next president of the United States, at least this is what our sources indicate. It is a bold statement, but we believe that the voice of the many is a good indicator when assumptions are to be made about the fall out of an election.

Since January of this year when we started our tracking project on the US election, Barack Obama has received more attention in the blogosphere than any of the other candidates. Hilary Clinton was ahead until mid February, since then Obama has been the most mentioned candidate.

The same relationship between Obama, Clinton and Mccain is also found in traditional news media online: Clinton dropped significantly once the primaries gave Obama the number of delegates needed to become the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Since then, Obama and Mccain follows a similar pattern, the only difference being that Obama is getting more attention than Mccain measured against the total number of times each of them are referred to online.

(Click on the images to enlarge)

And yes, "it's the economy, stupid", almost that is, in the wake of the war in Iraq and security related issues. Iraq appears to be the issue in the US election that is most linked to any of the two candidates, followed by security and the economy. And there are only marginal differences in how these three issues as linked too either of the two candidates. One could be tempted to believe that Mccains military merits would give more resonance in the debate on the Iraq war, but this does not seem to be the case. Now, these figures do not measure the real sentiment surrounding these issues. So when Obama and Iraq are more closely associated than Mccain and Iraq, though marginally so, it could also mean that the debate in the blogosphere is focusing on negative effects on the development in the relationship between Iraq and the US should Obama be elected president.

This year, all candidates have used the internet as a marketing channel to get their views across to US voters, much more so than in the past. Some commentators have even said that internet marketing campaigns are getting more attention from the candidates than television and newspaper campaigns this year. On the internet, messages are often made as brief videos where candidates quickly respond to daily events, Like in the much talked about "how many houses do you have Mccain" interview. Since a large number of these video postings are found on Youtube, we have also looked at the association between issues and candidates on this publishing platform, knowing that Youtube is favoured by young voters who are more likely to vote for Obama than Mccain.

As the following graph shows, associations on Youtube are strikingly different from those found in the blogosphere however, where Mccain is remarkably more linked to Iraq, security, and the economy than Obama, as one would expect. Education, trade immigration and healthcare on the other hand are more so linked to Obama.

The figures represented in both these graphs are from one specific day in August, and daily events can give dramatically different outputs depending on the issue.