Measuring the U.S. Election without Counting Votes

PRWeek posted about one of Dow Jones Insight's observations last week about how George Bush has dropped out of the news hole during the final stages of the 2008 election campaign.

It was one of the many things we wrote about on Dow Jones Insight: Election Pulse blog, which was one practical use of media measurement.

We've devoted a significant effort over the past several months to measuring McCain and Obama campaigns via the footprint they've left on the mainstream and social media.

Of late we looked at the breakdown by battleground states to see if the press was covering the candidates in step with what the polls show. (In general the color of the state does not seem to be an indicator of the volume of coverage of a candidate.)

Another thing we did was a recurring "Issue Tracker" analysis to see which issues were sticking to which candidate as the months ticked by. (September was strong for McCain as he took over coverage of most of the 25 top issues we were tracking. He then lost that lead a bit at a time to Obama in October.)

Also of note. We caught the eye of the folks at XM Radio's POTUS '08 and were a recurring guest on the Thursday afternoon show.

All in all, a fun project. But it's kinda nice it's Election Day. One more summary post coming in a week.