BlackTerrel
04-11-2010, 10:29 PM
It's a rainy day in Northern California and I have some free time. With all the speculation about online polls, and telephone polls and straw polls I decided to conduct one of my own.
Facebook recently passed 450 million monthly actives. Meaning 450 million unique people logged onto Facebook in the past month. I don't know the exact numbers but huge percentages of Americans are currently on the site, especially younger people. I recently read that something like 2/3 of Americans under the age of 35 are on Facebook.
So seeing which politicians have the most support on Facebook seemed as reliable a poll as any. Obviously there are many flaws - skews younger, not everyone is online, it is self selecting so not everyone wants to post their political views etc... All that said all polls have their flaws and given the sheer numbers has a much larger sample size than any poll I have ever seen. Here are the top GOP candidates:
Sarah Palin 1,525,867 fans
Mitt Romney 281,493 fans
Mike Huckabee 211,519 fans
Ron Paul 192,001 fans
Newt Gingrich 45,205 fans
Tim Pawlenty 37,150 fans
I think this is pretty close to how I see it. Palin definitely has the largest number of fans. One thing I will say about both her and Huckabee is that in addition to having a lot of fans they have very little appeal among middle of the road type people - meaning people will actively vote against them. That is a problem I do not see for Paul and Romney. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change as 2012 comes closer.
As an aside if we look at the last two presidential nominees:
Barack Obama 8,040,373 fans
John McCain 564,879 fans
Facebook recently passed 450 million monthly actives. Meaning 450 million unique people logged onto Facebook in the past month. I don't know the exact numbers but huge percentages of Americans are currently on the site, especially younger people. I recently read that something like 2/3 of Americans under the age of 35 are on Facebook.
So seeing which politicians have the most support on Facebook seemed as reliable a poll as any. Obviously there are many flaws - skews younger, not everyone is online, it is self selecting so not everyone wants to post their political views etc... All that said all polls have their flaws and given the sheer numbers has a much larger sample size than any poll I have ever seen. Here are the top GOP candidates:
Sarah Palin 1,525,867 fans
Mitt Romney 281,493 fans
Mike Huckabee 211,519 fans
Ron Paul 192,001 fans
Newt Gingrich 45,205 fans
Tim Pawlenty 37,150 fans
I think this is pretty close to how I see it. Palin definitely has the largest number of fans. One thing I will say about both her and Huckabee is that in addition to having a lot of fans they have very little appeal among middle of the road type people - meaning people will actively vote against them. That is a problem I do not see for Paul and Romney. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change as 2012 comes closer.
As an aside if we look at the last two presidential nominees:
Barack Obama 8,040,373 fans
John McCain 564,879 fans