KMM asked me to write about the NH Primaries. For those who don't know, I've posted about politics in this blog before. We kind of fell silent on the subject because some research we were doing got turned onto the current wave of presidential hopefuls and I didn't want to pollute the waters by posting research results here thus influencing what we were researching. I'm very careful about influencing the outcome of a study.
In this case, we were doing a study of how politicians interact with their blogging audience. We were doing this study across several industries and politics was handy (especially here in NH) so why not go for it.
I presented the results of this research at the recent SNCR Symposium in Boston. Here's a nutshell of our findings.
The study dealt with who's leading conversations versus who's being lead by a conversation. This image shows that Senator McCain (green) is strongly leading his conversation rather than letting people lead him around. As he often says from his podium, he's telling it the way he sees it. Governor Romney (red) is very much letting others dictate his conversation. The yellow is Senator Clinton, who is also letting others lead her conversation rather than leading it herself.
Finally there's Senator Edwards (blue). He's not as strongly leading his conversation as is Senator McCain and he's still out there doing it.
Several people at the SNCR Symposium thought I was predicting election outcomes again. Really, I wasn't. Not in the usual sense. This chart (we did one for all the candidates we recognized as candidates, only showed these four in our presentation) doesn't show who'll win so much as it shows what makes a winner in this election cycle.
Do people want someone who can lead them? They'll vote for Senator's McCain and Edwards (only going by what is shown on this chart. Senator Obama and Governor Huckabee aren't shown. We're only considering what's shown on this chart). Do people want someone whom they can lead? They'll go with Governor Romney or Senator Clinton.
From the psycho-social standpoint it really doesn't matter who or what party, it only matters whether the majority of Americans want someone they believe can lead them versus wanting someone they believe they can easily influence to do what they want.
What kind of leader would you choose?
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