Oddsmaking

Joshua Levy had to say this last time around about search patterns and elections :

Amidst all of the head-scratching — or self-flagellating, as I like to call it — following pollsters’ erroneous predictions in New Hampshire is a sign that the web may have had it right all along.

Yahoo! has released some Buzz data that shows that Hillary Clinton’s “Buzz Score” — “the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read” — went up and up in the runup to the New Hampshire primary. At the same time, Barack Obama’s score spiked downward.

In addition, the fine folks at Yahoo! report that on the day of the New Hampshire primary Clinton’s Buzz Score among New Hampshire women spiked on primary day. (It’s scary that they know this information so precisely).

Obama originally led in searches among voters age 45 and older, but by primary day Clinton had a 15% lead over Obama.

If Yahoo's Election08 Political Dashboard is any indication, as of 8:28am EST, the winners will be :

• Barack Obama : His buzz track has gone up 14.2% for a 67% of all political searches.
• John McCain : By a razor thin margin given his searches have declined almost 20% while Romney's are up almost 8%.