Interesting profile from politicalmojo now that the primary race is really on. Some thoughts:

1.  John Edwards consistently trails the two leaders from a sentiment point of view.
2. All candidates drop after a primary, indicating that advocates are more active before the primary and slack off afterwards.
3. Obama consistently scores top: his supporters are most active and most enthusiastic.

PoliticalMojo woke up today wondering how the election would differ if the series of wars of independence in the 18th and 19th centuries had gone another way.Apart from the obvious – there would be no president (and no election), no separation of powers, and the USA would be the Commonwealth States of America (CSA) – the USA might look more like Canada, including some of its citizens speaking French and seeking independence (or at least better food).Presidential candidates, all of whom have records of distinction and achievement, may well have already been honored by HM The Queen, leading to the following possibilities:

1. Dame Hillary Clinton (for services to healthcare);
2. Sir Barack Obama (for services to speech writing);
3. Sir John Edwards, QC;
4. Mr Rudy Guiliani (not quiet or polite enough: did not sit still long enough to receive his award);
5. Lord Huckabee of Arkansas;
6. Rt. Hon. Lord McCain of Sunbelt, VC, DSO, MC.;
7. His Holiness Mitt Romney.

As for the outgoing guy, GW Bush would be getting ready for his hereditary peerage to become Lord Bush (although he kind of already has that through his pa).

We have now reduced the list of viable political candidates on politicalmojo.com to seven (three democrats, four republicans) as the primary season unfolds. We decided not to track Mr Permanent Maybe (Michael Bloomberg).

Frequent visitors to politicalmojo, celebrity trendmojo and baseball trendmojo will notice that our ratings have changed.

Typically, our new scoring algorithms are more realistic (pessimistic?) than our previous model so you will see scores change dramatically from the beginning of July.

Do not be alarmed: our revised rating and sampling system provides a significant upgrade to better track the perception of people and issues in the public eye. Please comment on this blog or contact us by email if you have any questions.

Interested in getting great TrendMojo content on your own homepage? Take a look at our widgets so you can pull graphs of popular sentiment about key candidates. Check this out at TrendMojo Widget Central.

Recent news of the size of democratic fund raising is sure to change the campaign landscape. Unfortunately, its likely that quantity of cash is not likely to be reflected in the quality of campaigning. All this money signifies is that the cost of admission to the electoral race has gone up. More money will be spent, and no candidate will be the better for it.

The politicalmojo experiment is already yielding results. Jason comments that Tommy Thompson has now announced his official candidacy, yet we were tracking very positive posts on PMJ for the past 30 days. Does this show how sophisticated candidates are manipulating the web to prime the pump before announcements? Or does it reveal how groundswell of interest can predict events in the campaign? What do you think?

Either way, politicalmojo seems to be reaching some kind of insight into campaign developments. Excellent. 

Politicalmojo tracks a sample of blog postings for the main Republican and Democratic candidates for the US Presidential election next year. They also analyze these postings and provide a summary “positive-negative” indicator on each candidate based on the text people use in their blogs. It’s cool.

The top three are displayed based on recent “positiveness” ratings: Barack Obama just made this list again. Check out the site.

Its amazing how videos of candidates on YouTube have caught the imagination of US citizens. Seeing somebody sleeping or fixing their hair is a classic example of how important the trivialities of celebrity have become. We may condemn such distractions, but dare not doubt their impact on voters.

The views of users, and User Generated Content (UGC) that stems from these views, is increasingly important. We at politicalmojo have started with several analytics which track attitudes underlying the chatter. Please take a look and let us know what else we should be tracking. Best wishes from PMJ.

We at politicalmojo.com have been working on our new site for a while. We are still working on it, but decided to go live this week with a rolling launch…

As data accumulates for us on the main US Presidential candidates, we will start by tracking the attitudes of bloggers and chat media to the main candidates. The positive buzz about candidates will be tracked by us as their campaigns proceed and we hope to analyze this over time. We welcome your comments. Take a look now at www.politicalmojo.com.