New Harris poll on the State of the Union; the blogosphere helps give context
A new Harris Interactive poll released to be released later today in advance of next week’s State of the Union address reveals that four out of five Americans believe the state of the country is either fair or poor. Broken down by party affiliation, 61% of Republicans believe the state of the union is fair/poor, 95% of Democrats, and 87% of Independents.
The poll also asks about seven specific issues. Unsurprisingly, given recent economic events, “strengthening the economy” suffered the largest drop from last year’s poll. In 2007, 36% of the respondents said strengthening the economy was going well; this year it’s down to 16%. The only increase was in sentiment about the state of the Iraq war. Last year 19% said the Iraq war was going well; this year it’s up to 26%.
In light of this new poll, I thought it might be interesting to see which issues directly tied to presidential candidates are being most discussed online, broken out by Left and Right.
We began tracking several major issues, and created search agents wherein key terms around those issues be mentioned within a certain number of words of any of the major presidential candidate’s name (both Democratic and Republican). This is to ensure as much as possible that each topic is being discussed in direct relation to the presidential race. We have previously identified hundreds of blogs as “left-leaning”, and likewise for “right-leaning”. We ran these search agents through both blog networks, and the resulting share-of-voice is displayed below.
Iraq-related conversation of course dominates the Left, but the biggest surprise is that Immigration issues were discussed significantly more often on the Right than Iraq (Immigration policy was not included in the Harris poll). In the past when we’ve surveyed these issues we had taken all online sources–blogs, message boards, and news–together; and had found that Immigration always came in a distant second to Iraq. We always assumed that the Right talks about Immigration more than the Left, but it was surprising to see that it was actually the dominant topic.
It was also a bit surprising to find that both gay issues and general conversations about the economy were almost equally distributed on the Left and Right. 
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