It’s been a while since we tracked the election campaigns in social media, so we decided to do a couple quick measurements to see if anything had changed.

Unsurprisingly, Obama has maintained a consistent lead in mentions across the blogosphere since September 1, but his lead has widened considerably over the past couple weeks. Only two days (9/1 and 9/2) saw McCain gain a lead (and marginally at best) in mentions.

Political sentiment is primarily negative, given the general tone and subject matter of most political conversations. We looked at the sentiment for each candidate within their own politically-leaning blogs. McCain’s sentiment on right-leaning blogs was initially much less negative than Obama’s sentiment on left-leaning blogs. But over the past few weeks, the two have blended closer together, and swapped spikes and dips.

What was much more surprising, however, was that on blogs on the opposite sides of the aisle, Obama’s sentiment was much higher than McCain’s. In other words, it appears that Obama is portrayed in a much more favorable light within right-leaning blogs, than McCain is on left-leaning ones. This points to a couple possibilities. So perhaps the online Left is much more vitriolic against the other candidate than the Right. Or alternately, there are many more traditionally conservative bloggers who have become sympathetic to Obama.

(We’ve tagged approximately 500 blogs as “left-leaning”, and another 500 as “right-leaning.” Our sentiment algorithm works on a 1, 0, -1 scale (1 being positive, 0 neutral, -1 negative). For each day, we averaged the sentiment of each post on a blog with its respective politically-leaning tag.)

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