Sunday, February 5, 2012

Obama supporters pick Patriots, GOPers go for Giants?

Super Bowl Sunday offers no respite from partisan bickering in this presidential election year.

A Silicon Valley startup found a strong overlap between how people feel about who will win today's big game and who they'd like to see win the presidential election in the fall.

Mountain View-based Saygent conducted a survey asking 205 people for their Super Bowl predictions and then did a bit of data crunching using its voice response and analysis platform. Saygent's algorithm looked at the way people talked about the teams and the game ("by analyzing the way people talk about the game we can infer who is actually knowledgeable and who is taking a stab in the dark," the company says).

Saygent then filtered out "people with very low trust or a strong bias" to come up with a prediction from its "trusted crowd" of 90. The result? the New England Patriots by three points.

That's almost identical to the official line, which had the Pats by 2.5 points at last check, and is--frankly--not that interesting.

But Saygent, in what it admits is not an exact science, also asked people in the same survey who they planned to vote for for president. When it took a look at those political preferences, it revealed quite a rift:

No comments:

Post a Comment