Do you want to monitor President Barack Obama’s 2012 election chances? Polls are always worth following (ideological blogs will tout polls that show their candidate in a good light and almost always question the methodology of ones that don’t, then tout the same company’s poll when it shows their candidate in a good light). But here is another way: monitor the sale of T-shirts. We got this in the email and it is worth running in full:
As we gear for election 2012 – given Obama’s recent announcement – citizen engagement starts to rev up in the polls and on T-shirts.
As we saw four years ago (and four years before that), the T-shirt economy has a history of predicting presidential winners.
In 2008, Obama was a consistent fan favorite on CafePress.com, the go-to site for customizable merchandise (think “winning” Sheen gear and “free the cobra” tees), surpassing sales of McCain-related items by more than 30 percent in the weeks leading up to the election.
This week, voters are already showing their support – and disapproval – for Obama’s reelection campaign, with more than 14,000 Obama 2012 product designs added in the past day alone. Here are some additional stats about the products designed by the CafePress user community:
· Pro vs. Antio 777,000 pro-Obama T-shirts available
o 453,000 anti-Obama T-shirts available
· As of Monday, the top three search terms on CafePress were (in order):
1. Obama
2. Autism
3. Anti-Obama
As momentum builds for another interesting “T-shirt election,” please keep CafePress top of mind for data to support campaign trends.
There are lots of designs (go to the site to see them all) but here’s an example of a pro and anti Obama shirt:
PRO:
ANTI:
FOOTNOTE: I’ve long believed in and been fascinatied by these other indicators of political outcomes. For instance, some insist the World Series can predict an election. It is also worth watching how kids vote in the Scholastic poll (a VERY good indicator). Each election year I also spend hours seeing what psychics say, but many of them are way offbase (I mean, Michael Jackson never DID solve the Middle East crisis). T-shirt sales are a GOOD indicator…plus they’re fun.
(Also note that this post was not in exchange for any t-shirt or the result of someone clamoring for us to to it on TMV. It was a simple email that was so good and fascinating it was worth posting on TMV as a post).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.