Will Barack Obama and Ron Paul win in Iowa?

If traffic to a candidate’s web site is any indication of popularity in the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama and Ron Paul will be the winners after the votes are tallied this evening.

Web site traffic statistics provided by Alexa show Obama with a clear lead in the Democratic contest over second-place finisher Hillary Clinton.

John Edwards lands in third place with Joe Biden taking a distant fourth and Christopher Dodd finishing fifth. Bill Richardson’s doesn’t even break the top 100,000 websites, so there is little data on Alexa about their traffic trends.

On the Republican side, congressman and internet fundraising star Ron Paul’s web site has a clear lead over the rest of the field with Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee finishing second followed by former Massachusettes Governor Mitt Romney and U.S. Senator John McCain. Traffic for actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson took a nosedive at the end of December, when he was ahead of both Romney and McCain.

Of course, using web traffic as a polling tool is completely unscientific, but as the population ages and more and more internet users become voters, analysis of web traffic trends may become another tool used to predict the outcome of elections in the future. We’ll find out the real results once the caucuses are finished this evening and see how good a predictor traffic to a web site is in gauging voter popularity.

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