For all of its personal attacks and policy discussion, the third and final presidential debate may well be remembered as the country’s introduction to Joe the Plumber, also known as Joe Wurzelbacher. In case you've been living in a complete media blackout, Joe is a contractor from Ohio who wants to buy his own plumbing company and asked some tough questions of Senator Barack Obama on the campaign trail. Joe also happens to be a registered Republican.
During the third and final presidential debate, John McCain repeatedly invoked Joe the Plumber as an American everyman in an effort to highlight how his opponent's tax policies would affect “regular” Americans. By the time it was all over, Joe had been mentioned more than 20 times throughout the debate.
The following day, McCain went so far as to declare Joe the Plumber the debate winner! And while this assertion may be difficult to verify among likely voters, we can use our Viral Reach Database to measure the viral video performance of both the debate itself and subsequent clips of Joe.
All told, we found more than 150 different debate video placements, which, in aggregate, received just under 3.7 million views. Given that each of these videos shows both candidates, and in the interest of simplicity, let's divide these views equally between the two candidates. So, score 1.85 million view for Obama, and another 1.85 million views for McCain.
We here at Visible Measures often say that the online video audience votes with its mouse, so we next investigated video clips related to Joe the Plumber. We identified more than 130 distinct placements that together collected almost 2.0 million views total, or 8% more than either McCain or Obama.
Remarkably enough -- and with one big viral video measurement assumption around dividing debate views equally between the two candidates! -- Joe the Plumber came out on top of the third presidential debate. Amazing. Somebody get this guy a campaign manager!
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.