One of the more interesting observations about this election campaign has been the effect of having the rugby world cup on the political process and therefore on our political blog stats.
Unlike 2008, we didn’t see a steady rise over the whole year leading up to the campaign accelerating in the final months. What we saw was this chart (StatCounter weekly pageviews).
The overall trend was slowly rising through most of the year. But at week 38 we had the opening of the world cup causing a quite pronounced drop. I’d also argue based on 2008 that the quiesence in weeks 31-37 wasn’t normal either. After week 38 we started to see the expected election time rapid rise which was abruptly terminated in week 42 when the semifinals and final were on. That was followed by normal election level bouncing during the debates (there are always big spikes after the debates), election manouvering, and the election itself.
The rugby world cup was extremely disruptive on the political process in this election – at least from we could see during the campaign. The whole of the political discussion was crammed in between and after the games.
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