Can search results, online advertising, likes and follows predict an election?

The polls say it is a close race, but what does Google say? Or Facebook? Or Twitter? Can you use these (in some ways) more populist tools to learn anything about voter sentiment?

MediaBistro highlighted a study from StateTech magazine that highlighted five races — the gubernatorial races for Louisiana, California, Ohio and Texas, and the Chicago mayoral race — where the winners had more Twitter followers than their opponents. The graphic then went on to point out that President Barack Obama, as of Oct. 18, had more Twitter and Facebook followers than Mitt Romney. That’s not particularly surprising, given that President Obama was a visible early adopter when it came to campaign social media.

So President Obama has more clout on social media — also, literally, more Klout with a score of 99 to Romney’s 92 — but there are other techy metrics to muse about. Google searches of “Obama” turned up customized search links about the president when users then searched for “Iran,” “Medicare” and “gay marriage.” Meanwhile searches for “Romney” did not turn up related links — a strange quirk of Google’s algorithms.

Larry Kim, a marketer at WordStream, wrote that he suspects that more people are looking up Obama’s stance more often, which he said could be a measure of how engaged Web users are with the Obama campaign. In fact, Kim said that online engagement metrics indicate Obama will win “by a landslide,” based on a read of Web sentiment and the pure amount of money both campaigns have spent on online advertising.