The U.S. election is heating up, and we’re not just talking about the humidity in Tampa. Since April 2011, when Romney officially entered the race, close to 600,000 videos mentioning Obama or Romney have been uploaded to YouTube, and these videos account for close to 2 billion views.

Topping the list of these videos is baracksdubs’ “Barack Obama Singing Call Me Maybe,” which has racked up over 24 million views in just a few months.



Political pop song parodies are on the rise in general. In the past month, this Gotye parody titled, “Obama That I Used to Know” and a more humorous One Direction parody about Romney have both crossed the million view mark and hit the YouTube Trending Videos list.

It’s not just light-hearted fare that have people tuning in. Since the primaries began, there have been more than 100 million views of official presidential candidate videos on YouTube.

In fact, in just the last 30 days, people have spent more than 20 cumulative years watching official videos of Obama and Romney (that’s two years longer than Justin Bieber has been alive).

And new uploads from Obama and Romney’s official YouTube channels are gaining traction quickly, with videos receiving hundreds of thousands of views within a few days of upload. The latest video on Obama for America’s YouTube channel has received over 217,000 views in just 24 hours. And since Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, he has seen a surge in both channel subscribers (a 300% increase since the Ryan announcement) and views. Their first video together, “America’s Comeback Team” has racked up over 1.1 million views in two weeks and is the second most-viewed video on the Romney channel:



We’ll be tracking the political trends on YouTube until Election Day. To keep your finger on the pulse of political video, and to watch up-to-the-minute live and on-demand coverage from the campaign trail, visit the YouTube Elections Hub at www.youtube.com/politics or follow YouTube Politics here.