Google News Democratic Poll for 6/18/2003

		This Week (6/18)			Last Week (6/11)
1	John Kerry	1920	15.6%	-0.6	1	2490	16.1%
1	John Edwards	1920	15.6%	+2.4	5	2030	13.2%
3	Bob Graham	1910	15.5%	+0.7	2	2280	14.8%
4	Joe Lieberman	1620	13.1%	-0.7	4	2130	13.8%
5	Howard Dean	1580	12.8%	-1.1	3	2140	13.9%
6	Dick Gephardt	1310	10.6%	-0.6	6	1740	11.3%
7	Dennis Kucinich	942	7.6%	-0.3	7	1220	7.9%
8	Al Sharpton	701	5.7%	+0.1	8	860	5.6%
9	Carol Moseley Braun	423	3.4%	-0.1	9	423	3.5%

Everybody's absolute numbers are down this week indicating decreased media attention on the campaign. John Edwards barrels from fifth to tie with Kerry for the lead with +2.4 increase in percentage of news reports. I have no idea why his numbers jumped so much. Did I miss something in the news? Howard Dean, by these numbers, had a bad week as he dropped to fifth place with a -1.1 drop in percentage of news reports. This is odd considering the increased coverage he has been getting in the TV news broadcasts. Maybe google news doesn't cover this as well? I wonder if they include transcripts in their system. (Methodology: All numbers are taken from the hit counts when searching on the Google News Service for news stories containing each candidate's name. Click on each name to rerun the search. You will likely get different results as the numbers are constantly changing. I make absolutely no claim that these numbers have any real meaning.)