Google News Democratic Poll for 8/6/2003

		This Week (8/6)			Last Week (7/30)
1	Bob Graham	4790	17.9%	+0.0	2	5010	17.9%
2	Howard Dean	4460	16.7%	-0.3	3	4760	17.0%
3	John Kerry	4420	16.6%	-1.8	1	5130	18.4%
4	Dick Gephardt	2950	11.0%	+2.0	6	2520	9.0%
5	John Edwards	2850	10.7%	+0.4	4	2860	10.2%
6	Joe Lieberman	2760	10.3%	+0.2	5	2840	10.2%
7	Dennis Kucinich	1950	7.3%	-0.8	7	2290	8.2%
8	Al Sharpton	1560	5.8%	+0.1	8	1600	5.7%
9	Carol Moseley Braun	959	3.6%	+0.3	9	922	3.3%

This has been an unusual week. Bob Graham is #1, but only because the media share of Kerry and Dean dropped. Kerry's drop may be because the media attention is turning away from the Niger story and Kerry had been pretty omnipresent on that issue. What is perhaps surprising is that Dean didn't improve considering his trifecta appearance on the covers of TIME, Newsweek and USN&WR.

I did some analysis of the actual news stories presented by Google and I think I see one big flaw in the metric I am using: it puts greater emphasis on wire stories at the expense of weekly magazine stories. Consider that an AP story may appear 100  times in the poll because it is re-produced on the web pages of local news organizations while stories like this week's TIME and Newsweek profiles may only appear in a couple of places, despite the fact that TIME and Newsweek provide greater media exposure than pretty much any wire report.

There isn't much I can do to compensate for this. Ultimately, however, the TIME and Newsweek coverage should produce a secondary effect of increased wire reports on Howard Dean. Not just because more will be generated but also because more local news sources will re-produce those stories now that Dean has become a major player. So, I think the impact of these news stories will eventually boost Dean's media share even higher.

Dick Gephardt apparently had a pretty good week. Maybe the coverage of the Teamsters endorsement helped him out. Kucinich continues his slide back into the third tier just as he was starting to get some attention. Everyone else pretty much coasted.

Note: starting next week I am going to move the poll to Friday instead of Wednesday. I originally did it on Wednesday to coincide with the Cattle Call over on the Daily KOS. But I've decided that this poll should more closely match the news cycle, which traditionally ends on Friday. I would have done it this week but I am going on vacation today and won't be back until Sunday.

(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.)