Google News Democratic Primary Poll for 9/25/2003

		This Week (9/25)			Last Week (9/19)
1	Howard Dean	6810	17.9%	-3.2	1	7950	21.1%
2	John Kerry	5760	15.1%	-0.8	2	6020	16.0%
3	John Edwards	4300	11.3%	+0.6	4	4020	10.7%
4	Wesley Clark	4160	10.9%	+3.7	7	2710	7.2%
5	Dick Gephardt	4020	10.6%	-0.4	3	4140	11.0%
6	Joe Lieberman	3620	9.5%	+0.7	6	3330	8.8%
7	Bob Graham	3390	8.9%	-0.3	5	3480	9.2%
8	Dennis Kucinich	2620	6.9%	+0.0	8	2590	6.9%
9	Al Sharpton	1930	5.1%	-0.3	9	2020	5.4%
10	Carol Moseley Braun	1480	3.9%	+0.0	10	1460	3.9%

I think it's safe to say that Dean is finally feeling the media pinch of the Clark entry into the campaign. Nearly all of Clark's rise this week was taken out of Dean's share. This is not surprising considering the amount of coverage Clark's candidacy has gotten and his immediate shooting to the top of several national polls. Clark is most certainly the media darling of the moment. So far I think that Clark has hurt the other candidates more than Dean in the traditional polling. But his increasing dominance of the media coverage could eventually eat into Dean's poll numbers as well.

(Note on methodology: While Clark has been the #1 story these last two weeks his share is still little more than half of that as Dean? Why? Because the Google News Poll is a measure of share of all stories returned by the Google News web archive. This archive goes back several weeks. A spike in coverage over a single week is flattened out by the overall volume of stories over the past month. Thus, while Clark has been huge these past two weeks, his overall numbers for the past month still trail Dean's. This will probably change in the next couple of weeks as old Dean spikes fall off the end. I fully expect Clark and Dean to be battling out for #1 before to long).

The rest of the candidates haven't really moved all that much so I don't really have anything to say about them.

The following is a chart of the Google News Media Share over the last few months.

(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 get different results as the numbers are constantly changing. I make absolutely no claim that these numbers have any real meaning.)