Google News Democratic Primary Poll for 9/5/2003

		This Week (9/5)			Last Week (8/29)
1	Howard Dean	4490	18.9%	-0.5	1	4250	19.4%
2	John Kerry	4420	18.6%	-0.5	2	4190	19.1%
3	Dick Gephardt	2730	11.5%	-0.5	3	2640	12.0%
4	John Edwards	2480	10.4%	-0.6	4	2430	11.1%
5	Joe Lieberman	2280	9.6%	-0.9	5	2300	10.5%
6	Dennis Kucinich	2180	9.2%	+2.0	7	1570	7.2%
7	Bob Graham	1920	8.1%	-1.6	6	2130	9.7%
8	Al Sharpton	1520	6.4%	+0.6	8	1270	5.8%
9	Carol Moseley Braun	1080	4.5%	+1.1	9	763	3.5%
10	Wesley Clark	676	2.8%	+1.0	10	405	1.8%

The top ranks remain essentially stagnant from last week. Which means that Kerry's campaign rollout is not producing any real impact on media coverage. Furthermore, every report on his rollout includes a mention of how he has had to do do this due to the surprising front-runner Howard Dean.

Surprisingly enough, this appears to be the week of the also-rans, as all the lower tier candidates saw their shares increase, especially so in the case of Kucinich. Why he has gotten such a jump I haven't a clue.

Bob Graham continues his drastic plunge of the last few weeks. One month ago he was at 17.9%. Now he is at 8.1%. I think this indicates that the establishment media has decided that he is no longer a serious candidate and have written him off.

I've been doing this poll for about three months now. So I decided to go back and generate a chart to show how the various candidates have progressed.

The battle for media share has pretty much all been about Dean and Kerry for the last three months. It will be interesting to see if any of the other candidates will become the media focus before the primaries begin.

(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.)