Google News Democratic Primary Poll for 1/9/2004

First of all, apologies for the lack of posts of late. I've been buried under both several inches of snow and a mound of work (doing late night work while having to drive over icy covered roads. fun fun fun!) Also, things are going so fast and furious now with the Iowa Caucuses less than two weeks away that it is hard to get around to posting about something before the news changes and what you had to say is no longer relevent (case in point today's endorsement of Dean by Harkin). I've been doing most of my opinionating on the Salon Table Talk forum where I can better keep up with what is going on.

On with the countdown...

		This Week (1/9)			Last Week (1/2)
1	Howard Dean	9330	26.3%	+0.4	1	9700	25.9%
2	John Kerry	5040	14.2%	+0.1	2	5270	14.1%
3	Wesley Clark	4730	13.3%	-0.2	3	5070	13.5%
4	John Edwards	4020	11.3%	+0.8	6	3940	10.5%
5	Joe Lieberman	3940	11.1%	-1.1	4	4580	12.2%
6	Dick Gephardt	3810	10.8%	+0.0	5	4040	10.8%
7	Dennis Kucinich	1870	5.3%	+0.2	8	1910	5.1%
8	Al Sharpton	1510	4.3%	-0.8	7	1910	5.1%
9	Carol Moseley Braun	1200	3.4%	+0.6	9	1050	2.8%

Dean continues to build steady on his lead. I expect that as things get close to the actual voting the news reports will become faster and furiouser and it is to be expected that the remaining candidates will be focusing their guns on Dean even more, thus elevating his share even more. Which is just another way of saying it is crunch time. If Dean really can stand up to the pressure like I think he can, now is when he will have to demonstrate it. The Harkin endorsement will help, but probably only for a day or two at best. It's not going to stop the also-rans from continuing their assaults on Mt. Dean.

That's the curse of being the frontrunner.

Clark's shares have barely budged despite the recent reports of his "surge" in national polls and in NH. I think this just goes to show that, outside the circles of political geekdom, not many people really care about things like that. I've been thinking for some time that Clark has consistently failed to generate any media excitement about his campaign. This could change if the media's desired two-man race develops, but even then it could just be a repeat of last summers Dean-Clark dynamics.

Lieberman's shares continue to plunge as the weight of the much sought after New Republic endorsement sinks in.

Update: BTW, just for comparison purposes, I did a Google New search on "George W. Bush" and got 10,600 hits.

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.)