Google News Democratic Primary Poll for 2/13/2004

		This Week (2/13)			Last Week (2/6)
1	John Kerry	26000	33.3%	+9.4	2	21500	23.9%
2	Howard Dean	20300	26.0%	+0.7	1	22800	25.3%
3	John Edwards	18000	23.1%	+4.0	3	17200	19.1%
4	Dennis Kucinich	6940	8.9%	+1.0	6	7070	7.8%
5	Al Sharpton	6850	8.8%	+0.3	5	7630	8.5%

Two big changes this week: Wesley Clark is out and Dean finally loses his top ranking. In fact, I think this week marks the week in which the media finally loses its interest in Dean. As such, it becomes that much harder for him to turn it around. After New Hampshire I assessed his chances as "slim to none". They are even smaller now.

Will he drop out after Wisconsin (assuming he loses)? The pressure will be intense for him to do so (I understand Tom Harkin has already called on him to do so). I would prefer him to stick around at least until Super Tuesday, but only if he can return to a positive message and leave the questioning of motives behind him. If all he is going to do is criticize then I'm really not that interested in listening any more.

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.)