Iowa's over, New Hampshire almost here. Let's take our third look at the online popularity of the presidential candidates.We took last week's 50,000 most popular Lycos user search terms and scanned for candidate names. The results, with each candidate's percentage of the search "vote," look like this:
1. George W. Bush (23%)
2. Al Gore (16%)
3. Bill Bradley (13%)
4. John McCain (12%)
5. Alan Keyes (12%)
6. Donald Trump (6%)
7. Steve Forbes (6%)
8. Pat Buchanan (3.5%)
9. Gary Bauer (3%)
10. Orrin Hatch (3%)
11. Jesse Ventura (2.5%)
One month ago we did this same review. At that point the order looked like this:
1. Bill Bradley
2. George W. Bush
3. John McCain
4. Al Gore
5. Alan Keyes
6. Donald Trump
7. Steve Forbes
In our October tally the candidates looked like this:
1. Al Gore
2. Bill Bradley
3. George W. Bush
4. Jesse Ventura
5. John McCain
6. Donald Trump
7. Pat Buchanan
8. Steve Forbes
What can we conclude?
First off: give Web users credit for predicting the rise of Alan Keyes. He was a surprising #5 in December, one month before he was a surprising #3 in the Iowa caucuses. Keyes sustains his #5 search ranking this month, putting him in the same echelon with Gore, Bradley and McCain.
In three months candidate Gore has dropped from first to fourth place and then bounced back to #2. He's still significantly behind George Bush, however.
Bush is the clear leader in this month's numbers. In fact, this is the first month in which the search numbers look about like the standard polling numbers: Bush and Gore in the lead, McCain and Bradley following.
Orrin Hatch's decision to hustle onto the Bush bandwagon seems sensible, given that only Jesse Ventura saved him from ranking dead last. Still, Hatch got more respect from Web users (3%) than he got from caucusing Iowans (1%).
Speaking of Jesse Ventura -- what happened? Looks like his strong showing in October was due more to his Playboy interview than to any presidential interest.
However, Ventura's Reform Party colleague Donald Trump made a decent showing, beating out fellow moneybags Steve Forbes. Trump is the only candidate to hold the same position (#6) from October through January.
Doesn't look good for chatty independent Pat Buchanan and former Reagan staffer Gary Bauer.
Finally, a prediction: based on user searches the next dropouts should be (in order) Bauer, Buchanan, and Forbes. (You read it here first!) We'll check that prediction next month when we run the numbers once again.
Notes: Search logs are for the week ending January 22. We counted only searches which were plainly for a candidate: queries for Bill Bradley and Bradley campaign were counted for candidate Bill Bradley, while searches simply for Bradley were ignored. We assigned 80% of all searches for George Bush to candidate George W. Bush; the other 20% are presumed to be for his father, ex-president George Bush. Note that we used a larger sample this time than for the previous two lists (top 50,000 terms vs. 25,000). That accounts in part for the reappearance of Hatch, Buchanan, Bauer and Ventura, who didn't make our December list. For amusement purposes only; please do not base your vote on this list.
