With Super Tuesday coming up, let's make our monthly review of the US presidential candidates.
As always, we've taken last week's 50,000 most popular Lycos user search terms and scanned for candidate names. Newly-declared candidate Ralph Nader has been added to our list; dropouts Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, Orrin Hatch, Jesse Ventura and Donald Trump have been cut.
The results, with each candidate's percentage of the search "vote," look like this:
1. John McCain (37.3%)
2. George W. Bush (27.7%)
3. Al Gore (15.3%)
4. Bill Bradley (9.2%)
5. Alan Keyes (7.0%)
6. Ralph Nader (2.6%)
7. Pat Buchanan (0.9%)
Late in January we did this same review, with these results:
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%)
We also ran search polls in December (Bill Bradley was the leader) and in October (Al Gore ahead). Four months, four different leaders: web searchers are a fickle crowd.
Bradley and Keyes took it on the chin this month, dropping 4 and 5 percent, respectively. Gore dropped from second to third, but lost less than one percent. Bush is up nearly 5 percent.
But McCain is the big story, the huge winner. In one month his portion of all searches jumped a full 25 percent, from 12% to 37.2% -- an astonishing rise.
Here's a trend Democrats might want to worry about: add up Bush, McCain and Keyes and you see that 72% of all searches were for GOP candidates. This may just be because McCain and the GOP race have been getting so much press -- but still it seems significant.
McCain's wife Cindy seems to be drawing some interest on her own, oddly enough. She would have had about 1.3% of the search vote had we included her here -- which means she actually outpolled Pat Buchanan. Of course, Chelsea Clinton (1.1%) outpolled Buchanan, too.
However, we do give Buchanan credit for hanging on. Last month, based on your search results, we predicted that Bauer, Buchanan and Forbes would drop out in that order. We did get Bauer and Forbes in order, in any case.
Notes: Search logs are for the week ending February 26. 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. For amusement purposes only; please do not base your vote on this list.
