Blog P.I.

Two months ago, Blog P.I. ran searches on the names of the top-contending 2008 presidential candidates through the Trend Tool at blog search engine Icerocket to see how often a candidate’s name appeared in blog posts over the previous month. We weren’t counting the positive or negative mentions, so this didn’t tell us how popular or unpopular a particular candidate was — but it did give a pretty good idea how intense was the interest in one candidate relative to the others.

Today we’ll update that, covering the time elapsed. We’ll start as we did before by comparing the top three contenders for both party. Although there has been relative movement among them, nobody new has clearly broken through or fallen out of each trio. Then we’ll get to the dark horses and mix things up a little.

Last time we started with the Dems, so let’s switch it up and begin with the GOPers:

McCain may not be the frontrunner any longer, but he apparently remains the most talked-about candidate. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what was happening with McCain during the spikes recorded here, so I went to Google BlogSearch, which lets you isolate search terms by date. The first spike was certainly nothing good — mostly posts about about his slipping support. The second spike coincided with his semi-unofficial announcement on the Letterman show, where comments ran a little better — but it also occasioned his slip of the tongue about lives “wasted” fighting in Iraq.

Being the new frontrunner, Giuliani only had two short-lived leads in early February and March. The first peak coincided with his statement of candidacy, and pales compared to McCain’s; the second appears to match up with the New York firefighters union — the Swiftboaters to Rudy’s Kerry? — releasing a letter opposing his bid. Otherwise, he seems to run consistently behind McCain and about even with Romney.

Romney’s first spike? His announcement at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. His second spike was the CPAC conference — which explains why Giuliani actually saw his highest absolute mark for the period here as well, and perhaps why McCain experienced another short peak — much of which was probably about his decision not to attend. Actually, that may have been for the better — because as we all remember, the whole event was overshadowed by Ann Coulter. So let’s make a brief detour and look at how Coulter stacks up for the period against the candidates she appeared with:

Yeah, that looks about right. How about the Dems?

When we last measured, all three candidates were just beginning to pick up serious attention, Hillary for her campaign launch and Obama for his exploratory announcement. But where Hillary was the slight leader last time, now she is clearly underperforming relative to her name ID. The huge spike for Obama centered around the weekend of Feb. 10 and 11 represents his more-official kickoff and the launch of his newfangled campaign site, which drew a good deal of positive notice. He commanded plenty of attention in the weeks after, but lately appears to be no more or less interesting to bloggers than Hillary. This could be a sign that the initial rush of attention has subsided, and he’s just another candidate in contention.

Oh, and that peak they share a week and a half after Obama’s announcement? That’s the argle-bargle started by David Geffen’s anti-Hillary comments to Maureen Dowd.

The Edwards spikes require no Googling: The first was Ann Coulter’s aformentioned braindead attack, and the second was the announcement that Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer had returned. Both have clearly earned him a good deal of attention, making him arguably the most interesting candidate of the Democratic field right now. On the other hand, while that attention has been positive, both instances are predicated on bad news — not exactly sustainable, or something you would want to sustain, anyway.

Now, onto more arbitrary comparisons:

As long as reputable pollsters are putting Al Gore into the mix, who am I to say they’re wrong? Likewise with Bloomberg — as long as respectable newspapers are writing stories about the possibility of a self-funded bid, who am I to leave him out?

Now, Gore just picked up an Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth” (as if you didn’t know what that huge spike in late February was about). And Fred Thompson, well, perhaps he’s just entertaining himself right now (but at least he did appear on a Sunday show recently). For these reasons, and because Bloomberg has a mighty populous city to run, I decided to append the word “president” to each search, just to keep things on topic. It didn’t change much.

That appearance was March 11, but interest has sustained relatively well until surging last week for no reason I can divine from patterns at the Blogsearch — but I’m guessing it has something to do with the first round of polls showing him with some credible support.

Bloomberg is still waiting for his surge. He may be waiting awhile — that near-flatline does accurately represent the (lack of) interest in such a campaign. For mirror-opposite reasons the same is true of Gore: he is larger than life, and if he did run, it’s not implausible that he could — as his former boss was always said to do — suck all the oxygen out of the room.

So here we compare the relative leaders in online mentions among the Democrats, Republicans and dark horses. (Yes, overall Obama has run stronger than Edwards this period, but let’s go with Edwards, who is closer-watched/has had bigger spikes lately — even if he has fallen into third in just the past few days.)

Clearly Edwards cannot compete with Gore’s Oscar — apparently only Coulter can do that — but aside from that, he doesn’t run too far behind. And McCain is at least competitive. He doesn’t have those huge spikes, but he has led Edwards several times (and upon his Letterman announcement, even Gore, briefly).

So how about those underperforming frontrunners, and the next-most-popular dark horse? Well, Rudy is no match for Hillary. This does seem to show that while he leads the traditional polls and has appreciable support among bloggers, he is not really the “rightroots” candidate — Thompson has been doing almost as well since his announcement. Their mentions rise and fall together enough to be worth mentioning, suggesting that the two are being compared against each other. Hillary’s mentions, however appear to be completely unrelated, and that makes sense as well. Even at their best, neither Giuliani nor Thompson have bested Hillary in blogger mentions this period.

Once again, we’re just measuring mindshare, and with the exception of Bloomberg, all of the candidates here have demonstrated the ability to capture it. So who knows whether it’s good to be a leader in these charts or not. Maybe that’s another study, for another time. For this time, we’ll leave it right here.