Showing posts with label John Ensign. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Ensign. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

What Scandal Does to the Candidate Emergence Tracker

No, the Mark Sanford numbers aren't actually factored into the archived Google Trends data on the FHQ Candidate Emergence Tracker yet, but the numbers from John Ensign's affair announcement may give us some indication of where Sanford may end up.
Who is represented by that orange line? That's Sarah Palin. Well, Sarah Palin and David Letterman. That particular bump dwarfs the Ensign announcement bump in purple. Both those incidents and where Mark Sanford searches end up underline one important point about the tracker: That the influence of news coverage has to be accounted for in some way.

As we've pointed out several times since we began working with this data, there is a certain recursiveness to this relationship. Candidates drive the media and the media drives candidates. What we have to be on the lookout for in this data is the extent to which news story triggers a bump and then decays over time. Does the trend decay to the point that the earlier equilibrium of searches for that candidate resumes or do we see the emergence of a new equilibrium with a higher/lower search volume. If the track is upward, especially three years away from the next election, we may be seeing the organic, grassroots emergence we originally hypothesized about.

The somewhat unrelated question for now, given that the South Carolina governor is likely out of the 2012 White House sweepstakes, is whether Mark Sanford surpasses Palin/Letterman or settles in between that level and Ensign's announcement last week. I'll update as soon as that becomes apparent on the tracker.


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Why the Sanford Thing Matters

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

How Not to Emerge as a 2012 GOP Darkhorse

One question: What's worse for a prospective 2012 Republican presidential candidate?
  • Taking an ambassadorial position with the Obama administration.
  • Admitting to having had an extramarital affair.
My hunch is that neither plays terribly well with primary voters on the right. We may be able to mark John Ensign off the list of those in consideration for inclusion on FHQ's candidate emergence tracker in the same way Jon Huntsman was recently removed.


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A Week Later, Deeds Still Leads, but...

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Monday Reading: GOP Behind the Eight Ball?