Since November of 2004, we have been tracking the strength of the different potential Democratic nominees for President in 2008 through a simple alternative measure: the number of bumper stickers, magnets, campaign buttons, posters and shirts that we sell in support for each of the Democratic contenders in the 2008 presidential race. Instead of the weak and changeable indicator of an opinion given over the telephone to a stranger, our own system for tracking candidates measures the kind of support that counts – whether Americans are willing to spend money to show their support for a particular candidate in a public way. That kind of strong commitment turns into donations, and later turns into votes. Below are results for two time periods: the week of May 27 – June 2, and the year 2007 so far.
The following is the percent share of sales of our Election 2008 gear in the past week, for each candidate who garnered at least a 1% share of sales:
Al Gore: 37.3% (last week: 31.8%)
Bill Richardson: 24.1% (last week: 24.1%)
Barack Obama: 17.0% (last week: 26.0%)
Hillary Clinton: 11.1% (last week: 7.4%)
Bill Moyers: 5.5% (last week: 0.0%)
Others: 5.0%
Pop! Out of seemingly nowhere comes a mini-boomlet for the Bill Moyers 2008 presidential draft. I say “seemingly nowhere,” because Bill Moyers has been decidedly somewhere recently, on the PBS series Bill Moyers Journal. It seems his work there is making a positive impression.
We’ve grown to expect that candidates such as Christopher Dodd and Joseph Biden wouldn’t be on the list. But where are John Edwards, Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich? Off the charts, in a very small way: none of these candidates managed to grab even a 1% share of election 2008 gear sold last week.
To put this snapshot ranking for the past week in context, let’s look at changes so far this year among the more popular presidential candidates:
The time frame offers some stable trends: John Edwards is dropping to the bottom of the barrel of people committed enough to buy a sticker, button or shirt to display in public. For some time, John Edwards and Bill Richardson traveled in tandem as second-tier candidates, but over the past month Richardson has surged to take a large share. This change is three weeks strong — what’s happened to account for this quantum jump.
And then there’s Al Gore. Gore, Gore, Gore: whenever he comes out in public, people seem to react very positively to him (apart from the third of Americans who will never support him, or Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton). This happened last year with An Inconvenient Trush, and it’s happening now with The Assault on Reason. Are people projecting their hopes upon him (as they seem to decreasingly be doing with Barack Obama), does his popularity reflect the wish that the past 6 years had never happened, or is there a substantive appeal to Gore’s combination of environmental advocacy, media populism, and indignant Bush denunciation?
