by WonkoKevin

For months now Hillary Clinton has been the dominant topic in the political blogosphere. In November, she led all Democratic candidates with 40% liberal buzz share in Wonkosphere, and she has never averaged below 30% in any month since June. It hasn’t only been the liberal blogs that have been concentrating on Clinton. Until recently, conservative bloggers have been equally obsessed with Clinton, routinely giving her well over 50% of the attention they give to Democrats. The last four days look very different, however–Clinton’s liberal buzz share has dipped below 30%, and a similar, strong downward trend has occurred in her conservative buzz share. Similarly, Ron Paul’s internet juggernaut has been the talk of the town; in November, Paul led all Republicans with 30% conservative buzz share. Yet he’s been below 20% buzz share for 6 straight days now. What’s going on? These data suggest that, as one might expect, the Wonkosphere is transitioning from a pre-primary to primary phase, and that means all of the old “attentional structure” that has existed is going to become much less significant in light of upcoming voting results.

What do we mean by “attentional structure”, and why is it important? It comes from two sources. First, the Wonkosphere directory is made up of the 1200 plus most prominent political blogs in the country. In the directory there are a significant number of “candidate-only” blogs–blogs that are unabashedly for a single candidate, and may even only talk about that candidate. This is why Ron Paul has had relatively more buzz share than other Republicans, and why Bill Richardson has had relatively less buzz share compared to other Democrats. It’s also why the predictive ability of Wonkosphere buzz share is based on changes in buzz share, not absolute buzz share. The second source of “bias” in buzz share is the bias that bloggers have towards particular candidates, for any number of reasons. For example, the liberal blogosphere settled on Joe Biden months ago as the 4th candidate, and it’s been that way ever since.

The deterioration of Clinton and Paul’s dominance indicates that the Wonkosphere has shifted into a different phase where those old historical tendencies won’t matter as much, a kind of a change point. We would expect as much with Iowa at our doorstep, and the data is proving it out. A huge increase in the number of blog posts that is occurring now is overwhelming the candidate-only blogs (hence Ron Paul’s decline in buzz share, even though his total buzz amount is about the same). Previous attentional biases are being wiped clean as every new poll comes out and every news item butterfly flaps its wings.

So Clinton and Paul are down, but who else is hot and who’s not according to Wonkosphere data?

Rudy Giuliani continues to tank. He’s been below 10% conservative buzz share 11 of the last 12 days. He was second in conservative buzz share in November with 18%.

John Edwards has been above 20% liberal buzz share for 7 of the last ten days, up comparatively to the 13% he had in November.

Mike Huckabee’s tone amongst conservative bloggers has been below the critical 10% level for 4 of the last 5 days.

John McCain, after being stuck at 8% conservative buzz share for 4 months, has been above 10% for 10 of the last 14 days.

Barack Obama has moved up from 25% to 302% liberal buzz share in the last 2 weeks.

Ditto Mitt Romney, who has moved from 16% to 23%.

Fred Thompson has moved a bit, from 8% to 11%, but most of that seems to be coming from Fred-only blogs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under Horse race, Romney, McCain, Wonkosphere, Giuliani, Paul, Politics 2.0, Clinton, Edwards, Huckabee, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.