by WonkoKevin

Wonkosphere buzz share in the conservative blogosphere is splitting into the haves and have-nots.  Mike Huckabee led all Republican candidates with 46% buzz share, and Mitt Romney finished second with 23%.  All of the other candidates have fallen below the critical line of 10%.  Why is 10% critical?  The blogosphere is filled with “candidate-only” blogs, e.g. Revolution Radio.  If your fans are talking about you and no one else is, you’re bound to get 10%.  When you drop below 10%, some of your fans aren’t even paying attention.

Here are the have-nots: Ron Paul (8%–his lowest buzz share in a long time), Fred Thompson (6%), Rudy Giuliani (5%), John McCain (5%), Alan Keyes (3%).  That’s right, Alan Keyes was within earshot of Giuliani and McCain and Thompson.

In Wonkosphere, negative attention is only bad if it leads to no attention.  As we’ve analyzed, both Huckabee and Romney have been pretty resilient to the negatives.  While there are several possible explanations for the current buzz share data, my best guess is this: Conservatives believe Huckabee or Romney will be the nominee and are debating which should move forward.  They assume that if Huckabee and Romney both stumble, Giuliani, McCain, or Thompson would be OK choices, but they want them to prove themselves.  Conservatives bloggers will come back to Giuliani only after a big Feb 5, not before.  Likewise, bloggers are waiting to see a big day for McCain in NH and ditto for Thompson in SC before they’ll pay attention again.  The other possibility is that the negatives will start sticking to Huck and one of the three will rise to compete with Romney for blogger attention.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 8:42 am and is filed under Romney, Horse race, Huckabee, Politics 2.0. 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.