the Huntsman surge January 9, 2012

The Huntsman Surge

The polls suggested he was pulling up. The report was that searches for Huntsman were trending on Google. And Politico said Huntsman found his mojo in New Hampshire. " Supporters and the curious suddenly flock to his events in New Hampshire." (Summers, 1/9/2012) Apparently, everything is going his way in New Hampshire.

What about on Twitter? Almost 5,000 Twitter messages mentioned Huntsman. To think of this as a surge you have to know what went before. For the entire month of December the average number of Twitter messages mentioning Huntsman per day was 517. The best day was December 29 when just over 500 people thought "in Iowa they pick corn; in New Hampshire they pick a president," in one form or another, was worth repeating. Apparently, he should find himself a writer who can do one-liners. The total for the day was 1,400.

January was definitely different. The figure shows messages per day for the first nine days of January.

January 1 there were 709 messages that included Huntsman, which was almost half again as many as the December average. That increased to 3,000 on the second, which was more than any day in December. It fell. Then it spiked on the seventh which was the day of the debate. And it settled into almost 5,000 the last two days before the election.

From 500 to 5,000 is an impressive jump.

However, it pales when you compare that to the numbers for the other candidate. On the ninth there were 83,370 messages mentioning Romney. There were 28,686 mentioning Ron Paul, 27,109 mentioning Santorum and 23,011 mentioning Gingrich. Rick Perry was off in South Carolina and there were 4,769 messages mentioning him.

Jon Huntsman may have found his mojo, but it looks like only a few have recognized it. Now it's up to the voters to see what their mojo is.

Reference

Summers, Juana (1/9/2012) Jon Huntsman, campaigning in New Hampshire, finds his mojo, Politico