As I think you can guess, there’s not a lot to write about this morning. So how about Beto O’Rourke? Liberals are chattering a lot about how much attention he’s getting—too much? not enough?—and factions are apparently being formed for some kind of war between him and Bernie Sanders. Or maybe just between their supporters. Or something. I’m not really sure about that part. Really, I just want to know if Beto is getting lots of undeserved attention in the early race for the 2020 Democratic primaries.
So let’s take a look. Here is the past 90 days of Google Trends for Beto O’Rourke:
Hmmm. Not much action there for Beto following the election, so let’s zoom in to just the past 30 days:
Still not much. A couple of little blips, but basically flat for the past month. So how does that compare to other potential candidates for 2020?
That’s better! Over the past month Beto is right up there with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a bit ahead of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Whether he can keep this up after the mini-war is over is another thing entirely. We’ll see.
UPDATE: The original version of this post used a Google Trends chart showing that Beto O’Rourke was getting less attention than any of the others. It’s been corrected.
