How Much Attention Is Beto O’Rourke Getting Right Now?

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Right now is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme and cruel agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability at the polls and in the press has a fighting chance. We have our work cut out for us, and we still need to raise upwards of 400,000 by June 30 to give it everything we can. Please help:

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.