Rand Paul and Ted Cruz most Drudged of 2016 contenders

Don’t doubt the influence of Matt Drudge. (Scroll down for video and poll featuring Rand Paul, the only candidate with ‘less baggage.’) According to Quantcast, the Drudge Report sees a steady stream of more than 2 million unique visitors daily. For publishers, the distribution power of the Drudge Report—just like other content streams such as Facebook and Twitter—is hard to write off as trivial. Those 2 million daily visitors are sent around the Web via the news links that Drudge feels are most worthy of their attention. Get a top link on the Drudge Report, and your site will have a steady stream of thousands of eyeballs. So we wondered: What is Matt Drudge directing his massive following to read about?…

The results pretty much trend with the biggest stories of the year, although they do appear weighted toward conservative flashpoints—immigration, Obamacare, military issues. In the chart below, we compile the top terms of the year. Some caveats: We had to filter out prepositions and filler words; we also filtered out nonspecific terms such as “video.” We combined similar terms such as “GOP” and “Republicans.” Also, because the script separated out individual words, we searched for first or last names that (most likely) refer to one person. Hillary, we can assume, is Hillary Clinton. Michelle is most likely the first lady (Bachmann spells it with one “l”). And Rand is a rarer name than Paul.
You can sort through the complete list of Drudge terms here. Potential activities include creating decorative Drudge word clouds and searching for coded messages about the apocalypse. Drudge deployed a 20,830-word vocabulary this year, so there’s hours’ worth of fun to be had.

Of the 2016 GOP presidential contenders, “Christie” got the most mentions (although many of those concerned the Port Authority scandal). “Rand” beats out “Cruz” by just a few mentions, with “Perry” trailing not much further behind…

Read more: http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/2014-according-to-the-drudge-report-20141229

Related story: Rand Paul Does Best of GOP Candidates in NBC/WSJ Survey DEC 10-14