NAFTA Pops as 'New' Thing to Discuss on Campaign Trail

By Glenn Fannick
Dow Jones Insight staff


As mini-Tuesday approached there wasn't too much new that was being discussed on the campaign trail. But two concepts seemed to poke their heads above the rest of the noise -- NAFTA and religion. Looking to Dow Jones Insight's discovery technology that finds and counts previously untracked terms, we see today that "NAFTA" and related terms ("Canadian officials", etc.) far and away were the latest issue to gain some traction.

Religion (or, perhaps more accurately, fear-mongering discussions around it) also emerged with discussion around Barack Obama's middle name ("Hussein") and talk of support from Louis Farrakhan, seemingly moving the discussion.

Methodology: The total number of documents analyzed equals 2,946 on March 3, 2008. The number of mentions exceeds the number of documents as many documents include more than one mention of a candidate's name. Sources in this analysis include more than 6,000 newspapers, wires, magazines, radio and TV transcripts; more than 13,000 current-awareness news Web sites; 2 million of the most influential blogs; and more than 6,000 message boards.