To date, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich announced their official bids for the White House on Twitter and YouTube. Ron Paul raised over one million dollars in 24 hours online through his political action committee. President Obama hosted an online town hall about the economy on Facebook. Needless to say, the race to the White House is heating up online.
At the end of last week, Mike Huckabee and Donald Trump officially pulled their names out of the race to be the Republican Party’s candidate for President. Tracking Facebook data, total visits to Trump’s Facebook page were already falling before he made the announcement on May 16th – visits declined 49% for the week ending May 14th, 2011 as compared to the previous week.

Trump launched an aggressive campaign for The Apprentice season 11 which coincided with his media blitz of political pronouncements, including requests for President Obama’s birth certificate. This approach had a positive impact on online interest; searches for variations of “Trump” peaked during the week ending May 7th, at which point there were sixty-five times more searches for “Trump” than during the peak in season ten of The Apprentice (10/9/10). But web-users are fickle and last week (5/14/11) searches for all variations of “Trump” had dropped 68% over the week prior (5/7/11).

Examining the rest of the field of potential candidates, President Obama and Sarah Palin’s Facebook pages are capturing the most visits. Visits to Mitt Romney’s Facebook page are on the rise, growing 44% from the week ending May 7th to the week ending May 14th. If the first few weeks of this election are any indication, candidates will be leaning heavily on the internet to engage voters and disseminate their messages.
Thanks to Margot Bonner, Analyst on the Custom Data & Insights team for today’s analysis.