The Friday#: Rick Santorum’s Shocking Exit

 

The Sizzle: Sony The Fri-Up: Santorum’s exit The Sauce: Dog texts

The Sizzle

• Sony CEO vows to revive company
• Video game sales sink 25% in March
• China’s internet users blocked from foreign sites
• Pentagon buys dual focus contacts
• Apple defends price fixing allegations

The Fri-Up

Santorum’s shock exit
Santorum’s journey through the GOP race has been a story of the underdog fighting to succeed against all odds; then in a dramatic turn, news came this week that he was leaving the race to be with his daughter who is fighting pneumonia. It also emerged last night that since his loss in Wisconsin on April 3rd, money was also becoming an issue in continuing the race.

Let’s take a look at the week’s GOP news in a wordcloud. (Twitter only)

Fig 1. Wordcloud for all original Republican candidates April 6th – April 13th 2012

There’s nothing that we wouldn’t expect here. The inference that Mitt Romney is now the only realistic winner of the Republican turns the public’s thoughts to his run against Obama for the presidential race. Rick Santorum features slightly more prominently in the cloud, but his fame (as demonstrated below) is likely to end here.

This graph shows how the interest in candidates once they have exited the race, drops entirely.

Fig 2. History graph of candidates exiting the race between Jan 1st and April 13th 2012

It will be interesting to see whether Rick Santorum, who started out as a wildcard and then came to be the only realistic competitor to Mitt Romney, will now leave the public’s thoughts as quickly as the others. In the meantime, empower yourself with Obama’s official Spotify playlist. Not as bad as you might think. Happily, Mitt Romney’s seems to have been lost in the mail.

The Sauce

Something for the weekend:

• Who will push the button?
• Texts from my dog
• Looking for a bar brawl this weekend? Here are some tips

Hope you enjoyed the Friday#, have a great weekend.

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