Gingrich upsets Paul in home state of Comments Section

I often help moderate the comments on the Yahoo News liveblogs during debates and elections, so I get a rough sense for the proportion of support for candidates among readers. We can only publish a small proportion of the torrent of comments in the liveblog stream--we'd otherwise drown out the experts we've recruited to contribute (imagine the injustice)! But I feel guilty that many comments go unpublished, so I did a tally of all mentions of the Republican presidential candidates in the 1,974 comments we received between 6:30 p.m. and 8:55 p.m. ET on Saturday night.

Here are the results, with mentions of the candidates' names in all caps represented in red:

Of course, this doesn't account for whether the commenters were saying mean things or nice things--I'm not that good a programmer--but we're working on that at Yahoo! Labs. It does account for first or last name, upper or lowercase, and double counts if two candidates are mentioned in the same comment (but not if the same candidate is mentioned twice).