Woke Up This Morning Thinking About Name Recognition

"Quote tweet" from Dave Smith:

Nothing but respect to Ron Paul and Justin, but how pathetic are these regime libertarians? Somehow “podcaster” is an insult. Succeeding in the marketplace is less honorable than collecting a tax funded salary? Keep whining Mr. Irrelevant. https://t.co/IQmLcD3RYL

— Dave Smith (@ComicDaveSmith) July 16, 2022

That, in response to this:

Why is the most libertarian member of Congress in probably ever buried in the fifth row behind a bunch of podcasters? https://t.co/GxaLy1w4uz

— David Boaz (@David_Boaz) July 16, 2022

My reply:

Your quote tweet must have haunted my dreams. I woke up thinking about name recognition within groups versus at large and suspecting that @David_Boaz may be under-estimating (and you perhaps over-estimating?) the latter vis a vis "liberty movement famous" podcasters.

— knappster@edge (@thomaslknapp) July 17, 2022

If I had to guess, I'd guess that of the names listed for the YAL event Boaz is complaining about, the first four (Ron Paul, Tulsi Gabbard, Rand Paul, and Kennedy) are the only ones with much general name recognition at all, and that recognition certainly not on the level of, say, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, etc.

The fifth, Glenn Jacobs, might do pretty well outside the "liberty movement" among people who know him better as professional wrestling's Kane.

Nothing against Dave Smith's skill as a podcaster/comedian, but he's probably just not in the same name recognition league as those first five outside the "liberty movement," and perhaps among really dedicated devotees of stand-up comedy. At least not yet. I mean, some regular people might be like "isn't he one of the two other guys with Luis G. Gomez in Legion of Skanks?" but probably not that many. Again, yet. Maybe he'll get his own Netflix or HBO special and really take off one of these days. But he hasn't. Yet.

Down on the fifth row, Justin Amash is probably under-billed, because he was briefly "famous outside the liberty movement" during the Trump impeachment thing before mainstream media said "nope, not going to mention that there's a partisan Libertarian in Congress now."

But, you know, those are just my guesses. What I want to know is this:

Why isn't there a cool, publicly available algorithm that tries to quantify likely general name recognition?

It's been a decade and a half since I really involved myself in campaign management, and not much seems to have changed unless there are proprietary algorithms I haven't heard about.

Back then, to get a proxy for name recognition in the absence of being able to afford real polling, I'd just plug my candidate's name (in several iterations with modifiers like "politician" or "Congress") into Google and compare the number of returned results with those of his or her opponents to figure out which one more people had likely heard of.

Being well-known inside a very specific niche can make one feel famous.  I remember one time introducing myself to someone at a Libertarian National Convention and getting the reply "the Tom Knapp?" And of course that made me feel pretty good. But pick a random sample on any street in America, and me introducing myself would get, effectively, 100%  pro forma "nice to meet you" or "who?" responses.

I'm not trying to pick on Boaz here, but I'd say that, well, he's older and has been around the "liberty movement" for a long time, and recognizes a lot of those names from a previous era that he spent hob-nobbing and mixing and working in, and not as many names from the "podcasts are the big new thing" era that's following his period of maximum influence/involvement. So he's probably under-estimating the relative name recognition of a Dave Smith versus a Justin Amash within the "liberty movement" as it exists now.