How Google Trends Showed Trump Would Win the Presidential Election All Along
While doing some research for my day job today as a search optimizer I was looking at Google Trends. I decided to see if anything had changed after the first Presidential debate.
I had never checked the trends between the two main candidates before, and I assumed that there would be more search volume for Hillary Clinton because the echo chamber I live in online suggested that.
Check out this data on Google Trends yourself.
I was wrong, in a major way.
I started by looking at the graphs for 12 months back. It seems there has been more people searching for Donald Trump all along. That blue blip that spikes through is when Hillary collapsed at the 9/11 ceremony.
That was interesting to me because I believe people do not search for candidates they hate and have no intention of voting for.
The Bigger Surprise
The second chart on Google Trends shows the United States broken up as sub-regions (states). This is where Hillary would be searched for more frequently than Donald Trump in places like California, Massachusetts and New York right?
Actually no.
Donald Trump has greater search volume in every single US state. But it must be really close in some states right?
Below the comparison map Google is nice enough to break it down for each search entity.
Since she is killing it in Vermont, let’s check that state in a head-to-head comparison.
Time Frame
My last thought was that maybe it was the time frame I was looking at that was skewing the results.
I’ll skip the 12 month graph since that’s what I lead off with.
The two spikes in July are the RNC and DNC conventions.
As I mentioned before, the Clinton spike is no doubt from her 9/11 medical problems.
That’s an impressive spike for the debate, and Clinton does garner more search volume than Trump for that spike, but when the spike comes back down, it’s Trump searches again.
Search Terms
If you’re not fairly deep into search, you may not be aware of that Google tries to distinguish entities from a search term. A good example is Apple vs an apple.
When I choose the candidates names in the pulldown, I made sure to choose them as the presidential candidate entity rather than just a search term.
Other Interesting Tidbits
I had a few people ask me to look at past elections to see if this trend is also evident. Although I think Trump makes the 2016 election cycle different being a complete outsider, here’s what I found.
The general election seems to follow the same trend. Besides the blips for each candidates convention, Obama’s search volume was above John McCain’s for the entire year.
I’ve tried to keep this as a data experiment, not political. I’m not implying one candidate is better than the other, just that I think the data is fascinating and worth considering.
What does this data say when you look at it? Am I crazy?
I wonder if Nate Silver has seen this?
UPDATE: Now that it’s November 10th, it seems like there was more here than anyone wanted to acknowledge.
